“I am telling you the last time child, if you don’t finish your meal today, I am going to let you starve for the whole day tomorrow.”, shouted a woman in her shrill disciplinary voice. Young Parul was again running around the house to find an escape from eating pan-fried bitter guard and Khichudi (rice porridge cooked in pulses) that her Pishi (paternal aunt) has served. Parul followed her usual route from the kitchen to the sitting area and out of the central circular open veranda. She crossed over to the other side of the Veranda and dashed inside her father’s room, her favorite place to hide from the tortures of her aunt. Soon after she crawled underneath her father’s four-poster bed, her aunty enters the room and drags her from under the bed. Parul then reluctantly sat back for her meal and finished it till the last morsel disappeared from the yellow copper plate. But Pishi’s rearing principles are severe. She told Parul in an instructing manner, “Now, wash the leftovers off your plate by pouring the water from your glass into the plate, and drink it”. To an outsider, this might seem a rather harsh and unnecessary way to discipline a child. However, if we look from the perspective of an average adult who had to keep their families alive in the prolonged years of famine, Pishi’s actions don’t seem so strange after all. 

The year was 1943, and Bengal fell into the grip of a ravaging famine, also known as The Great Bengal Famine. Mymensingh (then under the British East India Company, now in Bangladesh) was a flourishing city, but the threatening clutch of the ever-growing famine was destabilizing the general sanity. News about the decreasing food stock spread like wildfire. Impulse buying and panic hoarding turned into common consumer behaviors. Parul’s family was only a whistle away from the erupting storm of hunger and starvation lurking outside the safety of their nest. A ravenous monster was waiting to feed on millions of souls. Parul, my maternal grandmother, who was a young girl in 1943, had her childhood shaped by this terrible humanitarian crisis created by the brutality of wars. Although it is normal for children to not eat what they don’t like. My grandmother’s routine shenanigans of wasting food were unacceptable because of the nature of the crisis of her time. 

Grandmother's aunt ran the house. She was an intelligent woman who knew the worth of every grain. She considered it her responsibility to make the family survive on the least possible amount of supply. The haven built by my grandmother’s father had sufficient but not surplus. It was a modest household of a humble priest. Food was an invaluable resource around that time, and because of the common awareness of the scale of depravity, every single grain of food was preserved meticulously. My grandmother’s aunt pressed her not to waste even a single molecule of nutrition, and hence the routine of rinsing the plate with small proportions of water and then drinking it - a habit that my grandmother carried out till the last meal of her life. Bottom line is, food was sparse in Bengal. 

Contemplation 

They say that we are an outcome of our history which was once the reality of our ancestors. If that is true, then I am a dormant presence of the past cruelties that my ancestors survived. My genetic memory is haunted by these skeletal humans, whose ghostly remnants are peeking through the curtains of the past. Only a couple of generations ago, my ancestors had a first-hand experience of an unforgiving famine that killed over 3 million people of Bengal over a year. It is hard for me to comprehend the idea that the beloved boulevards of abundant Kolkata were once filled with innumerable starving, homeless people. With their ribs protruding out so sharply that they might pierce through the skin, they barely looked human. Some hung on to whatever human part remained within them, and others let go in exhaustion. I think exhaustion is the only prime sensory information that the body can comprehend when one is preparing to die. I feel it is important for me to tell this story, or else the aimless ghost of these ancient boulevards will haunt me forever. This story is to exorcise the past of its painful suffering, to exhume the dead out of their dreaded pits of history, and free them the baggage of their untold stories. 

Indifference 

Shankar Ghosh recollects from his years of reporting in his remarkable memoir Scent of a Story

One of my greatest regrets while reporting in the war years was the studied indifference of our entire journalistic community to the famine in Bengal. Between 1942 and 1943, over three million people died of starvation in Bengal with hardly any mention in the media. Battles, skirmishes, they give, and take of a few square yards of real estate in unpronounceable locales made it to the front pages, but the death by starvation of Indians, almost equal to two-thirds the population of Scotland, was something to be wished away.

The consensus among the European media, including the British media during this particular humanitarian crisis was that of indifference. A small part of a relatively poorer colony is not much significant in the power play of world leaders. While documenting the case, many potential causes were cited for the famine, including the natural disasters, outbreaks of infections in crops, and the fall of Burma (a major rice importer to British India) into the hands of the Japanese. However, the reality of the policy failure emerged as a major cause as the investigation progressed. In her recent studies, journalist Madhushree Mukerjee has claimed that the widespread suffering and deaths due to starvation could have been prevented if Winston Churchill and his cabinet of ministers paid heed to the severity of the crisis when alerted. Mukherjee has presented evidence that the cabinet has been repeatedly warned that the excessive spending of Indian resources on the war efforts might lead to a severe famine in India. However, such concerns were met with indifference. The British government kept exporting rice to other parts of the empire. They perhaps thought that the mechanism of war had to run smoothly, and the lives of a few hundred impoverished people of the colony were just collateral damages. However, when the number turned from an estimated few hundred to three million deaths, the initial indifference now turned into denial. Rice stocks kept flowing out of India into the Empire’s reserve while prices skyrocketed in Bengal’s market, and London continued to deny to have ordered the Viceroy of India to supply 1 million tonnes of emergency grain supplies in 1942-43. 

The rising inflation disrupted the lives of several poor Bengali families. People could no longer afford to buy food and eventually ran out of every reserve. There was a persisting lack of grains, pulses, vegetables, and fish - all essential dietary staples of the state. To make matters worse, Britain implemented a ‘Denial Policy’. They were concerned about Subhash Chandra Bose, the charismatic and defiant Bengali militant leader of the All India Forward Bloc a radicle offspring of the Indian National Congress. Bose was a threat to the British because of his association with the Japanese imperialists. Bose's political stance added more woe to the people of Bengal. Huge amounts of rice and thousands of boats were confiscated from the coastal regions of Bengal. This was done in paranoid haste to deny resources to the Japanese army in case of a future invasion. A stark example of civilians becoming victims in the war of influential and privileged men. When Churchill was questioned for this apparent failure of policy he blamed it on the fact that Indians “breed like rabbits”, and snidely remarked that if the shortages were that bad how come Mahatma Gandhi was still alive. 

I wonder why Britain was not held responsible by the allied powers for their policy failures which cost the lives of 3 million Indians. Is it because they were heroes to the people whose lives were influenced by the bigger war? Or is it because colonialism is lesser of the two evils when compared to Germany violating ‘state sovereignty’? Or is it because racism is less abhorrent than anti-semitism? Amid the war, both countries operated in a way that led millions of people to their graves - a holocaust by definition. This reminds me of a quote by Andrzej Sapkowski from The Witcher series, 

Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference. The degree is arbitrary. The definition is blurred. If I am to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all.

Survival

A Bengali writer Sailen Sarkar documented the life of a Bengal famine survivor named Chand Ali Khamaru in his work, Monontorrer Shakkhi (Witness of the Famine). Khamaru’s memories of his early life amid the famine in the Medinipur district go back to him scavenging ponds for fiber and begging landowners for fain (the starchy water that is left over after boiling rice usually given to cattle) to feed his family. And yet, it was slightly less horrible compared to the scenes of Kolkata (then Calcutta).

Millions of people migrated to the city in search of food. There was a mass exodus from the countryside, people walked hundreds of miles to reach where there might be any hint of food. Thousands of people perished on the way of dehydration and fatal diarrhea. Some made it to Kolkata, but the tunnel they crossed in hope of seeing the light, greeted them with similar darkness of their abandoned home. The food stocks of the city were running out quickly. Kolkata was a massive city however it was not prepared to take in a million hungry people from the countryside. People were spotted holding cups, mugs, glasses, and almost all kinds of containers sitting near the drains of red-bricked British offices, to salvage rice starch or vegetable stock that might find its way out through the kitchen drains. Every street was filled with skeletal figures with hollow eyes begging for food, and eventually dying at the site.

There are no scientific parameters to measure human suffering caused due to the crisis of food in Bengal in the year 1943. And even if there was one, it would still be impossible to fully comprehend the collective trauma that food insecurity of this scale could cause. With our technology-enabled world being efficient, abundant, resourceful, and connected, famines for most of us have become stories of the past. However, let us not forget that prolonged wars can disrupt the trade relationships of the local communities and lead to famines if the country in question is not strategically ready to mitigate shortages. The famine of South Sudan in 2017 was a stark reminder of a similar crisis.

Although India’s population exponentially increased in post-colonial years, the nation has successfully eliminated famine-related deaths. It was done by implementing efficient irrigation practices, improvement in seed yield, strong food distribution and welfare systems, better transport systems to enable quick movement of food stocks in case of emergencies, and mainly adopting effective diplomacy and remaining non-aligned to the war politics. 

Wars should be obsolete

Evolution, by definition, means to adapt and change for the betterment of the species. Evolved modern humans should be working towards reducing human suffering. Wars are counter-productive to the natural process of evolution. Thus, wars should become obsolete. Wars, in general, propels humans to normalize apathy and racial discrimination. To survive in dire circumstances, humans beings awaken their animalistic instincts and lose touch with their human virtues. It is not much of a folly, only a survival mechanism. Apathy creates huge crevices in the collective consciousness. People on the receiving end of apathy forever lose their ability to connect meaningfully or practice compassion. Wars create broken humans, who then break the society, which then leads to war. It becomes a vicious cycle of social metamorphosis, which keeps on taking more gruesome form with each advancing stage.  

One way to counter the philosophy of war is to develop a pragmatic philosophy of peace and not just diplomatic deliberations. As we advance into our futures, we need to meditate on the next stage of evolution and what it demands out of us. Wars being obsolete should be the prime parameter of progress. The old Roman democracy is rendering itself useless. We need a new form of democracy. We need apt fundamental social structures that shift the power in hands of the common people who can then democratically hold leaders responsible for their supremacy and aggression. With such a semi-utopian model, the idea of war will become trivial. Nations should be deemed powerful for making technology that makes nuclear warfare obsolete and not for accumulating more nuclear weapons. The next phase of democracy will enable us to develop applicable frameworks to make wars obsolete. And that alone should be a prime parameter to assess development. 

This might sound idealistic and impractical under the current world circumstances, but I believe that only a radicle transformation of our democratic and social frameworks can lead to our desired goal of making wars obsolete. We live in a reality where everything that we hold dear can burn down to ashes as soon as tomorrow because of the inflated ego of mercurial men. If we deny this reality, we will always end up forging worlds that will be too brittle to inhabit. 

To drag the world out of its pitiful mess, we as a collective have to find a framework to evolve in such a way that we are in constant touch with our empathy. To create a system that is incapable of harm, hate, prejudice, or inflicting pain. Unless we attain this goal collectively, we will remain unassuming wild beasts caught in our apathetic slumber of greed, eventually shattering our beautiful abundant world into pieces. 

And as for me, I am aware that some part of my ancestor's indelible suffering is still etched in me. So I actively seek healing from this generational trauma, to move past the shadows of yesterdays. And I admit, on the days when I see lush green farms with crops ready to harvest, I feel immensely grateful for having all that I need - love, abundance, and an immediate reality that is devoid of wars.