In Linlithgow’s place, the government of Great Britain appointed a soldier, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, who was also to act as commander-in-chief for India. He would, arriving however late on the scene, address the family frontally.
Though Lord Linlithgow would not visit Calcutta, the acting governor of Bengal, Sir T. Rutherford, had the courage to walk its streets and then to reconnoitre some of the mofussil before Wavell arrived. On 19 September 1943, Rutherford wrote, ‘I have wandered around Calcutta after nightfall and scenes are pretty ghastly. I have also done a long mufti tour through 24 Parganas District … I envisage a large death toll throughout the Province from starvation following on previous malnutrition coupled with endemic malaria … Though famine is not officially declared, the conditions are those of famine.’
On 28 September, he visited the Midnapore and saw corpses being torn to pieces by dogs and vultures. He believed that the majority of the starving were the beggars and elderly until now maintained by private charity. But he thought that the large sales of metal, household vessels, ornaments and land were ominous signs. The peasants faced dizzying fluctuations in the policies of governments – price-fixing adopted and then abandoned and then adopted again. The Bengali government’s response to the Japanese advance was to call on people to keep a two-month supply of food grains in their homes. Worry about what was to happen meant that those who could manage it accumulated a six-month supply and so reduced the amount of rice in the stores. Then a US army air transport command and 6000 Chinese nationalist troops who had escaped Burma also had to be fed, which created a further drain on the local food supply in north-east Bengal and in Assam.
The question arises: was Churchill, a man of considerable compassion, nonetheless a villain in the story of Bengal? By the time of the famine’s onset, Churchill had been British prime minister for three years and was absorbed by the European war, to which he and Roosevelt had decided to give priority. Yet Churchill knew that British survival as an empire, and much of Britain’s wealth, depended on saving India from the Japanese. He was also convinced that India owed Britain a debt for providing its civilised administration. Quit India made the Indians, in many British eyes, less worthy of help when the food crisis came. Though many thousands of Indians were serving with Indo-British forces, Churchill felt there were countervailing examples of Indian ingratitude.
In a speech at a dinner in London in October 1943 to farewell Field Marshal Archibald Wavell to India, Churchill declared, ‘I must say, I am in a state of subdued resentment about the way in which the world has failed to recognise the great achievements of Britain in India … Famines have passed away – until the horrors of war and the dislocations of war have given us a taste of them again – and pestilence has gone. Vast works of construction have enabled shortages in one part of the country to be equalised by the plenty in another, and disease has been diminished – with what results; with the incredible result … that in ten years the population of India under the blighting rule of Britain [laughter] has increased by 50 million – 50 million.’ Yet he was ambiguous about this population increase. As Trevelyan had with the Irish, he condemned the Indians for ‘breeding like rabbits’. India’s population was then 400 million and Bengal’s 60 million.
Responding to the demands of the European war, Churchill and his cabinet directed inadequate shipping in India’s direction. Frederick Lindemann, Viscount Cherwell, the son of an Alsatian businessman and – like Churchill – an Anglo-American mother, was often his adviser on such matters as shipping priorities and India. During World War I, Lindemann’s loyalty was to Britain, and he took part in the scientific testing of aircraft, defining the physics of an aircraft’s spin and the method to get out of it. In the mid 1930s, while a professor of physics at Oxford, he became close to Churchill on the basis that both men were passionately opposed to any appeasement of Hitler. Churchill called him ‘the scientific lobe of my brain’.
Like Churchill (and, again, like Trevelyan in the case of Ireland), Lindemann believed the Bengal situation was exaggerated, a statistical invention, a creation of the Bengali imagination. He also believed he had the figures to prove wrong those who were proclaiming a Bengali emergency. In fact, he claimed that the Bengal famine could be managed by reforming the food distribution system.
Later, in London to meet the cabinet Food Committee, Archibald Wavell would write in his journal that Churchill’s secretary of war, his minister for war and Viscount Cherwell spent all their time saying that the Indians should not be as they were and suggesting that a number of wealthy and famous Indians should be hung. Wavell described Viscount Cherwell as having been introduced into discussions to present ‘fatuous calculations’ about harvests and yields. Wavell could make no impression on ‘Dr Berlin’, as Lindemann’s associates had nicknamed him.
Not all Britons accepted the British government’s view of the Bengali food emergency. Many thought that the government had failed. Leading British churchmen, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, called for daily prayers for India’s starving. A thousand delegates of British women’s organisations passed a resolution calling for the removal of Leopold Amery as secretary of state for India. Labour member Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, who succeeded Amery in 1945, would call the British government’s handling of the Bengal food crisis ‘a dishonourable failure’.
Churchill and Lindemann had further and more notable reasons than Quit India to accuse the Indians of ingratitude, and so to be unimpressed by their cries for help. There was the issue of the extraordinary Indian Subhas Chandra Bose. Born in 1897, Bose was a charismatic Bengali of Hindu stock. He was one of the Indian elite who had passed examinations to qualify for entry into the Indian civil service. He had twice been elected president of Congress. Today he is considered a great Indian hero, celebrated as Kalki, the final manifestation or avatar of the god Vishnu, and of Shivaji. Calcutta’s airport and Bombay’s Bose Marine Drive have been named after him. Any follies of the man have been forgotten in modern India, and he is seen as a prophet of Indian independence.
In his lifetime he was given the honorific title of ‘Netaji’ by Indians, which means ‘great leader’. And such was his aura by the early 1940s that when the Japanese bombed Calcutta in December 1942, many enthusiastic Indians attributed it to Bose.
Bose attempted to collaborate with the Nazis, a fact that was appalling to the British and to a great number of Indians, but obviously did not outrage all Indian opinion. Bose had gone to Germany in 1941 and tried, without much success, to create a ‘free Indian government’ in Berlin and to raise an ‘Indian legion’ under the aegis of the Nazis. It was Bose’s hope that the Germans would get beyond the Volga and Stalingrad to reach Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and, through Afghanistan, would enter north-west India. There, it was assumed, the local population would join them in fighting the British. Bose’s fantastic expectations were not approved of by Gandhi, despite his earlier statements about the British and Americans leaving, nor by the other great Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru. The leader of the Muslim League, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, thought that it was crazy to swap one imperial master for yet another and worse one.
By 1942, the Japanese were hammering on the door. After a private meeting with Hitler, Bose left the German port of Kiel for Japan by u-boat. In Napoleonic style, he left his 3500 Indian soldiers to the German army, in which they became the 950th Regiment. In July 1943, he travelled through Japanese-captured Asia to recruit an Indian National Army from prisoners of war.
Asia proved far richer pickings for Bose than Germany had been. Many Indian POWs, and some Indian nationals throughout the Japanese-conquered areas, were willing to join his army and fight with the Japanese in the invasion of Bengal and Assam from bases in Japanese-conquered Burma. Some of the POWs in Japanese prisons in Singapore were motivated by the general incompetence of the British leadership in the face of Japanese military competence throughout south-east Asia. The Indian POWs of the Japanese in Burma, thousands having been c
aught on the wrong side of the Sittang River, did not have the fondest memories of the battles they had lost under British command. Of the British army’s Indian regiments who had been surrounded and captured by Japanese, 35,000 remained loyal, but more than a third of the Indian POWs from Burma agreed to go over to the Japanese under Bose’s command.
Under the Japanese, Bose was Indian head of state and prime minister and war minister of a government in exile, as well as supreme commander of the Indian National Army. Members of his army fought on with the Japanese until the end of the war, despite the Japanese tendency to use the Indians for coolie work. Bose had offered Burmese rice to victims of the famine in Bengal by way of a broadcast through German radio on 14 August 1943. In return, he required British acceptance of his Indian Independence League, and for Britons to give an undertaking that any food he sent would not be used to feed the military or be exported from India. Naturally enough, the cabinet found the first of these demands unacceptable and no deal was done. Bose himself would be killed in a plane crash in Taiwan – on the way to Japan – in the last days of the war in 1945.
By then, 3 to 5 million Bengali deaths from famine had occurred.
Linlithgow’s successor as viceroy, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, was a cultivated soldier and held, as well as his viceregal post, the military role of commander-in-chief for India. Unlike most generals, Archibald Wavell had published his own anthology of poems, entitled Other Men’s Flowers, and a biography of the World War I commander Sir Edmund Allenby, a work that showed sensitivity for colonised people, the Egyptians and the Arabs in particular. He had himself lost an eye in that conflict. Married to a rather distracted woman named Eugenie, he may have been a non-practising homosexual. He enjoyed the company of his homosexual aide, Major Peter Coates, and in London stayed at the house of one of Coates’s boyfriends, the politician Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, a residence archly described by the British diplomat Harold Nicolson as a mixture of ‘baroque and rococo and what-ho and oh-no-no’.
Wavell knew from experience a military emergency when he saw one – he had been involved in a number of them. At the beginning of the war he had led a small and highly successful force in North Africa and conquered an Italian army that outnumbered it many times over. He had angered Churchill by reminding him that a huge death toll was not a sign of military success. But then he had been ordered to halt his advance into Libya and send troops to Greece. With his forces strung out between Greece and North Africa, those remaining in North Africa were surprised by the German General Rommel’s Afrika Korps’ counter attack of April 1941. Greece was a debacle, and the withdrawal to Crete no better. Then, as commander-in-chief in south-east Asia, he presided over the collapse of Singapore, Burma and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).
Churchill did not blame Wavell for any of these disasters, which were due sometimes to the folly and incompetence of generals under his command and often to the overwhelming numbers of the Japanese army. The prime minister still thought him one of the best generals of his era, though he also irascibly once said of him that he should be running a country golf course.
Wavell had come close to being appointed governor-general of Australia, a post that would have sidelined him for the rest of this historic phase. He seized the posting to India with some gratitude. In the months leading up to Lord Linlithgow’s retirement, he waited in London and spent each morning reading documents at the India office, developing a plan. He intended to tell Gandhi and Nehru, as well as others, including Mohammad Jinnah, that the British wanted self-government for India as early as possible. Then he proposed to leave them in a room with access to a secretariat of experts on matters such as constitutional and international law, so they could reach a constitutional answer to India’s problems, which he would then do his best to implement. Wavell’s argument was that though this was unorthodox, orthodox methods had already failed. Churchill and his cabinet were appalled at his plans. One leading bureaucrat said that Wavell gave no impression of being the strong ruler that a great soldier might be expected to be.
While Wavell was sitting in deliberations with the prime minister, India Secretary Leopold Amery pushed a note across the table that said that Churchill knew as much about India as George III did about the American colonies. From this and other signs, Wavell decided that the cabinet was ‘not honest in its expressed desire to make progress in India’. It would be left for peacetime, another prime minister and another viceroy to negotiate Indian independence.
On the matter of Bengal, Churchill told Wavell that more food for India could not be provided without taking it from Egypt and the Middle East, where a reserve was being accumulated for other areas of battle and for the ultimate liberation of Greece and the Balkans. Wavell wrote in his journal, ‘Apparently it is more important to save the Greeks and the liberated countries from starvation than the Indians.’ He knew there were special arrangements for feeding workers in essential industries, but he pointed out that practically the whole of India outside the rural districts was somehow engaged in the war effort, and that it was impossible to sort one particular individual from another ‘and feed only those actually fighting or making munitions or working in particular railways, as PM has suggested’.
In the week ending 9 October 1943, just under 2000 deaths were recorded in Calcutta, and 1600 the week before. The removal of corpses from the street became a municipal preoccupation. K. Santhanam, a former member of the Legislative Assembly and a journalist, believed 100,000 were dying of starvation in Bengal each week. By contrast, Leopold Amery in London said that between 15 August and 16 October a total of about 8000 had died in Calcutta from causes directly or indirectly connected to malnutrition.
Within a week of taking office in New Delhi on 20 October 1943, Wavell rushed to Calcutta and saw the dying in the streets outside the gates of houses and the glass fronts of restaurants and bakeries. He intended to galvanise the entire government apparatus to tackle what he significantly called the ‘man-made’ crisis. Then he toured the mofussil itself, in particular the nearer western regions, Midnapore and Parganas. What he saw there – corpses scythed down at the height of their hunger by cholera or smallpox, and lying in the roads and ditches – disturbed him profoundly. It was a sight Linlithgow had never deigned nor dared to see. Wavell decided to use the army to aid the civil administration and introduced rationing in all areas in Bengal, including Calcutta. Air-raid wardens throughout the towns of Bengal were now put to the task of carrying bodies from houses and the streets, and burning them in pyres or burying them in mass graves.
Wavell’s most powerful and highly unpopular cable after this journey was addressed to Leopold Amery and Churchill. ‘Bengal famine is one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and is dangerous to our reputation here both among Indians and foreigners in India.’ His urgency was motivated in part by the desire to save Britain from the world’s censure, and to ensure no collapse of morale in the British Indian army. Indeed one of the chief terms of his appointment was that he should solve the crisis in Bengal, since it was beginning to get in the way of the war. And in that spirit he also cabled, ‘There is now a military as well as a charity problem, since army must have a stable base.’ But humanity and compassion were also at play, and he whipped up the inefficient government of Bengal to recognise and react to the scale of the event.
To the new viceroy, one of the minor villains of the famine may have been Bengal’s chief minister, Khawaja Nazimuddin, whom the viceroy thought ‘straight but incapable’, and exactly the sort of man of whom the corrupt take advantage. And one of the corrupt in question, Wavell believed, was Nazimuddin’s minister for civil supplies, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, a former Oxford graduate, one of the founders of the Muslim League and a future prime minister of Pakistan. Suhrawardy, it was claimed, siphoned money from every project that was undertaken to ease the famine, and awarded to his associates contracts for warehousing, the sale of grain to governments, and transpor
tation.
With some justice, Suhrawardy himself blamed the black marketeers and hoarders for the tragedy, and claimed that he had worked around the clock setting up food distribution centres and gruel kitchens all over the city. He argued that he had threatened the grain hoarders and black marketeers – mainly Hindus, he was careful to point out – with confiscation of their produce. This caused rice to appear in the shops of Calcutta sooner than it would have otherwise. Suhrawardy also declared himself to have gone to New Delhi many times begging for rice shipments to Bengal, but found, he said, that Hindus did not want to send rice to a region they saw as largely Muslim.
To Suhrawardy, the famine was entirely a sectarian tragedy.
Wavell’s motives for having the destitutes of Calcutta’s streets gradually removed to army holding camps from November of that year are not clear. It was a movement that the hungry invaders of the city themselves resisted. But he also involved the army in food and medical relief. He supervised personally the running of kitchens for the famine victims still crowded into Calcutta, and brought in as many government agencies as he could to deal with the crisis. The fact that the army itself proved a creaky and inadequate agency of relief was not his fault.
Above all, he was willing to remain grossly unpopular with his masters by peppering them with cables and memoranda about the famine. Churchill would send a mocking cable to Wavell asking why, if food was so scarce, Gandhi hadn’t died yet? Unchastened, throughout the months of February and March 1944, Wavell continued to ask for assurances of substantial imports of grain. One of his cables declared that the attempt by His Majesty’s government to prove on the basis of defective statistics that India could do without the help demanded would be regarded in India, by both British and Indian opinion, ‘as utterly indefensible’. He considered his own resignation. ‘They must’, he wrote to London, ‘either trust the opinion of the man they have appointed to advise them on Indian affairs or replace him.’ No document so eloquently proves the moral courage and strength of character of Wavell.