3. The F-Word

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I stripped right off, I buy nothing, but a pair of shorts, khaki shorts and a singlet, and chap please, let's say Indian sandals and a wristwatch. In August 1943, he had a lot on his mind. On sticky monsoon mornings, he left his modest bachelor pad, ran down two flights of stairs, and jumped on his bike to work. It was about a mile along this admirable broad street to my office. Well, it was a lot of fun, one got sunshine and fresh air on an almost naked body. Cycling behind him was Rahim, his trusted servant, carrying his freshly ironed office clothes in a box, strapped to the bike carrier. And one got exercise, which working as I then in more time, had to do often about 14 hours a day, it was a difficult thing to contrive, and one had minimal sweat. Listen to him, he sounds pucker apart of the colonial establishment. But Stevens wasn't entirely conventional. Not only did he cycle half naked, he was also addicted to yoga, and after 20 years in India, he had close Indian friends, a rarity back then. The office he was cycling to was a the statesman, the most widely read English language newspaper in India. Stevens was the editor, in the middle of a war. It was a tough job. The circumstances when I was editor were harsh. There were wartime circumstances, all edges to controversy, all moral judgments were harder, rougher, quicker. That summer, he was facing the biggest moral judgment of his career, maybe even his life. Famine was sweeping through Bengal. People were dying on the same streets he cycled on, but officially the colonial government denied there was a famine, and the wartime sensor made sure his paper didn't mention it. Was his job to support Britain's war effort, or was it to report what was really going on? Once in the office, he spongeed himself down and put on the bus shirts and trousers, his servant Raheem had pressed for him. Ian Stevens was ready for work. I'm Kavita Puri, and for BBC Radio 4 in the World Service, this is 3 million. Episode 3, the F word. It was a problem for the colonial authorities that famine was visible on the streets. They were worried that Britain's enemies, the Germans, the Japanese could use it as propaganda against them. So the sensibility, I think, is that if you can erase the spectacle of famine from the streets of Calcutta, you can censor the famine itself. Historian Janam Mukherjee. At the end of July 1943, the colonial government introduced a new law. So there was something called the Bengal Vagrancy Act, and that was to remove the vagrants from the streets of Calcutta. By August of 1943, they were collecting as many as 1,000 bodies a day from the streets of Calcutta. And it wasn't just the spectacle of human suffering that was erased. Publication of the word famine was strictly prohibited under the Government of India's emergency rules. For most of the war, the statesmen had towed the line and supported the government. But by a monsoon season of 1943, Stevens was restless. He spoke about his time in India in an interview with the BBC in the 1970s. In the near two-hour conversation, there isn't a single question about the famine. Stevens mentions it once. I'm prompted. I really have very few visual memories of what was certainly the worst horror of all in terms of death and suffering that is to say of the Bengal famine. And I was deeply profoundly disturbed in my, so to speak, humanitarian aspect. In August 1943, Stevens wrote an editorial blaming the grave situation on the Indian provincial government and the colonial government in Delhi. But he was frustrated. It wasn't getting much pick-up by the authorities or the international press. Mortality figures in Calcutta were rising, and Stevens was receiving reports of widespread starvation in the surrounding countryside. I felt a sense of outrage at the appalling suffering, which was occurring, and the inertia of the government in coping with it. Tracing Stevens' story, it's easy to see how the silence around the famine started. The millions of British subjects who died were poor and lived in remote areas of Bengal. Most were not part of the wartime effort. Their suffering was easier for authorities to overlook. But as the death rate rose, particularly in Calcutta, where soldiers, colonial officials, and the Indian elite could see the devastation in plain sight, it became impossible to ignore. And while Stevens contemplated whether to challenge the censor, there was an entirely different censorship battle taking place somewhere else, in the monitoring of letters sent to and from soldiers on the front line. The enormity of what was happening was getting harder and harder to contain. So, wartime letters are always censored during the Second World War. Dear Gupta is a lecturer in public history at City University of London. You can't have soldiers writing to family members at home giving away troop locations, giving away sort of military strategies, because these letters might fall into the hands of, you know, the Axis forces. But the more sort of sophisticated point around this sort of censorship was not to let all the distressing information from home reach soldiers ears. The censor was particularly vigilant about Indian soldiers. Because India is going through this massive crisis in confronting colonial authority during the 1940s, and then you have something like the famine happening in 1943. It becomes really important for colonial censors to keep a watch on how their men are behaving and feeling and what they are being told. Dear went through the military censorship reports, archived in the British Library. She was looking at correspondence between Indian soldiers in the Middle East and North Africa and their families back home. These letters were seized for the British censor to read. And in the letters that you looked at, is it fair to say that was the kind of one thread during that time period that was the thing that dominated the letters. The letters are just dominated by famine. Reading these letters today is extraordinary. It shows the strength of emotion. The colonial censor was intercepting. I mean one of the most moving letters that I found, Kavita, was actually by a Javildar or a junior officer in the Indian Army. And I'll read it out to you. He says, "Whenever I sit for my meals, a dreadful picture of the appalling Indian food problem passes through my mind, leaving a cloudy sediment on the walls of my heart, which makes me nauseous, and often I leave my meals untouched. Every time he sits to eat, it's like the specter of famine hovers before him. And he can't eat." Can you imagine what it must have felt like being in the archive and finding hundreds of these extracts of letters? It just opened up a whole other world to me, this layered textured world in which soldiers were empathizing with famine. People across the country, not from Bengal, were empathizing and talking about famine. And his deer went through the the archives. unexpected story began to emerge. She noticed how these letters affected the very same British colonial censor who was deleting information from them. He would write reports about the material he was reading. So towards the end of 1942, when letters have started coming in saying something bad is happening at home, the censor just appears a bit disbelieving. He's kind of very dismissive. And, you know, his attitude is, home front is always going to have problems. But then there's a change in tone. It's mid-1943 and this colonial censor was exercising words written by Indian families to their loved ones on the battlefront and vice versa. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't even know how to manage this avalanche of despair. In a report, he writes, "I'm failing my role in some ways because I can't climb down on all this information. There are too many letters. Some of them will inevitably get through." He says, "Deletion from such letters presents problems which a humane censor finds very difficult." And this is a high-ranking British colonial officer saying, "So he was touched." He himself is touched. And he is saying, "How can I do this job in the face of such appalling catastrophe? I can't delete what's in these letters." And I think it would have taken a lot for a British colonial officer to have officially noted this in a report. That's important to say, isn't it? It's not what he felt. He is actually writing this for other people, perhaps, back home to read. Absolutely. He is writing this as his official response. When you found that, what was that like for you? I think that was, you know, a pen-dropping moment for me, really, because I hadn't expected that. I hadn't expected that reading about famine would make a colonial censor question what he did, for the war effort. 80 years on from the famine, these emotions are only just being uncovered in the archives. In these typewritten military reports, there's the sense that there's too much feeling here for the colonial censor to suppress. Despite his qualms, there's no sense that prevented him from doing his job. But Ian Stevens, the editor of the statesman, was prepared to put his job on the line in August 1943. Hamstrung by censorship rules, he knew he had to do something different. So the press adviser to the government would monitor the publications. Joanna Simmonow is a historian at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University. And they were not allowed to use the word 'femin', but there was a loophole in the guidelines that the censor used. The loophole was that while the censors' guidelines said the word 'famin' couldn't be mentioned in writing, there was nothing about photos. So it would only talk about words, but it would simply not make any statements about photographs. So this statesman then decided to use this loophole and just try what the censor would do if it would publish pictures or try to publish pictures of 'femin'. It was risky, not everyone on the statesman believed it was a good idea. Ian Stevens' thoughts at this point are unfortunately not recorded in that 1970s interview. In his memoir however, he says he knew he had to do something. He would have felt ashamed if he hadn't. So Steven sent out two photographers onto the streets of Calcutta. It only took a couple of hours for him to return with very drastic images and then they had a discussion about what kind of images they should actually publish. On August 22nd 1943, Stevens published the pictures. They were shocking. In one image, a young mother is lying on the pavement, cradling a child, in the background is an emaciated man. It's unclear if they're alive. It was a Sunday when they were published and you have the Sunday crossword on the right side of the picture. So I can imagine how readers of the statesman would just go through the paper looking for the crossword and then come across these images. Newspapers flew off the stands in Delhi and Calcutta. The chief press adviser in Delhi called the statesman to give the paper a piece of his mind but there wasn't much he could do. They hadn't technically broken the censorship rules. Stevens was now in Bolden's. The following Sunday he published more photos. This time with a scathing editorial. He didn't mention the f-word but he was pushing it as far as he could. On August 29th he wrote, "Thought for Britain's must realize that so long as their nation, their parliament and their Secretary of State maintain some responsibility for India's welfare, the ultimate blame unavoidably rests upon themselves." Now Indian papers around Bengal started publishing images of the famine too. So it really kind of destroyed the sender at that time. At that moment it was not possible anymore to keep a lid on what was happening in Bengal. And because the statesman was simultaneously published in Delhi and it was circulating internationally, you then also have a response to these images beyond Bengal and even beyond India at that time. Stevens' campaign lasted two months. By September in his editorials he was calling the disaster a man-made famine. And now that reports of mass starvation were emerging, other British news organizations began to respond. The Sunday pictorial which would become the Sunday mirror made it clear that those dying on Calcutta streets were British subjects. And Stevens' campaign reached the BBC too. By mid-September it was broadcasting that famine conditions were evident in parts of Bengal. Audio recordings of their broadcasts no longer exist but there are transcripts of the news bulletins. The growing coverage of the famine was bringing the BBC into conflict with the government. My name is Kato Brian. I'm an archivist here at the BBC Ritenarkiv Centre in Kavasham. Oh look at this. It smells very archival. Yeah it does. That's the first thing she was the kind of a smell of the books and things like that. Here we are, our 34th policy. What Kato's finding me are memos and letters between the BBC and the government during the Second World War. Look at this. Telegrams, letters on thin paper, I mean they're yellow now. Kind of nicotine coloured. It will take a while to get through all of these. The folders are a gold mine. There are communications between the British government's India office based in London and the BBC's director general as well as different BBC employees including Rushbrook Williams, the director of the BBC's Eastern Service. Famine is never named. Rather it's called the India Food Question. Many of the most heated exchanges take place from late September. Now this is a really key letter here. It's delivering a message from Mr. Amory who is Leo Amory, the Secretary of State for India. And he tells Rushbrook, Amory is somewhat concerned at the treatment which has been given over the last few days in the home news to the India Food Question. And what then comes next is quite an extraordinary request really and I quote here. He is asked to see the text of what has been included in the various bulletins on this subject and I would be grateful therefore if you could arrange to send me at the earliest possible moment all references back to and including Saturday September the 18th. Just a few weeks after Stevens reporting the letter says and I quote, "I should have thought that it was hardly necessary from the strictly news angle to keep this subject in the forefront in so sustained away." Clearly Leo Amory, the Secretary of State for India and the government were very very concerned about the British public knowing about what was happening and they're clearly not afraid to put pressure on the BBC from reporting it in a prominent way. The BBC's Rushbrook Williams responded by sending the bulletins Amory at ask for but it wasn't happy about it saying it left him distressed. The BBC in wartime was operating under very different conditions to peacetime. It was partly a tool for propaganda and took guidance from the Ministry of Information. So it wasn't just with the Bengal famine that these types of demands were made, it was for other stories that might put Britain. written in a bad light will be damaging to morale, such as the number of fatalities. But looking through the news bulletins from late October, with archiviscatobrine, we notice something. This is a script that would have gone out on air. This one particularly is for the 9pm bulletin. It's a mix of home news, so sort of British based and then kind of what was happening on the home fronts and then sort of more overseas news as well. And this is crucially after that Aemri letter. This is after that Aemri letter. After the complaint from the India office, they talk about what can be done to relieve the famine in the province and then it goes down and there's a whole paragraph cut out which talks about people still dying of the streets from starvation, death in hospital averaging 100 a day. This is all cut from the home news bulletin. They don't allow this to be broadcast. Everything else has been crossed out or redacted, so I mean draw your own conclusions from that I think. Clearly someone was going to read this script out, they've underlined words that they want to emphasise, they've changed words and somebody has subsequently crossed it out. You could potentially think that it was a editorial decision, but you couldn't say for sure, you can never know with these things. We can't go back and see what they've been discussing. It could have been cut for other reasons such as for time, but out of 18 pages of this news bulletin, it's only these paragraphs detailing the worst of what was happening in Calcutta that had been crossed out, most likely from someone at the BBC, and they come in the weeks after that pointed exchange between the broadcaster and the India office. By October, the British government admitted in Parliament the food problem in Calcutta. The F word was now being mentioned. You had a debate in the House of Commons where the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amiri, he was no longer able to deny feminine and he had to confess that there was a menace of feminine. A Martia Sen, who we heard from in the last episode, was then living in Shantinikathan, a hundred miles outside Calcutta, his family read the statesman. The statesman was for the first time saying there are hundreds of thousands of people dying and how could the government in Westminster deny that? Do you think that was a turning point for the British government? Yes, it was. They were introducing a system of reckoning so that people don't stop. The contrast with that human theory and attempt in England with the letter that they will take to us attitude in India was extraordinary. And I think the result was impossibly unacceptable to the English public as well. Do you think that Ian Stevens intervention saved lives? Oh yeah, lots of lives. By the end of the year, government relief efforts would be accelerated. A Martia would write a letter to the Times on Stevens' death in 1984 saying he'd possibly saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Looking back on that time, Stevens was proud of what he'd done and of the appreciation he received when he visited the capital of Bangladesh, formally East Bengal, years later. I look upon it as perhaps the most satisfactory thing I ever did in my life. Unquestionably, I saved many Bengali lives and I had the astonishing experience when arriving at Dekai of finding a waiting me on the airport and I was deeply profoundly touched for Bengali officials, elderly ones, who said Mr. Stevens don't be alarmed, "We've come here to greet you because we don't forget what the statesman under your charge did to help us Bengalis in our time of trouble in 1943." Stevens is right to take pride in what he did. But when I look closely at the statesman photographs published at that time, there's no sense of who these suffering individuals were. Maybe the photographer never asked, or perhaps they were too exhausted to respond. In all the photos and those editorials, there is no mention of a single name of those who suffered or who died. Even papers, journals and pamphlets, were also capturing the extent of what was happening in Calcutta and the countryside and in quite a different way to Stevens. Artist and writer Chita Prasad Bethacharya was one. In November 1943, he published Hungry Bengal, a tour through Midnampor district. It contained individual sketches of those affected along with the commentary of their lives. Five thousand copies of Hungry Bengal were printed and nearly all were instantly confiscated by the British. I've been trying to get my hands on a copy for a while. "Ah, my name is Shona, Dr. Shona Dutta, I am primarily a curator, a writer and a sometimes broadcaster." Luckily, Shona can help me. "In fact, it was only a few months ago that a colleague from Bangladesh said the first copy should ever found was at the British Library." That copy of Hungry Bengal in the British Library, I've got a PDF of it. Is it an English Bengali? Is it in Bengali, right? "Is it in English?" "Is it in English?" "Do you like to have a look?" "Shall we?" "Let's have a look, yeah." The drawings are swirling, intense, black inked depictions of survivors of the famine and victims. "Oh my God, look." This is really sad. These are really disturbing pictures. There is an image of a man, but he really no longer looks like a man and he has been eaten by what looks like a wolf and he's being surrounded by vultures. And it is called "Unhonoured and Unsung" and he says, "It's actually quite emotional to see," as he says, his name was Kishitra Mohan Nike. So he's saying that, that's his name. These are incredibly powerful, aren't they? I mean, I can. "Really visceral." "Very visceral. You can see how they really connect with people. But there is such dignity in giving his name. He has nothing left, literally, not even his body, but he, Chitra Prasad, gives him his dignity." "Yeah." "That is what is so moving." "Really is." That is the first name of a victim of the famine that I have seen, to find it. One of so many is a reminder of how little we know of those who died. At the time their voice was censored and erased, maybe that's why we don't remember it as well as we should today. There are no memorials or museums who dedicated archives anyway in the world to this humanitarian disaster. To investigate the Bengal famine isn't only about asking what caused it, which so much of academic and public debate is focused on, but also about remembrance. To recall the existence of Kishitra Mohan Nike and the others who died. To give them dignity and to say their names. Next time I find old cassette tapes, but clues do they hold about colonial responsibility and about what more could have been done. "The of those old gains had been distributed to the countryside, where many debts could have been saved." "That's next, on three million." The post office horizon scandal has shocked Britain. "Post office IT scandal, which has had so much capacity hasn't overlapped." "This is a scandal of historic proportions. I've been following the story for more than a decade, hearing about the suffering of sub-postmasters like Joe Hamilton and Alan Bates. "It was just horrendous, the whole thing was horrendous." "I was told you can't afford to take on post office." And about their extraordinary fight for justice. "What was motivating you?" "Well there was wrong what they did." Listen to the true story at first hand from the people who lived it, in the great post office trial from BBC Radio 4, with me Nick Wallace. Subscribe on BBC Sounds. Is Facebook dying? The journalist who's reporting "inspired" the film tells us why Facebook stopped being [BLANK_AUDIO] and whether a meta its parent company can reinvent itself. For more, listen to the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your pods.