7. Road to the Past

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Fall tastes better with better ingredients from whole foods market. No added growth hormones are antibiotics in their meat department. Means slow braised short ribs are even more satisfying. All-sea food is well caught like their vibrant sockeye salmon or verified responsibly farmed. And all sweets including fall-themed cookies are made without high-fructose corn syrup. Spice up fall at Whole Foods Market. Part of why I blew the whistle was I didn't want to lay in bed in 20 years. Having seen another million people die and know that I could have done something when when I had a chance. This week on the interface, we're talking to Francis Halligan. The Facebook whistleblower who leaked the documents that changed how the world saw social media. And now she is the subject of Aaron Sorkin's latest movie, The Social Reckoning. So join me, Thomas Germain and me, Jess Maddox, for the interface. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcast. BBC sounds, music, radio podcasts. In this episode of three million, I travel to India to meet survivors of the Bengal famine and hear their stories firsthand. Some of their recollections are disturbing. I'm in Calcutta and it's it's strange really because it feels like an old friend. There is so much here that feels familiar. I've heard so much about Calcutta while making this series about the Bengal famine. This is my first visit here. And I'm on the Charingy Road, which was really busy back in the day. And it's still really busy now. The city, known as Calcutta back then, was transformed by war and famine. It's a place so many of my interviewees talk about. And everywhere I'm seeing places through their eyes. And so it doesn't feel like I'm here for the first time. Being here reminds me of the observers to the famine I've interviewed, like Pathamitta, who was a boy, watched through the iron gates of his home, as emaciated people streamed into the city from the countryside desperate for food. It's those people who made that journey, the poorest and most vulnerable that I haven't yet heard from, who so often don't get to write history. That's why I've come to Bengal to find the last survivors before it's too late. Their stories have never been broadcast before. We said we hadn't eaten, so the girl gave us two pieces of bread with jaggery. When I think of my older brother, I feel very sad, I weep, I still cry for him. He took us to Calcutta. He said if we lived here, we would die of hunger. At least three million Indians, who were British subjects, died in the Bengal famine during World War Two. It's one of the largest losses of civilian life on the Allied side. For the past year and a half, I've been asking why is there no memorial to them anywhere in the world? But then deep in the Bengal jungle, I finally find it. It's not what I expected. I'm Kavita Puri, and for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, this is three million, episode seven, road to the past. So it's morning, it's Sunday, but it seems like everyone's up and busy and making breakfast and getting the stalls ready, and here we are in new markets, which is in the heart of Calcutta. It's still early, but there's a lot going on. People drink their morning chai, fresh parantas are being made, and it's already getting hot. Tathagata Niyogi is waiting for me, wearing a huge sun hat. He's going to take me on a tour of the city, showing me key sites connected to the Second World War and the famine. So I'm born here, my family has been here for as long as Calcutta has been here, so about 300 years. My father's father was in the war, so he was a part of the dockyards engineering, so he was working when Japanese were bombing the dockyards. What were you told about the famine? Yeah, so they said that it was very difficult time to live, because my grandfather was involved in the war efforts. They were getting food supplied to them, canned food from the British and the American army. A lot of people around them were starving, so they had to share food with them that they were getting. When you take people on these tours, including Indians, do they know about the famine? Indians would know about the famine, but it's more of a recent knowledge, because when I was in school, there was just one sentence that the famine happened. Even in Bengal? Even in Bengal, yes. We head off from the market, and it's not just the grand Victorian buildings where remnants of colonialism are evident. So there's local boys playing cricket? As we walk around the city, he points out vestiges of war. The Metro cinema, where American GIs had free tickets to watch Hollywood movies, and a newly bricked up part of the road where a Japanese bomb once fell. But then we stop outside a large red building on a street that's the microcosm of the extremes that were happening in the city during wartime. So this is the Calcutta municipality headquarters. This is where the politics happened during the famine. The very local level politics. Directly opposite where the local politicians worked is the square. Called the Corporation Square, and a lot of famine-stricken population that came into the city, they set up here inside the Corporation Square. I mean, there is a huge irony, isn't there, that this kind of classic Victorian red brick building is opposite where so many people would have been so ill lying on the street, they would have seen it. They would have seen it. They would see it every day. Just literally a few steps. The most hungry, the most vulnerable from the countryside were dying. Yeah, yeah, that's the situation, and you won't find a single memorial for that. Why do you think there is nothing here to remember that time? I think a part of it is lack of knowledge, because they're faces people, they're common people. That is why I think there is less interest. That's why I think there is a reluctance about building the placks. There wasn't only local politicians seeing the catastrophe unfolding, but also many others all across the city. So that reluctance about memorializing the famine could also be bound up in guilt too, about what they saw and couldn't stop. Or even turn away from. But maybe there's something else here. Maybe Calcutta wants to forget. Maybe we should let it forget it. It was a bad time. I mean history is not only remembered in good things, to teach history to the public. Properly is very important, and that needs to be both the bad things and the good things at the same time. Corporation Square is now a garden. Actually it's called Charlie Chaplin Park. There's a large image of him in the entrance, which feels a bit weird, really, given this history isn't funny. How could there be a sculpture celebrating a British comedian, but nothing to mark all those who lost their lives right here? Over 80 years ago people came here. They came for food. They collapsed here. They probably died here. Decades on now. If you look at it, it's quite beautiful. It's serene. It's peaceful. Full of flowers. And strangely, it does actually look like some kind of graveyard. At the end of every walk, because we don't have any memorials or anything, and so many people died. We generally do a one-minute silence for the victims, so we remember them, remember their sacrifices. So you do that in the absence of anything concrete being there to remember those who died? Yes, and I think it's very important to do it. But the most important thing is that people might forget the walk, but they will always take the last act with them. So it's an act of remembrance? Yeah, it's an act of remembrance. There's hardly any sign of the famine in Colcutta, but maybe it's different in other parts of Bengal. The next morning, I drive out of the city on a narrow road built long ago by the British. Everyone seems in a hurry, with swerving cyclists and took took while cars overtake us. Our driver is navigating all this while holding his mobile phone to his ear and talking loudly to a relative. I'm in the car with 72-year-old Soiland Sarca, the memory collector who's been recording testimonies for survivors for the past few years with pen and paper. He's my guide through the countryside. This road is very important due to famine. That people wanted to go to Calcutta used this road. In many ways if you follow this road it takes you to where the story of famine begins. Driving along it I feel like I'm going back in time. And so if we were here in 1943 we would have seen many many people walking. Many many people walking and lying dead in this road. Hundreds of people, thousands of people walked by this road. In the morning shade men are chatting, uniform children are on their way to school and women in brightly colored saris by okra, jackfruit, tomatoes and onions from the side of the road. Over two hours out of Calcutta deep in the countryside Soiland stops for breakfast with a house of some friends. One of them takes me to their garden. Green fields like these seem unexceptional but they're at the heart of the story I've been tracing. Looking at them today it's hard to believe that over 80 years ago who controlled these grains of rice and who could access them could mean the difference between life and death. We get back on the road again to find the people who depended on these rice grains back then. We come to a small village right on the Hougley River. There were many complex factors that resulted in the famine including British colonial policies but in this area a cyclone played a major role in 1942. We head towards a covered area by a shop next to a newly built cyclone refuge having read so much about the famine in books and archives I'm finally about to meet a survivor. In walks a petite elderly woman in a bright white sari walking with her a members of her family one of them introduces her saying here is the young lady she takes a seat I ask her her name and how old are you? 196 and have you always lived here? Since birth. Melati may be nearly a hundred but her memory is clear. Soilin is with me translating her words in mine as she recalls the Hougley River rising after the cyclone in October 1942. In the sorm and rain people started to run all over the place people were crying somewhere drowning and resurfacing again so many people were being washed away. I saw mothers floating clutching their babies there was a person who was struggling he was a teacher he was pushed up onto a window everything was floating in muddy water after that happened what happened to your house the water we seeded a bit but mom and dad said if we had a high tidy game they wouldn't be able to save their children so we went to a brick built house nearby owned by our landlord we took shelter there the land owner asked what are you going to eat what will you feed your children with we were given only some wild rice as famine gripped Melati and her mother moved again this time to her uncle's house when famine came it was very bad a baby was crying on her mother's lap and constantly asked for food one woman next to her said there is no food it your own baby that is the clue I felt bad I was at my maternal uncle's home I was getting food on my plate I was not hungry there are generations of Melati's family sitting around listening then her son speaks up what he says is horrifying and disturbing to hear almost beyond belief I can only imagine what it must have been like to witness she used to say people ate other people's vomit mom told us the story that hunger was so intense that if someone was sick someone else would eat that vomit they couldn't be at the hunger when did your mother tell you these stories of the famine she said this many times when we asked her about her past she told us this it was so tragic even to think someone in our family some relative might have had to do this I felt so sad before I leave Melati holds my hand tightly and smiles to reveal one perfect top tooth in that otherwise toothless mouth her eyes sparkle just like a young lady she was an incredible woman she's 96 and she had such a clear memory honestly I've read a lot of testimonies but it was really shocking to hear some of those things that she said and afterwards she got really emotional and I asked her why and she said it's just bringing all those memories back again she wanted to speak but there was something she didn't or couldn't tell me which her son did even now over 80 years on to say these things out loud of what people did to survive it's too much we continue the drive south getting closer to the Sunderban jungle not far from the border with Bangladesh and I'm thinking of Melati the road splits off into a dirt track too narrow for a car and we get out to walk the scene is a delic there's the whining of an old water pump for people are filling up jugs and bottles in a big house surrounded by a river on three sides we enter and greeted by the owner then a neighbor walks in carrying a plastic shopping bag his name is Canal al-Height he says he's 95 people had no food to eat no clothes to wear people died of hunger there were dead bodies on the streets pathetic scenes the government suppliers too little insufficient I had raw good raw okra we had some vegetable crops which were hung in baskets from the ceiling to keep them dry we ate those raw too he says he was hungry for four or five months and that two of his grandparents died from hunger like Melati he speaks to his children about what he went through they get to know from people how we suffered from time to time I tell them about the famine if they waste anything I remind them of our difficult times he then reaches for his plastic bag and takes out eggs fruit milk offering them to us I now always keep food stocked up for two years I eat omelets made with ten eggs I eat food containing various vitamins I always keep my own stock of food that I always carry with me I always carry milk see here three two liter packs I always carry mangoes I wasn't expecting that at all he was carrying his food bags with eggs and mangoes and wanted to show me his milk and it's really clear that the impact of the famine and the trauma of it still lingers I mean he still keeps two years worth of food because of the fear of famine it's still so real and visceral to him today I didn't think the famine would still be so present younger family members finishing off Melati stories or Canal Al carrying food wherever he goes so he never has to feel that intense hunger again and yet there's still a story I haven't heard Melati and Canal Al were lucky at least they managed somehow to survive in the countryside but what about the people who had to leave their homes here and travel in their thousands to cities like Calcutta ending up outside Parthas iron gates we've just been driving off the main road and down a little tiny track with mostly mud houses. Villagers pass by on foot or bicycle. In the distance is the jungle, but there are no houses. It's swampy, and there are mangroves as far as the eye can see, completely uninhabitable. Soilin says this is what it was like in these villages before victims from the famine came here to build the new life. It is Sunderman village. It was a jungle 50 years ago. I am coming here for nearly 20 to 25 years. I love this area. It is very thrilling. Why do you love it? For its loneliness, it is very quiet and calm. Are there any tigers here? And now no tigers. So I shouldn't be worried. I am the response to the person. If Tiger comes, he does not know who is here's people or who is London's people. I want to ask you a question. Do you think coal cutter remembers famine differently from the countryside? It's right. Countryside recalls women in their own way as per their sufferings. But in coal cutter, the coal cutter city dwellers did not suffer as the villagers suffered. That afternoon, I finally find someone who made the long journey from the countryside to Calcutta. 91-year-old Jummana Pekayev has the most extraordinary testimony. She sits on a dewan in a light purple sari which loosely covers her head. Many family members surround us. She is tiny but speaks with authority. I was only nine years old then. I was not married. We lived in Tulshigata village. But during the famine, my father was poor. He could no longer afford to buy rice. He took us to Kolkata. He said, if we lived here, we would die of hunger. He carried me on his shoulder from the village to the station. My mother and brother were with us. We went by train towards Calcutta. The train was packed. Many haven't bought tickets. They were desperate. It was a harrowing scene and almost unimaginable that a nine-year-old witnessed such suffering. Babies were hungry and crying for food. A mother was holding her baby on her breast. But she was not able to feed her, as she was not producing any milk. Her breast had dried off from starvation. The baby died while on her breast in the train. Once Jummana arrived in Kolkata, she saw so many people on the streets who were asking for food or money. Soon, she joined them. She's never forgotten one young girl who showed her kindness. She was fair, a bit plump. We were sitting down at their doorstep. My dad was saying that he came to Kolkata with two children as we were in poverty. We said, we hadn't eaten. So the girl gave us two pieces of bread with jaggery. My brother ate one and I ate the other piece. Our parents didn't eat any. I remembered that. Her father soon managed to get a job, so they were just about surviving. She was lucky, she no longer had to beg. But others weren't so fortunate. When the city dwellers came out of their doors with some quantity of rice, there were hundreds of beggars with their begging balls asking for food. With so many of them, they didn't know who to give their eyes to. So they would scatter them round, and the beggars would pick bits from the streets and eat them. It was really heart-wrenching. I saw this. At the start of the interview, the male family members in the room were finishing off as sentences. But they have stopped now and are listening in reverence. We all are. She gets emotional remembering. Yes, I feel sad. We went through so much pain, so much hardship. What do you tell your family about the famine today? I did tell them many times they know. I have been witnessing hardship, struggle since my childhood, since I was nine. If you had stayed and not gone to Calcutta, do you think you would have survived? We would have been dead. We wouldn't have survived. We would have had no food. We would have starved to death. That was the reason why Dad took us there. I ask who she blames. Soilin turns to me and says she can't answer this. She has no concept of government or state. It's interesting, none of the many people I speak to blame the British or Indian governments of the day, what they do remember are the individuals who helped, stole, profited, or turned away. The thing Jumminer most wanted to tell me was about the girl who gave her and her brother a piece of bread. To this day, she's never forgotten her. Jumminers is just one story. There are millions of other stories of the famine we will now never know about. The remembrance of it today remains fraught. It seems nowhere in the world is yet ready to publicly memorialize the victims, all the survivors. In Britain, it's one of the worst chapters in our colonial history and challenges our war story and its heroes who wants to remember that. In India, it's difficult to, for those who witnessed the catastrophe, or even profited from the poorest in society. But hearing Jumminer 80 years on, how painful it still is to recount, and the things Malati couldn't say out loud, is there something about the very nature of famine that makes it so hard to talk about? So the experience of famine, of starvation, is not just the experience of hunger, of bodily deprivation. I asked one of the world's leading experts on famine, Alex DeVal. It's also a social experience of something akin to torture, of losing everything that makes your social life meaningful. It strips away the social garments and leaves you as a naked animal on the bear earth, being faced with those daily, cruel dilemmas of breaking taboos, eating forbidden things, choosing painfully how you're going to share out your last resources. It's these everyday cruelties that are what remain in the memory. Jumminer's recollection of the moment of kindness as a girl giving her bread is rare. Maybe she needed to hold on to that, to believe there were still shreds of civility left, because the truth is, in famine, as we've heard throughout the series, the norms that buy in society are subverted. Hunger forces you to do unspeakable things to survive. You sell a child for grains of rice, leave your husband for another who can feed you, you refuse food to someone you know, you even profit from the most vulnerable. It's hardly surprising these things are hard to talk about with that these memories are often bound up in shame. The legacy of famine, the memory of famine, is so painfully deep that it's something that survivors simply don't want to talk about. Memory is complicated. It can take a long, long time before famine and not just the one in Bengal, can even be spoken of privately, let alone memorialized publicly. It's quite amazing how few memorials that are to famine. They're just a handful, but these are very rare. I think what we tend to find is that local memory lives on in poetry, in song, in stories. And it takes a certain conjuncture of circumstances and a long period of time before people are ready to publicly remember famine and mass starvation. The people I've been speaking to are doing so 80 years after the famine, who knows if they would have been ready decades before. But this isn't just a thing of the past. Remembering starvation and famines matters today. Over the last year and a half that I've been working on this series, people have been facing mass starvation in places like Ethiopia, Sudan, and Gaza. - So I spent the first half of my academic career focusing on famines and I was very high. hopeful that famines had been abolished, they'd been consigned to history. But in the last six, seven years, we have seen starvation make a terrible comeback. And it seems to be making a comeback with extraordinary impunity. The world doesn't seem to mind too much if people are starved to death on mass. - Why do they not? Ami's mass death? - Yeah. - Ami, how is that tolerable? - For some reason, we seem to be ready to tolerate starvation, as long as it's out of sight, as long as we don't actually see it, you know, on our doorstep. - It was only 25 years ago that starvation was recognized as a war crime in armed conflict. There's still never been any convictions. Alex believes we need to start remembering famines as it's one way to help stop them happening today. I think there is a very intimate connection between the failure to memorialize famine and the failure to prevent it. And the fact that we don't memorialize famine means that we don't feel the impulse to stop it. - So, we're all packed and we're gonna go in our little wooden boats. My time here is coming to an end. There's no more road to travel on. - We're going to Giplott's by this boat. And Giplott is at the edge of the Bingo Bay of Bingo. - But there's still one more person left to meet. Soilin is taking me to the remote island of Cape Lot to meet the oldest survivor living there. - The river is wide and you can just see the mangrove swamps, and it really, really looks like we're in the jungle. - And we're traveling the boat to sit here. - No. - As the boat runs? - No. - The air will be. - Natural air conditioning. - During the famine, out of the 400 people, at least 200 people died there. - I always want to come here. It's a isolated island. When I leave the island, I become very sad. I think what will be their fate now? You're doing any cyclone. The island may be flasked away. - On the way along the shoreline, I see women with their saris hitched up as they cast nets out for prawns. We sit on the boat, soil and chatting about the Bengali literary journal he edits in his love of Kafka. Sometimes he smokes his roll-ups. And we sit in silence, enjoying the river breeze. And then I get a strong signal on my phone. We must be getting closer to Cape Lot. We take one of the two took-tooks on the island and go through a warren of dirt tracks. - I thought I was going to arrive on a really quiet, peaceful little island. And it's kind of blasting with Indian dance music. I think we're just passing the loudspeaker now. I'm not really sure what that's all about. - Actually, he's a very bad practice of the people who had a middle ceremony. He's there. - It's a marriage ceremony. - They're celebrating by this. We stop at a mud house. As we enter, I can see rice paddy being dried under a colorful cloth. An elderly man is sitting, waiting. He's bare-chested in a doaty. Sitting next to him is his wife. Before we start the interview, he beckons for me to see his neck. There are visible scars. Years ago, he was attacked by a tiger, but he fought it off. Soilin tells me this man is well known here for having been strong in his youth. Could you tell me your name? - Sheik gassum. Sheik gassum. - Sheik gassum's voice is a whisper. His wife helps us out. The Soilin who's been translating throughout the trip could barely hear him. He remembers hunger vividly and lying flat on the ground from having nothing to eat. He roamed around the island looking for food and would cry from hunger. - Why? - For cruelty. - I lived on eating whatever edible leaves roots I could find. My mother picked different kinds of edible leaves from the woods and boiled them. I ate once a day. The quantity was very small. - Did any of your friends die? - Not going to be. - I lost my elder brother from starvation. - He's talking louder now and gesticulating. - I want more, though. - I want to get you in. My older brother died of hunger. I was very young at the time. I was crying so much. Uncontrollably, my mother couldn't stop me. - How much did that? - When I think of my older brother, I feel very sad. I weep. I still cry for him. He had left us. It is now my time to leave too. He looks like he's about to cry as he remembers. This isn't history for Shaker Sam. I thought long and hard if it was right to ask survivors to excavate these painful memories from so long ago, but they wanted to speak. There is a dignity in telling your story and it being heard. I think of one survivor when asked about the famine who said, why did you come so late? - Nothing is forgotten even after 80 years and people remember with such clarity. They overcome with emotion and it's like they are that nine-year-old, that 11-year-old, all over again and being in the room with them as generations of their family are listening to them. It's very special because somehow you're transported back to that moment in time. But you also realize that the things that remain that feeling of hunger, or even a young girl who gave you food and meant that you and your brother weren't hungry that day, or whether that's sadness, or whether that's grief, because what they were remembering were all the people that they lost. There will be a day and not so far off now when there's no one left to record. Soilin, the memory collector, who saw his father's photo album of famine victims when he was just seven, has been obsessed with a famine ever since. And for the last few years, has been recording the survivors. - And when you come back to Cape Lot, or you go to the Sunda Bans, when there is nobody left who remembers, how will it be remembered? - When everyone is dead, no victims are there. I think their next generation, sometimes in the chatting, in the tea stalls, will raise the toys of famine as their history. I think it will be done. - The Bengal famine is a difficult and contested story. Actions of the great men of history are argued about today on social media and in academic circles. But the survivors, like Melati or Kanala, Jamanah or Sheikh Qasem, have rarely been asked about that time. The human stories behind the cold statistics are the three million who perished and the millions more who survived. Their voices deserve to be part of the historical record too. Here in the Bengali countryside, a handful still exist. These people, old now, towards the end of their days, lived through a devastating famine when they were British subjects, forgotten casualties of World War II. But they did not forget, even if others may have. - Yes, the memory will continue, not only that, the habits they got from the famine still continues there. For everyday's cooking, they take rises from their pots. Each time, they drop one handful of rice back to the pot. It's the memory of famine that less the foodstock not finished. The memory left on. By generation or generation, it will continue. - Throughout the series, I've been searching from a memorial, or even a plaque to the three million who died. But it was here all this time in the countryside, just not in the way I expected. It's in the memories that have been passed down by survivors and told to their children and grandchildren It's in the act of killing. keeping a bowl of rice aside at each meal and is in those testimonies soil in its preserving with pen and paper of those who survived. And now you have heard some of their stories too. That is also an act of remembrance. - The collection of the memories of the living women victims is definitely the memorial for the future. (soft music) - Three million was presented by me, Kavita Puri. The series producer is Antideen, the editor Emma Rippen, sound design and mix by Eloise Whitmore. The music was composed by Felix Taylor. The production coordinators were Brenda Brown, Sabina Sherrick and Maria O'Gondelli. The commissioning editors were Dan Clark and John Zilker. (soft music) It's the 1980s and a young body builder named William Dylan leaves rural Illinois behind for sun drenched California in search of a supersized American dream. To get absolutely jacked. - When you're muscular, when you're big, you get respect. - But he's about to discover the secret to why so many of the body builders around him are getting ripped quick. This is the story of the biggest illegal steroid operation the United States had ever seen. - Literally hundreds, if not a thousand needles, came down like the heavens you're falling. - I'm Natalia Petrazella. From BBC Radio 4, this is Extreme, Muscle Men. Listen first on BBC Sounds. (dramatic music) - Part of why I blew the whistle was I didn't want to lay in bed in 20 years. Having seen another million people die. I know that I could have done something when I had a chance. - This week on The Interface, we're talking to Francis Haligan. - The Facebook whistleblower who leaked the documents that changed how the world saw social media. - And now she is the subject of Aaron Sorkin's latest movie, The Social Reckoning. So join me, Thomas Jermaine. - And me, Jess Maddox, for The Interface. - Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (dramatic music)