April 9th
thanks to reader kumar. satyajit ray's "ashani sanket" is a portrait of this atrocity. i have had an exchange of email with gideon polya once based on a comment he made on one of my columns. he is certainly appalled by the sweeping under the carpet of this major atrocity, the bengal famine.
from the gideon polya interview:
One of the most extraordinary examples of such whitewashing of history is the sustained, continuing deletion of two centuries of massive, recurrent, man-made famine in British India from British and world history, and hence from general public perception. This massive, sustained lying by omission by two centuries of British academic historians occurred in a society having Parliamentary democracy, the means to readily disseminate information and a steadily expanding literate population. Furthermore, this process of lying by omission continues to this day in Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, such as Australia, countries having free speech, high literacy, democracy, prosperity and extensive media of all kinds.
To dramatise this perversion, imagine that the Jewish Holocaust was almost completely deleted from our history books and from general public perception, that there was virtually a total absence of any mention at all of this cataclysm in our newspapers and electronic media or in our schools and universities. Truth, reason, ethics and humanity aside, objective analysis suggests that such a situation would greatly increase the probability of recurrence of racial mass murder. Fortunately, in reality, virtually everyone is aware of this event and indeed in Germany today it is a criminal offence to deny the actuality of the Jewish Holocaust.
In contrast, during the Second World War, a man-made catastrophe occurred within the British Empire that killed almost as many people as died in the Jewish Holocaust, but which has been effectively deleted from history, it is a 'forgotten holocaust'. The man-made famine in British-ruled Bengal in 1943-1944 ultimately took the lives of about 4-million people, about 90% of the total British Empire casualties of that conflict, and was accompanied by a multitude of horrors, not the least being massive civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and young girls that compares unfavourable with the comfort women abuses of the Japanese Army.
The causes of the famine are complex, but ultimately when the price of rice rose above the ability of landless rural poor to pay and in the absence of humane, concerned government, millions simply starved to death or otherwise died of starvation-related causes. Although there was plenty of food potentially available, the price of rice rose through 'market forces', driven by a number of factors including: the cessation of imports from Japanese-occupied Burma, a dramatic wartime decline in other requisite grain imports into India, compounded by the deliberate strategic slashing of Allied Indian Ocean shipping; heavy-handed government action in seizing Bengali rice stocks in sensitive areas; the seizure of boats critically required for food acquisition and rice distribution; and finally the 'divide and rule' policy of giving the various Indian provinces control over their own food stocks. Critically, cashed-up, wartime, industrial, Calcutta could pay for rice and sucked food out of a starving, food-producing countryside...
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also read mike davis, "late victorian holocausts: el nino and the making of the third world" which details how 30 million indians were deliberately and brutally starved to death by the british roughly 110 years ago. so much for the 'white man's burden'. and the rations given as part of 'famine relief' were lower than the caloric intake at buchenwald, the notorious nazi prison camp were jews were starved to death. an able bodied man was given just enough calories to sustain an 8 year old! see my column on europe's hypocrisy for details on the 'sir richard temple famine relief'.
here's a link to the guardian's review of mike davis. some benign empire, this. and of course the marxist 'eminent historians' of india continue to toe the imperial historical line of 'aryan invasion fairy tale' and 'negationism of islamic invasion'.
the irony is that mike davis is a leftist american who sees fit to expose the colonialists, whereas the wannabe-white nehruvian stalinist and marxist 'historians' of india simply love the imperialists.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,424896,00.html
2 comments:
Contrast Indias response to these atrocities with the ruckus being created in China reagarding Japanese history textbooks. As of today there was a minor riot in front of the Japanese embassy in Beijing.
The international media also seems to be taking the Chinese line.
Imagine their reaction to some such demonstration in India. Would have been the hindu-fundamentalist-nationlist-nazi tag.
Maybe the white men secretly appreciate such hooliganism.
Some trivia related to this post. In one of your rediff columns, you had given credit to the Nehruvian stalinists for the fact that there were no famines after independence. I came across a column recently that paid tribute to Mr Minoo Masani. There is a little known fact mentioned in it that in the Avadi congress 1955, Nehru had decided to implement collectivisation of agriculture as in Mao's China. It was the Swatantra party that opposed it tooth and nail. We were thus spared famines in India compared to what happened in China. I shall send you the link later.
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