Nitheesh Narayanan
“Look! There are vultures on the left. There must be some dead carcass there.” Almost before I finished my sentences, our guides in front shouted to us, “It is a man ! It is a man!”.
The body was only twenty five yards away from where we stood. The young man had evidently been alive last night. He was half eaten by vultures and dogs now. His stick and his earthen pot told the destitute story all too well, especially when coupled with the dirty rag hardly three feet long which was his “dhoti” ! It was thus we made our first acquaintance with the famine-stricken Orissa.”
The above given sentences are taken from a detailed report by SS Batliwala, written in 1943 on People’s War, the organ of the Communist Party of India. The report was written after covering a total length of 286 miles in interior British Orissa. Another communist and a photographer, Sunil Janah, was with him. They travelled in palanquins, boats and on foot – a total of 17 days and nights.
Travelling from one village to another, meetings with thousands of people — alive and dead — they brought the miseries of rural Orissa to the consciousness of the country. The story, with many details and photos of what they had witnessed, was published in the party organ, and the report was titled “Toiling Orissa Faces Death”.
On the one corner of the page, it is written in big bold letters, “Orissa needs your help, send all you can”. This was an appeal from Sarat Patnaik, the then secretary of the Orissa Provisional Committee of the Communist Party. He was requesting all Indian patriots to lend a helping hand to starving Orissa.
Most copies of the People’s War from the early 1940s are not available today. The paper was subjected to strong colonial repression due to its continuous efforts to expose the plight of Indians – more importantly, of the marginalised sections in the country, keeping the British under constant scrutiny. Copies must have also been destroyed, following the situation in which communists had gone underground fighting British imperialists.
We came across a few copies of the organ from 1943-44, that show us how communists of the period responded to the Bengal Famine, which took the lives of about 4 million people in both Bengal and Orissa.
The British government did not want to spread the real photographs of the famine. They wanted newspapers to carry their own version — that there was no shortage of rice — and therefore, give out a false impression to those in famine struck areas as well as to the rest of the country. They must have feared that the real stories of the famine would fuel people’s anger, which further will intensify their struggle for freedom..
However, barring the threats, a few papers dared to cover the truth to the larger public, defying orders from British officials. The organ of the Communist Party was among those brave publications. It regularly carried reports from the famine-hit areas of Bengal and Orissa. Leaders of the Communist Party, including General Secretary PC Joshi, visited these regions extensively to bring out the reality to the outside world on the one hand, and prepared their organisational machinery to intervene and help people on the other.
I was reading two issues of People’s War published during that phase, in which two articles covering wide-ranging aspects appear — one on Bengal and another on rural Orissa. The cover page of one of the issues of the weekly newspaper, titled “Queues of Death’, must be the shortest description of the Bengal Famine.
These reports also carried photos clicked by Sunil Janah. Writer and lecturer on Modern Art History, Emilia Terracciano, has written about these photographs as thus:
[They] represented the first attempt in the history of modern India to expose the plight of refugees and visually inspire resistance for political expediency. During the final decade of India’s battle for freedom in which genocide, famine, war, and populist politics were defining factors, these documentary images constitute one of the most compelling visual attempts to create and mobilise a mass public. Whatever threats were posed to the colonial order by these images of “bare life,” what is interesting to note is the silence in the national narrative in regards to these works. This tenuous and fragile legacy has barely been acknowledged in historical accounts of Indian art, with art historians skirting around it.
PC Joshi wrote a report explaining the situation in Bengal with many minute details. He did not generalise the tragic situation, but specified lives according to their socio-economic status. The communist leader went on describing the plight of people from different backgrounds — landless labourers, share-croppers, middle peasants and more. Batliwala also did the same. He visited each household to trace the condition of the everyday lives of peasants, workers and the socially marginalised people. He explored their experiences. Women deserted by their husbands is a common premise. At least one member in almost every household would have succumbed to death due to hunger. Harvest had collapsed that year, mills were shut, and peasants and workers were left with no earning to survive.
He found out what a newly appointed collector of Ganjam district had written: “Sturdy labourers, who by the honest sweat of their brows have earned their modest livelihood, have become emaciated, revitalised bundles of bones, moving about like ghosts and dropping down dead like autumn leaves”.
Of course, the statement was promptly banned by the Orissa censor. They did not want any such report to see light.
Both Communist leaders narrated how the very foundations of social life were being destroyed in the process of economic disintegration and that a moral degeneration was taking place, following the outbreak of the famine. Similar to the piece by PC Joshi, Batliwala’s report also shows us the absolute wretchedness people were thrown into. The story of Ankolu, a 50-year old woman and the wife of a blind man, is dreadful. She had two sons, both of them had deserted their wives, leaving three grandchildren behind. Later, two out of three grandchildren died with swelling and sores amid scarcity of food. The old couple was left with no home, land, or utensils and survived with the food provided in the free kitchen. She also says in the report that if the kitchen stops and starvation returns, they will have to give away the only child to the orphanage. While continuing the conversation, Batliwala finds something even more heart wrenching. The women had two daughters too, each 17 and 20 years old. As the famine grew acute, the mother had to sell them to brothels.
PC Joshi had written this one after spending six weeks in different parts of Bengal. He begins his report stating how his direct encounter with lives hit by the famine brought to him closer to the actual severity of the situation.
I know Calcutta well, I have stayed there a year and half underground and visited it every year whenever I am free. This year I was going there exactly after a year to study the food situation. I never realised how bad the situation was, neither from daily press of Bengal itself, nor from the party reports, nor from the numerous press photographs.
Along with this eye opening report, the photographs clicked by Sunil Janah display the visuals of people quitting the village, a starved mother laying with a baby on the payment, a famished person in a relief hospital and the burning ghat. In his travels to Assam, this communist photographer captured a visual from near Jaleshwar town, where numerous skeletons and bones were littered – dead bodies in every stage of decomposition. It was like Batliwala wrote, “a battle scarred loud in which human slaughter had been indiscriminate, and nobody had had either the time or the money to burn or bury the unfortunate dead”. These were the remains of the impoverished who had flocked to the city of Jaleshwar from surrounding villages and even from Midnapore. Some of them had died of nutritional diarrhoea – the state of exhaustion caused by starvation having been too great to allow them to recoup on the khichdi provided in the free kitchens. Others were direct victims of the greed of profiteers and the inefficiency of the government.
Sunil Janah clicked another photo from the same town – of children in an orphanage, who were deserted by their parents amid the murderous famine. Another picture tells the story of the state of relief kitchens — exhibiting people’s struggles to get into the free kitchen door at Cuttack, as they were denied admission for reaching late.
PC Joshi describes the pathetic state of relief kitchens in Bengal:
The destitutes get only one meal a day from these kitchens and that too does not fill the belly. I enquired from a large number of them and learned that what they get is only half their one meal. The relief kitchen therefore is not an institution that saves people but only staves off the day of death, It is but a stepping stone towards the burning ghat.
Death rates in Calcutta were 2000 per day, PC Joshi writes. Per week in the entire state, it was around 50000 per week, the communist leader points out. In the toughest of words, he says that Bengal was dying. He warns the entire country that if Bengal sinks, the famine and the epidemic will spread soon to the rest of the country and nothing will stop them. He tells that what Bengal was suffering that day, will soon be the case in other places, unless the state was helped. Here too, like in the Orissa story, a request to contribute to the people’s Relief Committee was printed with the title, “SEND ALL YOU CAN”.
The General Secretary of the Communist Party concludes his report stating that he left Bengal determined to make every Indian patriot forget all differences and get together to organise maximum aid for Bengal; to make every man, woman and child to pay till their last penny is spared for Bengal.
But before this he says,
Bengal must not die for the sake of India and every single Indian.
If we do love our families and do not want it to go to pieces like Bengal families, we must help Bengal.
If we desire to save the honour of our wives and sisters and not lose it like Bengal’s wives and sisters, we must help Bengal.
If we want our children not to die like flies as Bengal’s children are dying, we must help Bengal.
If we love India we must save Bengal. If Bengal dies, India cannot live.
Nitheesh Narayanan is the editor of Student Struggle, a Central Secretariat member of SFI, and a PhD scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy.
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