1943 famine, Calcutta

This week, 93 years ago, India finally abandoned any hope of living in peace with the British Raj. When British guns blazed frenetically in the Punjab shedding blood in the holy city of Amritsar, our awkward, abusive marriage was well and truly over.

But the horrendous violence that was wrought upon unarmed villagers on the 13th of April 1919, assembled at the Bagh mainly for Baishakhi and quite unaware of the curfew in place, isn’t the actual crime though. The killing and injuring of hundreds even thousands of men, women and children; the firing without warning straight into the crowd and then into the thickest part of it when it broke up and people ran in a complete panic towards absent exits — to be crushed underfoot or against walls; shooting continuously until they ran out of ammunition, executing people wholesale and then leaving them there in piles of bodies, to die, if they weren’t already, of their injuries; the utter and deliberate disregard for human life and for humanity itself – these aren’t the real crimes.

The real horror is in the way that this act of terrorism (by Churchill’s own admission) was applauded by large sections of British society, both in India and in the UK. In the clubs across India, in the homes, barracks, and offices, prim, polite Englishmen and Englishwomen were sipping drinks served by their ‘native servants’ and celebrating the temporarily ranked Brigadier-General Dyer’s firm handedness in dealing with these local upstarts, who had had the cheek to confront British authority or worse, challenge the white man’s unquestionable right to bear his ‘burden’. Surely these Indians would think again now.

They certainly were thinking again. Thinking again why 43,000 Indians died fighting for Britain in the World War I, why Indian politicians remained loyal to the UK, assuaging fears that we would use this opportunity to revolt while they were committed militarily in Europe. We were also thinking again about why nearly 1.25 million Indian soldiers and labourers served the war effort, and why our independent Princes sent food, money, and ammunition of their own accord, to help Britain in her time of need. But mostly we were thinking again about why we ever expected the British to honour their agreement and give Indians more legislative liberty once the War was over.

The end of the British Raj in India, 1947.

But what happened there, in Amritsar, was something that no one quite expected. Not even the British. In a 1920 speech to the House of Commons by Winston Churchill – then Secretary of State for War – and showing uncharacteristic sympathy for Indians, answered questions about how it would be ‘un-English’ to punish Dyer for simply doing his part to protect the Empire with these comments,
‘It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.
… An unarmed crowd stands in a totally different position from an armed crowd. At Amritsar the crowd was neither armed nor attacking. I carefully said that when I used the word “armed” I meant armed with lethal weapons, or with firearms. There is no dispute between us on that point. “I was confronted,” says General Dyer, “by a revolutionary army.” What is the chief characteristic of an army? Surely it is that it is armed. This crowd was unarmed. These are simple tests, which it is not too much to expect officers in these difficult situations to apply.

… There is surely one general prohibition which we can make. I mean a prohibition against what is called “frightfulness.”What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country.

… Such ideas are absolutely foreign to the British way of doing things.’

Dyer was relieved of command and forced to retire, but he was never punished and enjoyed the support of many higher officials, including the Army Council and the Deputy-Governor of Punjab Micheal O’ Dwyer – who formally congratulated him. In fact nothing at all might have happened to him, had it not been for Lord William Hunter, who relied on his conscience and not on popular sentiment to deliver his judgement — sentiment that was echoed in the House of Lords, and even, sadly, by Rudyard Kipling who started a fund for General Dyer as recompense for his loss of pension.

Churchill may have thought the ‘British way’ was infallibly honourable, in the supercilious, super-silliness of the age I suppose he had to, a bit like the Americans have to today. But in reality, the British Empire in India was a particularly ignoble endeavour, and there was nothing at all isolated about that sinister, monstrous event. In fact just two days later, on the 15th of April, another gathering at Gujaranwala, protesting the massacre at Amritsar, was set upon by the British, this time with aeroplanes and machine guns, killing 12 more people including children.

Indians were routinely subjected to all manner of violence, from being publicly flogged, to being tied to the mouths of cannons and blown to bits. Summary executions were common, so was torture and exile. And of course apart from the physical violence, there were the psychological and the economic ones as well. In 1943, three million Bengalis died slowly of starvation, because Churchill didn’t think it worth his while to send food to them. In fact the frequency and intensity of famines during British rule in India was consistently higher on both counts than it had ever been in years prior, or has been since. So callous was Britain’s attitude towards the loss of life in India that when Florence Nightingale put out a series of publications during the late 1800’s with the hope of educating the British public about the human cost of their luxuriant Empire, it had little effect.

Before the British arrived, famines occurred mostly in drier parts around Delhi and Sindh, not in fertile and agriculturally endowed areas like Bengal or South India. Yet in British times these are exactly where they happened, resulting in extermination on a scale that makes the Nazi’s look like sloppy amateurs. A staggering number of people were allowed to die. Each famine killed millions – nearly 10 million in the Great Famine of 1876-78, and ten years before that in 1866, nearly a third of the population of Orissa at the time. Various theories exist about why this was the case, but the general consensus seems to be that it includes the following: land usage for industrial crops like indigo, jute and cotton at the expense of food grain and livestock, the commoditisation of grain, export agriculture for foreign revenue with little thought about domestic subsistence, inadequate transportation, heavy taxation, ridiculously low wages, a redirection of resources towards military spending and British upkeep, a conspicuous absence of any accountability or system of representation for Indians and more tellingly, an absolute lack of care for Indian life.

Even when decent men like the writer William Digby who witnessed the tragedy of 1876 first-hand, insisted that there be some policy change or some sort of famine relief, he was defeated by the Viceroy’s pompous assumption that it would only make the Indian workers lazy – ‘demoralisation’, I think is what he called it. I suppose it offended his principles less to exploit them thoroughly, before starving them to death. Around the same time that Indians were experiencing an agonising and skeletal demise, this celebrated and Right Honourable Earl of a diplomat, held a banquet for almost 60,000 guests, while exported tons of rice and grain to the UK and the USA as part of policy of non-interference with free trade – England’s lifeblood, siphoned off from the varicose veins of an atrophying India.

No one sums it up better than the American scholar Mike Davis who calls the famines ‘late Victorian Holocausts’, and says,
“Millions died, not outside the ‘modern world system’, but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered … by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill.”

Far from being a well-ordered example of British administrative prowess, and without much of a ‘civilising mission’ anywhere in sight, the Raj was in fact a shabby and mismanaged disgrace, excelling only at dispassionate plunder cleverly disguised as government. Bengal, for instance, with all its wealth and abundance, whose people had never before experienced such acute want, were robbed to the point of being beggared, copping it badly on both ends – at the start of British occupation and at the finish. In 1770, only 13 years after the British orchestrated a regime change in Murshidabad, the richest province of the Mughal realm experienced a famine so severe that a third of the population, possibly 10 million people, perished in only 10 months. And as a parting gift, just 5 years before they left, while Hitler was putting into place his ‘final solution’ for the Jews, Churchill cut off supplies of rice and other staples to Bengal to deprive the Japanese Army of sustenance, should they break through the Eastern gate after the fall of Myanmar. This ‘scorched earth’ policy was among other disastrous strategies concocted by the British government to protect all sorts of priorities in India, none of which were the lives of Indians, who were instead slaughtered by the millions at the alter of administrative oversight.

To put things into perspective, since the British left there hasn’t been another famine of such unconscionable proportions anywhere in Bangladesh, India or Pakistan. Ever. If that isn’t the last word on all that then I don’t know what is.

The 1878 famine had, as one might expect, a profound and permanent impact on Indian affairs. It led to the end of the Raj in fact. British civil servants in India like William Wedderburn and A.O. Hume distraught by how the Government in India regarded Indians as little more than disposable labour, and India’s first political leader the formidable Bal Gangadhar Tilak as well as Gopal Krishna Gokhale joined forces to form the Indian National Congress, less than a decade later in 1885. The rest is history, or rather, the present, as the Congress party is still going strong and is to date the most successful horse in the Indian race.

In April 1919, Amritsar became the tipping point in our struggle for Freedom. Kobi guru Robindronath Thakur returned his knighthood, the slogans gradually changed from “Home Rule’ to ‘Quit India’, and Gandhiji was finally incensed enough to see the futility of believing there could ever be a relationship of two adults between the UK and India. The chord was cut. Dominion status would no longer do and only full independence was acceptable. Britain would have to be forced to stand entirely on its own feet; it would have to be weaned completely off the effusive Indian tit on which it had grown so very fat.

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Zeeshan Khan writes from Brisbane, Australia.

This is the Aligarh-Luknow-UP centric Classical Indo-Muslim culture with strong Mughal leanings. It incorporates Agra, Delhi and Lahore as well, but doesn’t include, for instance, Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. It also has an ethnic component, though this is thoroughly diluted and absurdly racist. All across India Muslim culture developed a similar look and feel, incubated almost in a fortress mentality that kept it apart from its surroundings. The exclusivity, born out of cultural, ethnic and religious prejudices, has meant that Muslims from Bombay to Bengal often see themselves as belonging to a shared legacy, but one different from the ethno-linguistic environments they are living in. Muslim folk stories are often about Middle Eastern people, are of Middle Eastern events and places, and include even pre-Muslim parables from other Muslim lands, like the story of Rustum. They are rarely connected to the legends and stories of the place – and these are often relegated as ‘Hindu’ stories. Muslim moral and intellectual inspiration is usually sought outside of the Indian Reference, and if they are Indian, they are usually Muslims Sufis and Saints, never, for instance, Kautilya or Sri Choitonno. In ‘twilight zone’ like surrealism, Muslim India removes itself from India’s history and puts itself in an India that is part-Persia, part-Afghanistan part-Arabia, sometimes even part-Turkey. Indo-Muslim civilisation certainly has those parts, but it’s mostly Indian, a thing that is too easily ignored. But this isn’t peculiar. It’s a Muslim thing worldwide. It’s Pan- Islamism – a world without divisions and differences: a community of faith. We share these stories and this sense of common space, to give us a social cohesion that is probably too many parts fantasy (even if it there is some truth in it) to be taken seriously anymore. But it keeps us together. Perhaps in a time when there was less nationalism and fewer borders, it was even mostly true.

But there are cultural and linguistic factors that are far less arbitrary than lines on maps. And identity is a complex phenomenon. In India, Muslims were always the minority even when they were rulers and so an isolationist colonial attitude was perhaps inevitable. But what probably made assimilation more complicated were the clearly defined ethno-religious lines in Indian society. When Muslims arrived on the scene, newcomer and convert alike, they tended to hover above, rather than be able to sink into these formations even if they wanted to, and most often they didn’t. Ethno-religious nationhood is not so bizarre when you consider that in Malaysia today, you qualify as a ‘Bumiputra’, if you are both Malay and Muslim. By this definition, a Chinese Muslim Malaysian who has lived there for four generations is never an insider. But more oddly, neither is the Malay Christian or Malay Buddhist, who’s family has been there since the beginning of the Malay Chronicles and is as Bumiputra as it gets.

Imagined communities can have high walls.

Muslim nationhood in India happened in two distinct waves. The Sultanate era, and the Mughal era – separated by about 400 years. The earlier wave had actually begun to sink in to the soil of India, developing their own merged culture and language, and creating their own stratifications and castes when they were violently interrupted by the Mughal invasion.

This process took in Bengal in a way that it didn’t in many other places in India. A little over a hundred years and many independence struggles after the Delhi Sultanate conquered Bengal, the Sultanatiya-i-Bangala, began in 1352, quite decisively as a local Muslim kingdom. The largest mosque in all of ‘Al Hind’ at the time was Adina Mosque in today’s Pandua, Bengal. It was built by Sikander Shah the second Sultan, and was built in a carefully blended style of Pala, Islamic and pre-Islamic Persian influences. This new kingdom made a bold and confident statement of distinction from its erstwhile rulers in Delhi, and did so by aligning itself to Bengal’s culture. But it was also a ploy for support. By connecting themselves to the Pala and Sena dynasties, they were carving a place for themselves in the natural order of Bengali politics and so would have been received familiarly. This must’ve worked; it’s inconceivable how they would’ve had the manpower to resist repeated attempts by Delhi to recapture it otherwise.

This assimilation evolved into a great many syncretic traditions and mutual appreciation. It did, in its own way, replenish a Bengali culture heavily indebted to Buddhism. Sufis rushed to the delta, curious about the tantric wisdom of the Buddhist and Hindu monks. The Jizya on non-Muslims was abolished. The new Bangla language and its nascent literature was patronised by the state, as was Bengali architectural and sculptural arts. The kings were followers of Sufism but the Boishnob prophet Sri Chaitonno received state protection to propagate his new religion. Religious freedom and respect is evidenced. Alongside, many features of a modern state with institutions seemed to be emerging, and in the medieval age of empires and conquests, this was something of an anomaly.

This Bengali milieu – pluralistic, multi-faithed and multi ethnic in its composition, fused into a nation sometime in the 15th Century. But did the Sultanate create a Bengali nation or did a self-aware Bengali nation already exist since at least the time of Shashonko? Did it run through the Pala and Sena kingdoms of Gaur-Bongo, the Chandra realm of Shomatato-Harikela and to the Vangaladesa of the Dravidian Cholas – to later be reborn in the Muslim State of Bangala? Or has it been there since the adopted son’s of Bali created the five eastern kingdoms of Anga, Banga, Kalinga, Pundra and Sumha, before they were conquered by Karna and destroyed by Arjuna? But whatever the order, the result was an identity both new and original at the same time. Sri Choitonno, Hossain Shah, the Bauls, the Boishnob, the Fakirs, all seem to find a place of convergence where Vishnu is to Allah what Allah is to Bidhata, and they shared their values and their storiesin a shared language.

In the Mughal age, when ‘Rajputised’ Muslim Turkmen ruled in a Persian tongue, Subh-e-Bangala was chatting away in 16th Century Bangla and fermenting dissent to the point of being dubbed ‘the turbulent province’.Cultural fissures were in play then too, with much derision heaped upon Bengalis, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, by the Mughals. The Bengali-Pathan dynasties and the BaroBhuiyans mounted a last-ditch resistance against the invaders, but the Mughals won and brought their All-India Muslim Way into Bengal with them. Suddenly they were speaking foreign languages in the courts and the buildings no longer had the characteristic elegance of Pala ‘karokarjo’.

Then the British came and we went on to become a persistent thorn in their side as well. The Fakir-Shonnashi uprising of the late 1700’s, also a multi-faith ‘jukto’ effort against colonialism, frustrated British efforts for over a decade. All of India ultimately faced up to the sub-human brutality of the Raj, but so much dissent came out of Bengal alone, that the shiploads of political prisoners and rebels like BaghaMatin and BarindroGhosh, exiled to the infamous Cellular Jail at Port Blair gave the city a Bengali majority, which it still has.ButBengali nationalism continued to be enriched during the British period. It also developed its Vedic hue during this time, sincemany brilliant minds were from urban Hindu backgrounds or Hindu landed aristocracies – intellectuals educated and patronised by the English schooling system. The Muslims drop out of this new scene, clinging to a fading superiority complex.

We owe a great debt of gratitude to these Renaissance men and women. They read Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Chaitanya’sArthashastra, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Jeffersonian ideals, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Marx. They studied the IRA, watched as Japan defeated Russia; they read Rumi and Hafez, the Quran, the Bible and the Vedas, followed Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Vivekannada and became, in many cases, members of the BrammoShomaj or the Indian National Army. They were an India-wide phenomenon eventually, but it began in the teahouses and coffee shops of Kolkata. They were the titans of Bengali culture. Her champions. They became writers, poets, playwrights, musicians, scientists, revolutionaries, philosophers, freedom fighters, lawyers, journalists, leaders, professors, reformers, Nobel laureates, inventors and artists. They developed acute political consciousness and a taste for revolution. This was a Bengali experience, albeit re-made in a Hindu image.

The traces of fault lines that were drawn between ‘Bengali’ and ‘Muslim’, by MughalAshrafs and Hindu puritans – long after the Sultanate’s sublime social experiment had ended – to be exploited by the British during these ultra – nationalistic times, took us away to Pakistan just as a United Independent Bengal came within kissing distance in 1947. But Bengali nationalism endures – its roots sunk deep enough to see that a single Muslim Identity is not quite representative enough. The Pakistani administration’s ethno-linguistic chauvinism was just the push needed to set off a process that led to the crystallisation of a Bengali political identity and a final detachment from that unitary Muslim culture. In what is triumph of natural identities over imposed ones, we left behind both nations of the ill-fitted two-nation theory, preferring instead to belong to a Bengali legacy that stretches deep into the past – to the Vedas and beyond. And like all of those people before us, we established an independent entity to house it in.

But that’s not the wonder of it; the wonder is that it only happened in Bengal.

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Zeeshan Khan writes from Brisbane, Australia.