6. Silk Scarves

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 I had a chance. This week on The Interface, we're talking to Frances 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 Germain. And me, Jess Maddox, We're The Interface. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. BBC sounds, music, radio, podcasts. I was at a friend's for dinner, tucking into some roast lamb. There was someone opposite me who I'd never met before. And she told me she'd listen to three million in one go. She said she was hooked, and there was a reason why. Then she told me her grandfather's name. I almost choked when I heard it. John Herbert. He was the most senior colonial figure in Bengal during the famine. "Do you know much about him?" she asked. "Of course I did." "It's not a great story," I said to her. "I know," she replied. "What were the chances?" "I had a thousand questions. I'd just spent a year of my life researching the Bengal famine. And there I was, sitting opposite the granddaughter of the governor of Bengal. Later in the evening, she came up to me. She was holding a photo of her grandfather and her dad as a little boy in Calcutta. She confessed, she felt enormous shame about what happened. Shame. I was taking it back. Why should she feel shame all these decades later?" Since three million was released, so many people have been in touch to share their memories and reflections on the Bengal famine. I've finally got my visa and can travel to India to meet the last survivors and hear their voices which I'll bring you in a future episode. But they're here in Britain. Stories are emerging too. Often things haven't been spoken about before. "If your story had been made known, I think a British public would have been horrified." "It just kind of left me speechless. It's come to life." "Once you open a box, you want to find out everything. I want to make sense of things." When you put a forgotten history into the public space, it unlocks so much more. Because history is never history. It's very much alive today. I'm Kavita Puri, and for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, this is 3 million, episode 6. Silk Scarves. In the weeks after that dinner, the conversation with John Herbert's granddaughter kept going around my head. I mentioned the meeting to Janam Mukherjee, the expert on the famine I've been speaking to throughout the series. The John Herbert? Yeah, the Governor of Bengal. Yeah, oh. So John Herbert was the Governor of Bengal from 1939 to the summer of 1943. So the build-up and then height of the famine, in which at least 3 million Indians, who were British subjects, died. It really is in a pretty picture. He's really the colonial official most directly linked to the famine in many ways, because he's the chief executive of the province of Bengal at that time. The causes of the famine are many and complex, as we've discussed throughout the series. While John Herbert was the most important colonial figure in Bengal, he was part of a wider colonial structure. He reported to his bosses in Delhi, who reported to theirs in London. His granddaughter is called Susanna. Since that dinner, we've kept in touch. How does it feel to say you're the granddaughter of John Herbert? It's not a boast. It's a recognition. I never knew the man. I wish I heard really very few people give us stuff about John Herbert. So it's really not like bearing the Churchill name or the Mount Batten name, where people do know a great deal about them. Nobody really, until I met you, jumped out of their seat at the name. The truth is, Susanna didn't know much about her grandfather. No one talked about him in the family. John Herbert died of cancer in December 1943. He was only 47. As governor of Bengal, he was in the position of basically a kind of monarch. India, who has so nobodies subscribed to our war effort, took a day off for rest and recreation. In grainy black and white footage from a public event in Calcutta at the time, John Herbert and his wife, Lady Mary, are in a horse and carriage. Fashion despotted itself in the paddock, and everyone was on tiptoe for the start of this popular sporting event. John wears a top hat and waistcoat. Mary is draped in furs. They do look like royalty. But it's only on hearing your program that I began to feel a great need to put more pieces together and put them fast. That need has already begun raising complicated emotions. Over dinner, I asked this question to you, which is, why should you feel shame today? The shame, I think, is partly the inverse of something when I was young, you know, there was something kind of almost glamorous about having a connection with the British Empire. Merchant ivory, lots of white linen, polo, whatever. I borrowed a lot of my grandfather's old clothes because they'd all come back. They were silk scarves with a nameplate saying made in British India. Little cashmere waistgoats and it's to dress up things. And now when I see them at the back of the cupboard, I kind of, I kind of shudder and say, why would I even want to wear these things? Because the words "British India" on a label seems to me inappropriate to kind of wave around now. So now Susanna is confronting her complex family legacy by reading everything she can about the Bengal famine and her grandfather's role. We agreed to meet in person after she looked more deeply into her family's past. Why does this matter to you? Why do you need answers to this? It's just, once you open the box, you want to find out everything, I guess. I want to make sense of things. I've seen this before. When you put an overlooked history out there, it opens up more stories, sometimes difficult ones. I've had so many messages from people with a connection to the famine, who, like Susanna, are trying to piece together a relative's history. Many with Bengali heritage now understand why they were always told to eat every last bit of rice, or what the famine meant in their own families. Homes across Britain digging into the past today. Around the time I met Susanna, I got an email from Tony Knight. His 97-year-old dad, Peter, had something to tell me. While Susanna is trying to find answers from a vanishing past, Peter actually lived through those years, and yet learning about the famine has given him a whole new understanding about what he was doing during that time. I meet Peter at his bungalow in Wellengarden City. He looks decades younger than his years. I was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1927. I lived there for the first 30 years of my life. He remembers the day war broke out, like it was yesterday. I was a choir boy singing in the church choir in St Mary's church in Bromley, and the sirens went to 11ish, and nobody in the church heard them because we were singing. And it was until the service finished, and we all disrobed in the vestry, and someone told us where it was. Why did you want to get in contact with me? I have a friend who calls him once a week, and he said, Did you? You know there was a programme on about India and it caught my interest because of my very faint connection to it all when I was 16, 17. In the summer of 1943, as famine raged in Bengal, many thousands of miles away in Bromley and Kent, Peter had just left school and was looking for work. In 1943, my first job was as an office boy in the Ministry of War transport. The office was in Barclays Square, India and two guineas a week. The department I was in was handling shipping between colonies and on the other hand dominions. And of course amongst the dominions was India. One day Peter's boss had a request. And he turned to me and said, 'Would you dig out all the information we've got on getting food to India?' Peter went to file number two, four, zero, three. The bulging India file and started going through it. He says the information was for the head of the Ministry to answer a question from MPs on how much food was getting to India. He remembers one detail in particular. The crux of the whole thing was that we had sent two large grain ships and I think one was rice, one was grain. They were to head across the Indian Ocean to either Bombay or Calcutta. And they were both sunk by, we assume, Japanese submarines. So two precious cargoes went to the bottom of the ocean and they were meant to help out in India. Incredibly he says that all his life, he's never known why he was asked to compile that report or what the grain was for. Am I right in thinking that you didn't realise there was a famine on until you heard the programmes? That is true. My brother-in-law was a soldier sent out to India in 1942. When he came home, he'd been all through the Burma campaign. He simply wouldn't talk about it. I can well imagine that he'd seen something of the famine in common with all the troops. You don't talk about it. What was it like for you to listen to those programmes and realise that you played some role in that? Well, it just shook up memories that are 80 years old. I do think that the authorities has a lot to answer for. While the word famine had been censored, by the end of the summer of 1943 it was being reported, but Peter believes that if the famine had been more widely known about, it would have caused outrage. I think the British public would have been horrified. The significance of the number of deaths wouldn't have been missed by the general public had they known, and I'm sure there would have been a lot of feeling about it. But I'm still asking myself what difference could it have made. It wouldn't have made any difference to the war effort, and that was the overriding priority. Peter is only just comprehending his small role in the backdrop of the Bengal famine in the 97th year of his life. He and his son are now looking for the report he wrote for his old boss. I say goodbye to Peter, wondering if I'll see him again. This living link to a past that we're all just getting our heads around. A few weeks later I'm due to meet Susanna again. While she's been getting deeper into her research on her grandfather John Herbert, I've been trying to find out a bit more about him too, I speak to Janam Mukherjee. It was he who made the major policy decisions that really dislocated the economy, and he was the chief architect of the way that the denial program operated. He ordered the confiscation of rice in three districts within 24 hours without informing the elected ministry, and often worked through colonial officials rather than elected provincial officials. Knowing more about him, I go to Susanna's smart West London home. She shows me those silk scarves she used to wear. She hands me a delicate cream one with an Okra Liberty pattern, and there it is. The label made in British India. She's been going through the Herbert papers at the family home in Wales. They're kept in a climate controlled room. Oh, I think I've probably found the worst already, to be honest. There's absolutely no doubt that the policies he implemented and initiated contributed enormously to the scale and impact of the famine. He had skills, he had honour, and he should not have been appointed to the post of running the lives of 60 million people in a faraway corner of the British Empire. He just should not have been appointed. This is a personal search, but the actions of her grandfather affected many millions of people back then. It's not only John Herbert's policies in Bengal that she's been researching, but also the intimate family drama between her grandparents, Mary and John, as they decided whether he should take that job in Calcutta in 1939. I've found the letter only a few weeks ago, and it's in a bunch of correspondence, slightly random, and I felt when looking at those letters that I was the first person to look at them for many, many, many years. And I'm going to read you this thing from Mary. It's a letter of pros and cons that she wrote in 1939. She clearly had serious doubts about John taking on the role of governor. This is the bit that makes me shudder, I suppose. Is it worth giving up the only time our only child will ever really need us and enjoy our company? As I listen, it's clear how close they came, it's not going to Bengal at all. How did you feel reading that? You know, this is history for you, these are documents for you. You read them with hindsight. You read them knowing that what the writer and reader did not know. Which is? You know, if you could reach out to the past, you'd say don't do it, don't go, don't go to India. You will not do a good job. Over the next few weeks, Susanna emails me with updates from the family archive, she's really getting into this. And she's asking me lots of detailed questions that are hard for me to answer. I speak again to Janam Mukherjee, whose own father was a child in Calcutta during the famine. Janam's coming over to England and Susanna wants to meet him. It's very interesting proposal because I've been studying these people, colonial officers and particular John Herbert for so many years, you know. And obviously in my mind, I don't think of them as human beings. I think of them as cogs in machinery of power. So the idea of meeting his granddaughter is quite interesting, I'm interested to hear what her perspectives are, but it's going to be tricky. 80 years on from the famine, other conversations are now opening up for the first time, which are being led by British Bengalis. Dear Gupta has been in contact. She's the academic I spoke to earlier in the series, who told me about the colonial censor taking out references to the famine from letters to Indian soldiers on the front line. We speak in the days before an event she's organising in the east end of London. I was very interested in the art that came about in the 40s in Bengal, some of the urgency around documenting something that was being suppressed is clearly a 40s phenomenon. And I wondered how 21st century art might respond to that same event. It's a warm spring day and the windows are wide open, looking down onto a busy street in Whitechapel in East London, dear's event is in full swing. So I asked her why I went so far from my own. There's poetry in women's serving homemade rice snacks and samosas. There are generations of British Bengali families here, the grandparents tending the toddlers to shush. as they run around. I'm the artist of the Exhibition Hunger Burns. Sejarcha Gosh grew up in Calcutta. When this commission came your way for the 80th anniversary, how did you want to represent the famine today, artistically? In the colonial archives, or works of Indian artists, Bengali artists who have worked around the famine, which were rather violent at that point of time, and those were urgent responses to the famine itself. He's talking about the unforgettable images, like the one I saw earlier in the series, of what looked like a wolf eating a man, Kishitra Mahan Nike, who was still just about alive. But we are 80 years past famine, and of course, there is a violent memory of famine, which is existing, but there's also this idea of how they have resisted the famine and kind of made a life after 80 years. Sejarcha's art looks to move beyond representations of the famine, the focus only on colonialism, violence, and trauma. He stands next to vivid, colourful canvases of rural Bengali life. So there's a certain amount of rage as well as there's a certain amount of joy, and it kind of exists through these artworks here. And then I see words on the walls and floor that I recognize. But whenever I sit for my meals, a dreadful picture of the appalling Indian food problem, it's excerpts of those letters to Indian soldiers on the front line, where mention of the famine was censored, and which dear Gupta found in the archives. And here they are, for all to see now, in a public space in Britain. Dear, what's it like to see your letters here today? I think it's just kind of left me speechless. It's come to life. A memory is about lots of different things. A memory is about engaging with the past, but it's equally about thinking about our present, and our relationship with food, and with community, and people we love, and all of that is just as relevant. It's not just about generational trauma. Exactly. Exactly. For dear, this isn't just academic, it's personal too. Growing up in Calcutta, there were ghosts of the famine everywhere, even if it wasn't spoken about much. As I leave, I spot Susanna. I wasn't sure if she'd come along. She's in deep conversation with dear, two granddaughters with a connection to the famine, who were processing it in different ways. Hello. This is Janam. Hi, this is Janam. Janam Mukherjee is in town from Toronto, and I take him to meet Susanna. Did you ever think you'd be sitting opposite John Herbert's granddaughter? No, it's quite a interesting connection and interaction, I think. One of the things I'm trying to find out is why on earth he was appointed, his knowledge of government before he went out to Bengal was limited. He'd been a provincial MP. They couldn't really have found anybody more inappropriate. You know this is, I think, part and parcel of colonialism, right? And it stems from an idea of supremacy. Some MP who has no colonial experience, who has no linguistic capacities, who has not worked in a political system outside of Britain, can simply go and inhabit Governor's House in Calcutta and make decisions about an entire population of people that he knows nothing about. Janam goes on to explain Susanna in great detail, decisions John Herbert made that contributed to the famine. His reputation among his seniors, including Viceroy Lynn Lithgow, wasn't great. Lynn Lithgow called him the weakest of the governors in India. They, in fact, were interested in removing him, but they were worried about how that might be received. That is hard listening. In fact, Janam has discovered that Lady Mary tried to keep hold of her husband's correspondence after he died, so they wouldn't be given to the official 1944 famine inquiry, which was looking into what went wrong. She wanted to protect his reputation. Can I ask you Susanna, because I saw your reaction when you heard that. That was a surprise to you. Oh, yeah. What's a surprise and not a surprise? I mean, I can see that it must have been desperate to know that her husband could be judged and found wanting. This search for answers is throwing up more questions. I'm struck that both had fathers in Calcutta, who were little boys at the same time, but were living completely different lives. They both died now. Susanna, at least, has photographs. You know, there was no pictures of my father when he was a child. So what I knew was from his nightmares and from the few stories he told me of his experience in childhood in a colonized war zone. So I come from a sense of trying to think about my father's very damaged life and understand how that impacts me as his descendant. My grandfather also worked for the colonial police force. So my grandfather himself was complicit with the colonial system in many ways. So there are these interesting, innocence, similarities in our motivations of understanding. I had no idea Janam's grandfather worked for the colonial police force, but I was really surprised by what I heard next. I've only a caricature of the man, and that is, you know, somebody who served his country, you know, the church where we worship has a plaque honoring him. - What? This entire series, I've been wondering why there isn't a plaque for the three million who died, and yet there's a plaque to honor John Herbert. As they talk more, I realize this is getting harder for Susanna to absorb. - So while I find it relatively easy to accept that history is much more complicated than what we were originally told, I still find it hard to envisage John Herbert, acting in any way dishonorably. - These questions of intention have never interested me. In many ways, I'm much more interested in the historical course events, because I think intentions can always mask what happens. To just be completely frank, if there was a tribunal, the governor of Bengal at the time, probably holds the most immediate responsibility for the policies that directly lead to famine. But as I say, I mean, I think it's part of the colonial project as a whole. - Susanna acknowledges her grandfather made huge mistakes, but she believes he acted out of honorable intentions. For families of the three million, I wonder if they feel honor had anything to do with it. - I'm gonna go back to what we talked about right when we first met, shame. Is that the right emotion to describe how you feel? - No, it's not. I think the word shame centers it too much on my feelings. It's part of a greater project, I suppose, of understanding and transmitting understanding of how we got to where we are. - You mean Britain? - Yes, actually, I do, I do mean Britain. I mean this country. - But that's the point, isn't it, because you're a granddaughter. I mean, it's not your shame to bear. I mean, Janem, I don't know what you think. - You know, as a descendant of a colonial official, I don't think there is any particular shame that accrues intergenerationaly. I think it's Britain's shame. I mean, people died of starvation in Bengal, so I think there's cause for historical reflection on the individual level as well as the collective level. - Susanna and Janem exchange emails, they want to keep in touch. Susanna's hoping her children might help her work through the stacks of papers in the family archive and whales, another generation to come to terms with a complicated personal legacy. As Britain too figures out what to do with this difficult bit of its war story. But there's one absence throughout this series and it's actually the heart of this story. Now, my visa has just come through. At last, I can look into the faces of those who lived through the worst, the very last remaining survivors. There's only a handful left. That's next, in three million. This is a story about one of Britain's most revered institutions. And the theft of ancient treasures that were sold around the world. - It felt like a real punch to the summit. My God, things have been stolen from our museum. I'm Katie Razzle and from BBC Radio 4, this is Thief at the British Museum. museum. At the heart of our tale is an antiquities dealer turned amateur detective thrown into the centre of a global scandal. "I was shocked. I remember that thinking my hair stood on it." Search for Shadow World, thief at the British Museum on BBC Sounds. 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 Howigan. The Facebook whistleblower who leaked the documents that changed how the world saw social media. And me, Jess Maddox, for The Interface. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.