The Bengal Famine retold

HUNGRY BENGAL
War, Famine and the End of Empire
Janam Mukherjee
HarperCollins India
344 pages; Rs 308

There are various ways in which one can describe history. One view holds that history is nothing but the same story repeated in different voices. Movements, dynasties and people would be cast and recast into moulds more suitable to the changing times. Inevitably, "neglected chapters" will also be retold, mostly because they remain neglected but also because they need another telling. Bengal (which includes the Indian state of West Bengal and the independent state of Bangladesh), too, has had its share of retellings - histories that track its journey from a land of abundance to a land of famines brought upon it by the British Raj. Madhushree Mukherjee painted a tragic picture in Churchill's Secret War, where the United Kingdom was made the central villain. Janam Mukherjee revisits that tragedy of 1943 in Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire, this time determined to refocus the chronological lens.

An assistant professor of history at Ryerson University in Toronto, Dr Mukherjee is out to trace every thread in the tangle. The book's comprehensive collection of facts, dates, mind-scapes and social realities is what hits you first. The author is visibly at pains to leave no stone unturned. He has visited everyone from the then-editor of The Statesman to shop-owners, and ailing mothers. He has met famine victims and bureaucrats alike, and much of his story comes from the first-hand accounts. The author keeps the quotes light, peppered with colloquial words, and refreshingly intimate so that the narrator never loses his voice though his is only one of the many that crowds the book. There is no point at which the narrator's deductions can best the observations and experiences of those who have seen or heard it all. However, it is the narrator who pieces together newspaper clippings and books and radio archives, among other documents, and carries the weight of the story on his shoulders.

"Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough to eat," wrote Amartya Sen in Poverty and Famine. Although the former may be caused by the latter, he added, it is just one of many possible causes. Establishing the fact that famines are never simply the scarcity of food, but an engineered social condition where certain sections are deprived of their rightful portion of nutrition, the author goes on to claim that there might be more players behind the scene, than just Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet, who would have stood to gain from the 1943 Bengal Famine.

Dr Mukherjee believes that India's Independence has long stayed confined to a nationalistic narrative, where the majority of blame is diverted to the foreign rulers, and the terrible violence of Partition is posited as the ultimate tragic outcome. Churchill's Secret War traces a similar trajectory of this blame game from 1757 to 1947, framing Bengal as a mini India, the loss of whose wealth and prosperity was to be blamed upon the British alone. The Bengal Famine, then, becomes just another incident in the long series of injustices done to the Indian subcontinent by its colonial masters.

Dr Mukherjee disagrees. He believes that there were many practical and self-serving reasons that would have encouraged the native elites of Bengal to fuel the fire of famine. It is this theory that he pursues in the course of the book.

In his repertoire of culprit elites, you will find the political, the social as well as the intellectual elite. Dr Mukherjee enters Gandhi's Congress, Jinnah's Muslim League, the rajbaris of Bengali zamindars, reading through their letters, account books and even documenting their household staff. It is from here that he brings out the micro picture, placing it within the established macro framework.

Above all, Dr Mukherjee, as he disagrees with Madhushree Mukherjee, underlines the need of reviewing history. He makes it clear, that any perspective, no matter how well researched, popular and prominent in the annals of criticism and scholarship, needs to be reviewed from time to time. That is because, with every review and counterpoint, the proliferation of perspective means deeper research and more knowledge. Dr Mukherjee's study, for example, provides insight into not only the causes and politics behind one of the worst famines in the subcontinent but also how the most powerful political men in the nation lost the plot for gains often bordering on the personal.

Hungry Bengal might raise eyebrows for connecting famine with communal violence, lack of nutrition, a hunger for revenge and thirst for blood. But that is not the only problematic arguments that the book raises. There are more. And it is only after the book is read that one understands that in a society in turmoil, everything is indeed connected to everything else.