At 100, Maleka Beoya struggles to sit up to talk. A bright orange-red blanket wound around her frail frame, she has had a particularly difficult week: a fever and runny nose have worn her down, and her eyes are cloudy with signs of ill-health.
“You have come when I am about to die? I have nobody, except my daughter now,” she says, her voice hoarse. Among the last remaining survivors of the Bengal famine of 1943, as Maleka sits in the verandah of her small mud house in Gajamuri village in the Sundarbans to narrate her story, her neighbours gather around. It is the last of the monsoons and the rains have muddied the unpaved roads in the Sundarbans. Maleka’s visitors have brought some of that mud and slush from the road below onto her verandah.
Eighty years ago, the famine that struck India had resulted in the deaths of over three million people, a figure now widely accepted by scholars but severely underrepresented by the colonial British government when it happened. Most of these deaths in Bengal were due to malnutrition, disease and displacement. Today, the survivors are largely forgotten, scattered across villages in West Bengal, willing to share their stories of suffering with whoever cares to listen.
Maleka struggles to speak because of her advanced age, but she still remembers the days of the famine, particularly what she ate, just so that she could live: “Bhutta (corn), aloo (potato), soa (dill), saluk (water lilies), chui jhal (piper chaba). We would boil and eat those,” she says.
Maleka cannot sit up much longer, so her 60-year-old daughter Shobjan Bibi helps her lie down. Talking of how the frugal food her mother ate during the famine stayed with her forever, eventually finding its way into her marital home, Bibi says, “Growing up, I used to hear her stories about the difficulties she faced. She used to cook some of the food she ate during those difficult times.”
Destitute mother and child during Bengal famine 1943. (Express)
At the local school whose name Maleka doesn’t remember, government-run kitchens would distribute food during the famine. The food distributed in these kitchens went by different names, depending on the survivor who tells the story. Essentially, it was a gruel, colloquially called ‘khichuri’, a mix of boiled barley, jowar and milo (a type of sorghum).
“Poor people working in wealthy homes would get 250 gm of rice in exchange for physical labour. Sometimes they would get phena (foam from boiling rice). They would eat once a day,” says Bibi. Other times, they would scrounge fields for raw bamboo shoots to eat.
The Churchill hand
In 1943, the ordinary people of Bengal suffered because of a war and for geopolitical reasons they had little knowledge of or control over.
In her book Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, author and journalist Madhusree Mukerjee focuses extensively on the role of the British government in the run-up to and during the famine years and how the policies of the colonial administration exacerbated the devastation that occurred.
Churchill and the famine
During the Second World War, after the fall of Burma and Singapore to the Japanese army in 1941-1942, the two regions stopped rice exports, including to British India. In London, Churchill realised that with the Axis powers at Calcutta’s doors, his political future was at stake — he had to stop the Japanese from taking over Calcutta.
Mukerjee writes about army chiefs being “obsessed” with the “necessity of ‘denying transport’ to any invading force”, and references government documents that show how Indians were left to figure out their lives as the war escalated.
The British government, fearing a Japanese invasion, stockpiled food and exported a considerable amount of it for the use of British military forces. Coastal and eastern Bengal were severely impacted when rice stocks were removed by the British, and seized and destroyed in tonnes.
Then, in October 1942, a cyclone damaged the autumn rice crop, forcing subsistence farmers in Bengal to consume grains meant for planting the next year’s crop, bringing further distress to the lives of the poor.
Mukerjee’s book linked the famine to Churchill’s hostility towards the Indian freedom movement and argued how the resulting rage and his inherent racism influenced his actions. “No one had raised the question of the role Britain played in the famine. The Famine Commission (appointed by the British government to investigate the famine) deliberately stayed away from links to London,” says Mukerjee, adding that her research showed that Churchill chose to not send famine relief to Bengal though ships and grain were both available.
Survivors stories from Bengal Famine
She cites the examples of Bengal’s revolutionaries and freedom fighters, among them, Khudiram Bose, who was arrested by the colonial authorities for protesting against Britain’s rice denial.
Nearly a 100 years later, as survivors speak of ‘durbhikker shomoye’ — the famine years — two words serve as memory markers: ‘bonna’ or floods from the massive cyclone of October 1942 and ‘obhab’ or ‘severe scarcity’, marked by a burning hunger in their bellies.
‘Can you eat boiled brinjal?’
It is difficult to reach Taltala village in the Sundarbans. The village pond has overflowed after the monsoon rains, and the muddy trail to 95-year-old Jomuna Purokait’s house is slippery and known to harbour monsoon snakes.
Her body bent with age, Jomuna talks of “those difficult times”. “All crops were ruined. We had a small patch of land with brinjals and pui shak (spinach) which we tried to sell, but nobody wanted to buy it.”
Taltala village in Sundarbans, where Jomuna Purokait, 95, lives with her family members. (Express photo by Neha Banka)
But it’s the memory of her nine-year-old self rejecting an inedible brinjal dish that Jomuna describes in great detail. “My mother would boil brinjal and feed us. But can you eat boiled brinjal? Then she got some shrimp from somewhere, boiled it and mixed it with the brinjal and gave it to us. But I still refused to eat it. So my father said, ‘if this continues, my daughter will die’.”
She recalls how people “would scrounge the fields for anything they could lay their hands on, not caring who owned the land. It was because of their stomachs that were burning with hunger. Saluk (water lilies) is supposed to be eaten cooked, but they were so hungry, they just ate it raw — older people, children, everyone”.
Like Maleka, Jomuna remembers eating ghonto, a gruel made of various kinds of flour that was distributed by the government, whose taste she disliked. “It was called ‘bojra aata’. It was not nice to eat at all, but that’s all we had to eat.”
One day, when nine-year-old Jomuna lined up at the village market with a small container in her hand, the ‘ghonto’ was over. “I came home crying. It had finished. Oh, my tears, they just wouldn’t stop.” The authorities were only giving a fistful of ‘ghonto’, but even that ran out — there were so many starving people to feed.
In addition to its ‘rice denial’ policy, British officials also implemented a ‘transport denial’ policy, where they confiscated all modes of transport — bullock carts, bicycles, boats — essential to people’s everyday lives. The administration had claimed it was to curb the advancement of the Japanese, but it impacted the poorest in Bengal. Not only did this cut off livelihoods, it left rural Indians with only one option: walking.
Bengal famine in British Parliament.
Jomuna’s father, unable to see his family in distress, made up his mind to move to Calcutta for work, hoping that he would be able to feed his family in the big city. So he walked to the nearest train station with his family. “My mother cried, saying she couldn’t walk because of hunger. My father carried me and my younger brother on his shoulders and we somehow managed to reach Nimpith (approximately 20 km from their village).” A few days later, a train from Nimpith would bring them to Calcutta.
In Calcutta’s Benepara neighbourhood, Jomuna’s father managed to rent a room in a basti for his family, promising to pay the landlord when he got some money through work. “One day my father got Rs 10 and got some cholar chattu (roasted Bengal gram). We added chillies and salt to it. We didn’t even have bowls to eat it in, so we used our hands.”
In Calcutta, Jomuna’s mother worked as a domestic help. “She told her employer that she didn’t need money, just rice. She told them ‘my children are dying’, so the employer gave us more rice than we asked. My father worked as a water porter in another wealthy house and he told them he didn’t need any money but just food. Even Calcutta was suffering due to shortages.”
When others found out that Jomuna’s parents were being given rice, a crowd gathered outside the homes of their employers and there was a fight for food, she says.
For many of the survivors, the long years since the famine have blunted some of these painful memories, but Jomuna is an exception. She remembers the horrors, especially in Calcutta, where hundreds had migrated in desperate need for food.
“One day, my parents heard they were distributing rice and phena (foam from cooked rice). When we reached, my mother realised it was the leftover food from a nearby hospital that had been discarded by sick patients. A man in the crowd said, ‘Let it be. It is better to die eating this (contaminated) food than to die of hunger’… People ate that. But then, that food was running out, so they simply added large quantities of water. We didn’t eat it because my parents refused to feed it to us,” recalls Jomuna.
“A few days later, you could see kankal (skeletons) with large heads on the roads of Calcutta. They were all dead from eating contaminated food discarded by sick patients. A car came and began loading dead people into the van, probably to mass cremate them,” she says.
For Jomuna and many other families, the food cooked for survival during the famine years became an integral part of their lives — something they did not wish to remember, but could not forget either.
The agony of hunger
In Debnagar village, rain pours down on 96-year-old Malati Maity’s home. Like many famine survivors who now live in the Sundarbans, Malati speaks in a dialect that is a mix of Bengali and Odia. The dialect is a result of migration that occurred in colonial Bengal in the decades before the famine, when the British administration decided to deforest large portions of the Sundarbans forests to create urban settlements. The resettling of the Sundarbans occurred on the backs of the physical labour of migrant workers from across southern Bengal bordering Odisha, who stayed back and did not return home to their villages of origin.
Malati Maity, 96, at her house in Debnagar village, Sundarbans. (Express photo by Neha Banka)
Unlike many families who died of abject hunger, Malati was among the more fortunate. “I didn’t really suffer as much because my family was well-off. My uncle used to farm a small patch of land close to our village, named Shibrampur in Namkhana block. He used to share crops with us. But others suffered. It was terrible, my goodness.”
When Maity says she did not suffer, it only means that she was fortunate enough to get something to eat. During the famine years, not many did.
“The ones who survived were the privileged ones. The people who got nothing to eat died, and the ones who got a little found that the famine had a long-term impact on their physical health. The ones who are still alive today, were the ones who were able to manage a little food and could survive,” says Dr Swapan Kumar Das, who has been working as a doctor in the rural Namkhana region of the Sundarbans for over 15 years.
If young girls were fortunate, they would be married off to wealthy families where food supplies were still available, even as their parents, siblings and loved ones starved.
Close to Malati’s house, by the banks of the Hooghly, a river grass grows in relative abundance in the saline waters where the river meets the Bay of Bengal. It’s called gira in Bengali. Maity’s grandsons run out in the pouring rain and pluck some to show what their grandmother ate to survive eight decades ago. “Everything died in the flood water, even the sturdy durba grass,” says Malati.
Malati’s mother would feed her family the little gruel that was distributed by the government, and a collection of wild grass and leaves. The gira sak quickly became a kitchen staple, because it was the only thing that survived when the cyclones flooded the region with saline water.
Gira, a river grass that grows in relative abundance in the saline waters of the Sundarbans. Many survivors interviewed by The Indian Express recall eating it to survive during the famine. (Express photo by Neha Banka)
“The gira sak would be boiled and squeezed to remove excess sea water. Then it would be cooked with some prawns and crab and eaten. There was no oil available for cooking,” says Malati.
Basic ingredients for cooking everyday food, like oil and masalas, were absent or out of reach for many. The floods meant that there was no drinking water either, forcing people to rely on pond water. “I was 14 when I asked my mother for some salt to eat with the rice. My mother said the rice had been cooked in salt water and I wouldn’t need it. The rice was so salty that I couldn’t eat it at all. Seeing that, my mother started crying,” Malati recalls.
The famine impacted everyone, but vulnerable groups even more severely — pregnant women, infants, children, women and the aged. “Breastfeeding mothers found their milk drying up… They had nothing to eat. Many babies who didn’t get milk died. Some survived and they had to rely on foreign milk that came from the government,” says Malati, referring to milk imports by Polson dairy that were only meant for the consumption of the British administration and American forces stationed in the country during the Second World War.
The famine compelled the introduction of new ‘foods’ into the diets and kitchens of famine-affected families in rural Bengal that they had never eaten before. Wild grasses, wild oysters, snails, water lilies, raw tubers, tamarind seeds, and a mash of cooked grains when they were lucky at distribution centres, were consumed for months.
This ‘famine food’ has largely disappeared from kitchens in Bengal. The survivors would rather they never see them again. Sometimes, when their families ask, they make a sak using leaves — never the gruel — from their childhood, but the cooking process now reflects their vastly improved circumstances. Well cooked in oil, seasoned with masalas, prepared using abundant vegetables and meats, the sak scarcely resembles what was eaten 80 years ago. Now, it is eaten because they choose to do so and not out of any compulsion.
Malati no longer scolds her grandchildren when they waste food, like she did in the past. But her son Goutam, 50, says she does ask about why they waste food.
It is a story that all second-generation survivor family members narrate: how their parents would pick every grain of rice from the floor and eat it, even if it accidentally fell out of their plates. It is a legacy of the famine years, a habit that stayed with them, years after that ‘bonna’ of 1943.