5. Ghosts

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In 1998, Kushinava Chowdry, fresh out of Princeton, went to Calcutta, now Kolkata, to work as a journalist at the Statesman newspaper. When I worked there, it was still the biggest English paper in Calcutta. But it was sort of like Calcutta slowly declining. This was the city of his ancestors. He'd lived there as a child. And now he walked its streets, getting to know it as an adult. He went back to America at the turn of the millennium, but always felt the pull to call cutter. Years later, he returned to write a book about the city. And when I was working on the book, these stories of famine would come up. Kushin read academic books, seen the iconic photos and sketches of the famine, and watched famous Indian films about it. But it wasn't his focus back then. Like me, he overlooked it. So I knew about it and didn't know about it. And that had a lot to do with the nature of the people who starved. You know, I didn't know anybody who started the famine. None of my friends, none of my parents' friends, no one, not one person. And yet one in 20 Bengali died. He wrote the book, and it did well, but something kept niggling at him. You know, books have unresolved issues in them. And so this was really the unresolved issue in the book that I wrote. You know, I think it was the thing that kind of kept, you know, knowing at me. And then in early 2018, while browsing at his favorite Kolkata bookshop, he picked up a Bengali magazine. Flicking through it, he was gobsmacked. There were interviews from the countryside with actual survivors at the famine, alongside photos of them. And I just could not believe that those people are alive, you know, I mean, I just, I could not believe that they were alive. I really wanted them to be dead, to be very honest. They had just come to haunt me, you know, to say, where were you? You know, what were you doing? Why didn't you go and look for these people, you know, that they're still here? I'm Kavita Puri and for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. This is three million, episode five ghosts. I know what kush means. The survivors from the countryside have been haunting me too. Witnesses to that time are still alive in villages across Bengal. Their experience of the famine has been almost completely ignored. The reasons why I help explain why it's not well remembered. For over a year now, I've been in touch with Soilin Saka. It's his interviews, Kush saw in that Bengali magazine. I'm so happy to meet you finally. Yes, I was very much eager to see you. I know we want to come. We're trying to come. Soilin is 72, but looks far younger. He spent nearly all his life in Kolkata where he worked as a teacher. My subject was physics. When he was eight, he saw photos taken by his father who was giving out relief during the famine. He had a photo album and I saw many pictures of that time. The family suffered between and that interested me to know the survivors. He'd never forgotten their faces. So a few years ago, he started to look for them. He recorded their testimonies with paper and pen. The first survivor he met was 86-year-old Shri Patichar and Samantha, who we heard from at the start of the series. He left Midnapore for Kolkata when his family could no longer afford rice. I have an obsession. Now, the people of Bengal want to forget their history. Very dark we did here in Bengal. When you want to forget your history, you want to forget everything. Many have died since he heard their stories. Some had been waiting all their life to speak. Soilin remembers one man. When I went to him and asked about the famine, he passed it to the earth. The old man said then, "I am waiting for so much long time that anyone will come to me and I will tell him the story." And I was very much surprised with this. But I still can remember his voice. Why you are so late to come to me? How old was this man? And now then, when I went to him, he was 94 or 5. He said, "He was on a mohondas." I was meant to meet Soilin Sarka, the memory collector in Kolkata and travel with him into rural West Bengal. But I never got a visa. It's not easy right now for BBC journalists to travel to India. For 80 years, so little was known of those three million. And now, I can't even get to the very last survivors. I'm gutted I can't go. But Kush, the Bengali American writer, was more fortunate. He was living in Kolkata when he found that Bengali magazine. And he couldn't stop thinking about the people he saw in it. The photographs really haunted me. I felt like they were just looking at me, you know, for a long time. He called Soilin and asked if he could go with him on one of his trips. And he never met me. And he said, "Oh, I'm going to the Sundarman's tomorrow. Why don't you just come with me?" You know, I mean, sight unseen, you know. Famous for its tigers, the Sundarman's is an area in West Bengal and Bangladesh. But many people were affected by famine. And so the next day, you know, five a.m. in the morning, I'm at the railway station. You know, it's cold, it's in January, and, you know, we hit the road. They met for the first time under the departure's board, both dressed in woolen hats and scarves. Kush wore trainers, Soilin, open-toed sandals. They traveled south out of Kolkata. So right from the get-go, he was very open, which is not always the case, you know. He was very open to share what he knew. I was highly, my happy. He was very fine boy, very fine man. Soon Kush was seeing green fields, passing places he'd never seen. When they got off, they ate roadside snacks, puffed rice with raisins and jaggery. Soilin smoked roll-ups, one after another, replenished. They made their way to the Khmeri River. We have to travel by 330 minutes on the board. They arrived at Cape Lot, an island. Now Kush came face-to-face with the people who'd been haunting him. The first person Kush spoke to was Bijoy Krishna Tripathi. He was the oldest man on the island. His photo card said he was 112. He was sitting beneath a covered veranda, wearing a brown cap. Around him were four generations of his family. These are the survivors, right? These are the people who, you know, who didn't get washed away. They made a life in the jungles. And then they would talk about all the people who didn't make a life. The people who just vanished, you know, people who just came and then they went away and you never saw them again. Bijoy Krishna told Kush an extraordinary story at the cyclone, looting and death of children being sold for rice and a rebellion against the British. Kush says it was like a portal to another world. It was very powerful to meet these people. And it was very powerful to meet them. I mean, I think the thing that really struck me was that we didn't have to search for them. You know, they weren't hiding. They were all in plain sight in villages all across West Bengal and Bangladesh. Just sitting there as the largest archive in the world, right? I mean, and nobody had bothered to talk to them. I felt tremendous shame. I felt tremendous shame about that. But despite his shame at having overlooked the survivors, Kush was welcomed by them. He became a part of their family, the Chigain, Kwardim uncle, he became one of the families everywhere. After his trip with Soilan, Kush returned on his own and spoke to more survivors. He says many were speaking about the famine for the first time. No one had ever asked them, not even their own family. Hearing their stories helped him understand why the famine's victims aren't well-remembered in India, he thinks part of the answer could be guilt. The ways in which people profited, those people didn't want to remember the famine. As we've heard, including from Soilan's testimonies, there were those who bought cheap land. Some merchants bought up rice for profit. Some were so desperate they sold their children. Others turned the other way. But there's something else about India's remembrance. The collective memory isn't held by those who suffered the most, who were almost never asked to tell their story in their own words. The story is written by the people who it didn't affect. It's a curious phenomenon about who tells stories and who constructs reality. So the story is not also a huge lacuna there of what happened. Kush believes the silence has kept the victims of the famine from having a proper reckoning. We have not even begun to talk about questions of justice because we have not even begun to deal with questions of memory. We don't even remember it. So how can we even talk about justice for the people who suffered? So there's a huge conversation that needs to happen. There were reasons why some of that conversation hasn't happened in India and Bangladesh. Famine was just one of many tumultuous events during those years. The 1940s is a kind of decade of debt, you can say. Priti Kapila is professor of history and politics at Cambridge University. After World War II, there were devastating communal riots in Kolkata reported on at the time by Reuters. The worst riots in the history of Calcutta, trouble flared up in an orgy of looting and stabbing, fires raged unchecked in many places while pitch battles continued between Muslims and Hindus. And then a year later, the long nationalist struggle finally achieved its aims. In August 1947, the British did quit India, creating two nations, India and Pakistan. There was joy and finally gaining independence, but it was also a bloody and traumatic birth. And all the time the bloodshed goes on. For the masses, it's the weary trail of the road, carrying their few possessions. They flee from savagery and butchery that has never been exceeded even in India's stormy history. And the story of the 1940s is like there's very little punctuation to series of mass death events that take place. And that's why I would think that the Bengal famine in a way struggles to find its own place in that narrative. Even so, the memory of the Bengal famine does live on in other ways. British says it still shapes Indian agricultural policy and is affected global development economics, not least because of the work of a Martia Sen who we heard from earlier in the series, the little boy who gave rise to starving people from a cigarette tin. And the famine is also part of the enduring legacy of colonialism in India. If there is one way to understand empire, it is through the experience of hunger. That's its ultimate legacy and association in India. Quite apart from the grand buildings and the English language and cricket and tea which everyone likes to talk about, who are actually at the level of experience memory association, it is that yes, this led to indecent poverty. Because the 1943 famine wasn't the only one. There was a long history of famines during the hundreds of years of Britain's presence in India, an estimated tens of millions died. The causes are contested and complex, but it is argued that British policy and inaction contributed. You have massive famines in Bengal, in the 18th century straight away, and all through the 19th century you have famines. So yes, 43 is not the only one. With the British gone, politicians in newly independent India would determine that things would be different. And this is the pledge, almost a solemn pledge, most of the Indian nationalist leadership takes, that the meaning of freedom is going to be a freedom from hunger, which is not to say there is no malnourishment in India or that there is no inequality in India. But these famines in India are the thing of the past. There hasn't been a major famine in India since independence. However, food security remains a huge issue, even though India is now one of the largest economies in the world, overtaking its former colonial ruler. On the global hunger index, India currently ranks 111 out of 125, and in Bangladesh there was a famine in 1974 where over a million people died. So although the 3 million victims of the 1943 Bengal famine and the remaining survivors aren't remembered with a plaque or a memorial in India or Bangladesh, the association of hunger with empire endures, and Shruti says for many, there's one person who embodies that association most powerfully. There is an anti-hero iconic of what was wrong with the British Empire. That is Churchill for popular memory. Churchill is really entirely remembered in terms of this man-made famine, a war famine for which the brunt of it was made by the people of Bengal. In India and Bangladesh, conversations about the Bengal famine are complicated, but in Britain there's hardly a conversation. That's not to say that it doesn't still re-emerge in different ways. At the start of all this, I thought that 3 million Indians, who were British subject could all be disappeared from our memory in Britain, I was wrong. The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, over the murder of George Floyd, let his statues being pulled down, were daubed in graffiti. Yesterday this was sprayed next to the statue of Winston Churchill. The word "racist". Several from a variety of backgrounds turned out as self-proclaimed protectors of statues after Winston Churchill's monument was damaged last week. The then-shutters secretary of state for justice, David Lamy, spoke on the BBC. There's only one seriously calling for Winston Churchill's statue to come down. I mean, I hope not, but I recognise, of course there's a debate about what he did in Bengal with the famine. Many great figures in history are also flawed and we ought to be able to have that debate as well. The attack on his statue wasn't just about Churchill's record on the Bengal famine, but the debate Lamy was referring to was whether Churchill's attitudes to Indians affected his response to the famine. The ghosts of those 3 million and what happened to them were there, they hadn't gone away. I think the scale of human destruction is such that history will catch up and politics will catch up with the immensity of what happened in Bengal. Historian Janam Mukherjee, who we've heard throughout the series. I think certainly colonial responsibility, the responsibility of Britain in relation to the famine and particularly the role of Winston Churchill is necessarily going to create a kind of historical amnesia in Britain. Churchill is woven into our national story of heroism for defeating the fascist enemy during the war, it's who we are, why would we want to remember things differently. But remembering the famine is about much more than one person, it's about us. Are we ready to touch those bits of our history that are too painful to acknowledge? There are signs that maybe we are. There's a new generation of historians breaking ground with their research and one of Britain's biggest war museums has made space for the famine in an exhibition. So we try and shut out the global nature of war from the very beginning? I'm with Vicky Hawkins, the former curator of the new galleries at the Second World War at the Imperial War Museum in London. Well, the main reason for these new galleries was that we've always had a sort of second world war offering here at the museum, but it's been very much a British and a Eurocentric space and we wanted to make sure that we put the British experience of war back into a wider global context, so for the first time these galleries have got a lot of content related to Asia and the Pacific, the war and the Soviet Union. When did you realise that you wanted to include the Bengal famine in that? There wasn't ever any question that the Bengal famine would be included in these new iterations of the galleries, it's an important part of the history and of the war. We know that some visitors might not expect that material in here or might not know about it actually in fact, so that was another reason why we wanted to include it in the space. We wanted to make sure that the story of the famine was told from the Bengali perspective and in a small corner near to a loud video of wartime air attacks, I find the display. There are pictures of crime. Nicolas of the Famine, including writer and artist Chitta Prasad by Tacharya, who drew the people who suffered and died in the famine, ennamed the victims. "My goodness, I mean to see it like this, it's so detailed. It almost looks like a photograph. It's so clear. And there he is and I've never seen a photograph of him. And he's looking incredibly dapper with his kind of cigarette and its holder. It's a modest display, but it's a start. 80 years on, narratives are only just emerging, not about decision-makers, but voices previously unheard. And this isn't solely the domain of academics and curators. This is also happening around dinner tables and in family WhatsApp groups. We're living through a moment where urgent questions about our past that being asked in Britain and particularly amongst the younger generation in the diaspora who didn't hear much about the famine when they were growing up. So my family come from West Bengal, a district of Kolkata, you could say, Howrah. This is VLAN Chatterjee. And my mum and dad grew up on opposite sides of the road. My dad came to the UK as a teenager and my mum came in her late twenties. And when did you learn about the Bengal famine? I think it only really came up in university. Black Lives Matter was a movement that was quite strong at university. And then when people started thinking of the British context about our history, I think a lot of people started asking questions about what do we know and what do we not know. So he started looking into it. It wasn't in any of those curriculums. I think it was more an interest on my part and my friends who were interested in running events, having discussions, talking about these kinds of things. When you were learning about the Bengal famine, how did you feel? I think I was surprised that this was such a significant event that I had never really heard about. That was shocking and surprising. But in another way, completely expected just because being in the UK, I mean, we know that there's so much of our history that we don't often speak about. He put on some events at university and then he had a feeling I know well that time was running out. So I basically decided to make a short film, focusing on someone who had either survived or witnessed the famine. It wasn't easy, but he found Zibbonessa, Kair and London who was in her late 80s. He began filming with her into grandchildren. She's got a really sharp sense of humour and yeah, she was very happy to speak and I could just sit there and ask questions and every now and then she would kind of say, "Oh, you know, the memory has just come flooding back and she's wanting to say more and more." I remember because it is a very sad time, very bad time because people are hungry. She spoke of the Japanese bombings and being evacuated to the countryside, the independence movement, and of people asking for fun now, the starch water of rice. Dylan made a short documentary and had a screening, add a cafe in East London and it kind of sold out within an hour. There were lots of Asians and other people from other diasporas and immediately they kind of said, "Okay, it's crazy we didn't know about this." As South Asians in Britain, it seems like we've all grown up without really understanding our own history and it's not like this is kind of some minor detail. This is 3 million deaths. We can't really understand who we are today in this country and our history if we don't know about the famine. There may be few survivors left now but the strong emotions the famine still evokes haven't gone away. Young people have a lot of reasons to be angry and I think the reason a lot of young people care is because we know this has happened but we don't see any recognition of it, any acknowledgement of it. Whether we like it or not, these things happened. Talking about it may be uncomfortable but after 80 years maybe we're ready. For both historians Sean Adata and Janam Mukherjee, that effort to recognise what happened so overdue in Britain is critical. They see the value of remembering. I'm very interested in how we connect or relate the past to the present but in approaching the wall of silence which has been locked down by shame. It's not about blame, it's just about acknowledgement and in acknowledgement when it moves on. So I do think that justice is a historical enterprise and I do think that history itself is redemptive. It can be used in non-redemptive ways. It can be used in very sectarian ways but a clear understanding that an ability to name names and to point out the structures that led to the annihilation of at least 3 million people is to lend those lives that were lost some value. Just in the seriousness of investigation and to take the Bengal famine as seriously as possible is to also take that loss of life to heart, to understand that these people who are annihilated were human beings and that the silence around that that has existed for so long is a replication of the erasure of their lives by and through starvation. And a serious attention to the historical detail is in that sense redemptive. Acknowledgement is the act of remembrance not only of Britain's role but also of the witnesses, survivors and victims like Kishit Dramahar Nike, the first name I found of the 3 million who died. The generation who lived through the war and the famine are still with us just. They're slipping away before our eyes. I think of Pamela, her expression of horror, as she remembered the vultures and the dead on Kalka's streets, and Martia, just a boy, holding a cigarette in with a rice, working out how much she could give away. Partha, looking through the iron gates, are the emaciated mothers clutching their children. Descendants like Kush and Philan wanting to make sense of adults today. The new generation of curators and historians, like Janam, Pshonna, Dia and Vicki, looking for those forgotten stories on the other side of history. And Soilan is 72 year old man, doing his best to record the last survivors. You came too late, one of them told Soilan. You may have taken decades, but Soilan wasn't too late. He's gathering as many testimonies as he can, and now you heard some of them too. 80 years on, the great men of history, who made decisions in Kalkata, Delhi and London a long dead, so too those in India who documented it, the Indian writers, artists and photographers, as well as the editor of the statesman newspaper, Ian Stevens. Remembrance today doesn't have to be about blame, but if we don't remember the difficult bits of our past, alongside the glorious, what does that say about us today? In the middle of the Second World War, in the dying days of empire, British subjects in India died of hunger and disease because of famine. Surely it's time now to remember the 3 million. 3 million was presented by me, Kavita Puri, series producer was Antideen, the editor, Emma Rippen, sound design and mix by Eloise Whitmore, the production coordinators, Boomeria Ogondelli and Sabine Sherrick, the original music was by Felix Taylor. I'm John Ronson and I'm back with season 2 of Things Fell Apart. I show for BBC Radio 4 that unearths the origin stories of the culture wars. This time around the stories are all about the battlefronts that engulfed us during lockdown. The stories twist and turn until each one ends with the explosion of a new, far-reaching culture war. "If you tell me, am I there if you had superhuman strength, if you tell me that he didn't fill any pain, well he's dead now." This Things Fell Apart, season 2, listen on BBC Sounds. to dial into the story of the Bell Telephone and invention that completely transformed the way we communicate. We'll uncover the history behind a very specific beloved model of the telephone, how it changed the world and the story behind one of the most influential objects ever created. Listen to 100 objects, on the 99% of visible feed, wherever you get your podcasts.