India At War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War by Khan Yasmin

Author:Khan, Yasmin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

15

Scorched Earth

Ironically, 1943 was a year that saw little fighting for Indian and Allied soldiers in South Asia. Divisions fought in Sicily and in Naples but in India the army was undergoing a concerted phase of training, re-organisation and preparation for the looming engagements with the Japanese. Yet, if we include civilians, it was the year with the most wartime casualties for India. There is a strong case for integrating the dead of the Bengal famine into calculations of the global war dead, much as the casualties of Stalingrad and Hiroshima have become part of global war histories.

On the afternoon of 12 July 1943, a crowd of forty to fifty men, women and children gathered at the railway crossing at Sitarampur on the borders of Bihar. They had brought bags and woven baskets with them along with sticks and farming implements. Freight carriages carrying grain would be passing though on the East India Railway line and this hungry band of villagers was determined to find something to eat. When the first train passed through, the guards onboard drove back the crowd, but when a second train approached the people became desperate. The guards fired on the crowd, killing an unknown woman.1

This frantic attempt was one of many on the East India Railway line in 1943. In Bihar and Bengal, the line was often under attack from hungry villagers who came to meet the passing trains. In response the railways increased the numbers of guards. ‘People come from as far as 15 miles to attempt to obtain small quantities of grain from railway cars’, stated one report. ‘The guards are often stoned and occasionally arrows are shot at them … railway officials are of the opinion that this is only the beginning of these troubles.’2 Although the great hunger of 1943 was most devastating in Bengal, where it resulted in mass starvation and death, there is ample evidence that across many parts of India people were going hungry, forsaking meals and cutting back on their meagre portions of essentials by the second and third years of the war and deaths caused by starvation occurred in other provinces, including Assam and Orissa. Famine is an exceptional event but it is also the extreme end of a continuum with other forms of food deprivation and malnutrition; hunger and shortages had become endemic early on in the war. Famine was the nadir of a much wider food problem, which afflicted India and many parts of the world from 1939 until the early 1950s, amplified by precarious supply, worsened by lack of trust in government price controls, limited rationing and provincial protectionism.

Government attitudes towards food shortages consistently took metropolitan ideas of sacrifice and making-do as their reference point, ideas transferred from the British home front. The government severely overestimated the Indian peasant’s ability to cut back, living as he or she often did on the margins of viable existence in the first place. As the Bhore Committee Report on public health in India had already established, most Indians had a diet ‘defective in quality’ at the start of the war.

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