Spivak's mendacious memory

Gayatri Spivak says in an interview-

'I remember Independence. I was very young, but I was precocious. It was an incredible event. But my earliest memories are of famine: skeletal bodies dying in the streets, crawling to the back door begging for starch. This was the great artificial famine created by the British to feed the military in the Pacific theatre in the Second World War.'

Why does Spivak believe that the British created an artificial famine in Bengal? The British did not buy foodstuffs from there. It was a food deficit state- thus prices were higher and so it was not sensible to procure food from there.
Amartya Sen- whom she knows- won a Nobel for claiming that Bengalis in the Cities decided to use their high war-time wages to eat 5 times as much rice as they would normally. The result was that their poorer cousins in the countryside starved.

Bengal imported rice from Burma. The Japanese invasion cut off this supply. The Australian Governor of Bengal wanted to bring in Australian wheat so as to enrich his own people but Churchill wouldn't sanction grain ships because of the threat from the Japanese Navy. The truth is, he was not sanguine about Britian's ability to keep the Japs out of India and had said as much to the King Emperor.

Of course, Indian politicians had the power and the responsibility to prevent starvation. It could have been easily done. The Bengali Premier was friends with the Punjabi Premier. Both had supported the Pakistan resolution. Punjab was grain surplus and could be resupplied by sea (Churchill wanted to keep the 'martial races' of the North West happy). Hoondis (Bills of Exchange) drawn on Calcutta were in demand in Punjab which was beginning to industrialise. The Ispahanis- who were close to Jinnah- were happy to turn a good profit on the deal. Still, it didn't go through. Why? In the end, Muslim League politicians benefited from the famine- which they could blame on Hindu hoarders.  The official inquiry, headed by Ackroyd- the great agronomist of his generation- came to the conclusion that each famine death had enriched someone by about 5 ounces of gold.

Spivak's confabulations now take an even more bizarre twist-

A bit later I learned the extraordinary songs of the Indian People’s Theatre Association –the famous IPTA. Why were they political? One of you was asking me if literary representations could be political. In this case what happened was that section 144 of the Penal Code, enforcing preventive detention, was put in place to control resistance. But the British authorities did not understand the Indian languages, so theatre fell through the cracks and the IPTA survived as a political organization.

Spivak thinks British police officers and civil servants did not know Bengali. Thus the Law only applied to stuff written in English. But very few Indians then, as now, discuss politics in English. They use their native language. If the British had not cracked down on vernacular publications and theater troupes, they would not have been cracking down on anything at all.

This is isn't a one off 'brain-fart' for Spivak. She has repeatedly said that because India has many languages, the landlord or the official can't understand what the worker or peasant says. She seems to be blissfully unaware that all officials- then as now- had to pass exams and demonstrate fluency in the vernacular language of the district in which they were posted.

The real reason IPTA was encouraged by the Brits was because it was a Communist front. It took orders from Moscow. After the Hitler-Stalin pact, it was anti British. But then Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Suddenly the Commies were on the side of the Brits. On orders from the Kremlin, they supported the creation of theocratic states like Pakistan and Israel. Since Stalin was suspicious of the Congress party, they pretended that India wasn't really independent at all. At this point they thought it a good idea to mobilise the peasantry so as to bring about a revolution. That's why they started to write silly songs based on stupid lies. The play 'Nabanna' is a good example. It does not address the obvious problem- viz. that the 'Hindu hoarders' scapegoated by the Muslim League Administration did not exist. Instead, the Hindu Communists who capitalised, aesthetically, on the Bengal famine, played into the hands of the Pakistan movement. In the end, most of the Hindus who escaped starvation in Muslim majority districts did not escape post partition ethnic cleansing. Communism failed to gain a foothold in the Pakistan it had championed. Ironically, desperate refugees from East Pakistan gravitated towards the Left- which, quite predictably, fucked them over but good.

Not Spivak though. She borrowed some money and emigrated to America. Thus she can afford to have a rosy eyed view of Communist cultural mendacity.

Like most Bengali children, I learned their extraordinary songs, and I will quote the refrain that haunts our cultural memory: “We won’t give any more rice, for this rice, sown in blood, is our life”. I didn’t connect it to the British, only to class struggle. 

The share-cropper, quite properly, wants a larger share of the harvest. The Tebhagha movement was perfectly rational. But so was the demand to restrict immigration which undercut real wages for agricultural labour. The Communists finally embraced a wholesale gangsterism so as to square the circle in a manner familiar to segmentary societies.

Spivak, having left India almost sixty years ago, is not concerned with Communist misdeeds. Living in America, she doesn't have to bother with bread and butter issues.

In what she says next we get a clue to what has motivated her career-

The Japanese, we thought in Bengal, were bringing the British to their knees. We admired these Asians standing up to the British.

The Bengali wanted to see Whitey whipped. They were too stupid to understand that if their 'Neta' (hegemon) Subhas Chandra Bose had been installed as the puppet Premier of a conquered Bengal, then their fate would have been far worse. The Vietnamese famine, which genuinely was created by the Japs, would have made the Muslim League famine look like a picnic.

Kolkata was evacuated at the time of my birth for fear of Japanese bombings.

Nonsense! A few people left the City. More poured in to work in the war-time factories.

The Bulgarians were first with the Axis powers and then with the Allies. For us, it was happening at the same time. The largest number of dead in the Second World War was Indian solders fighting for the British.

 Is Spivak completely mad? Does she really believe more Indians died than Britishers? Only 87,000 Indian soldiers died. Britain did not sustain very high losses but they were around 350,000. By comparison, the Soviet Union lost ten million.

On the other hand, at India’s eastern edge, there was this alliance with the Japanese and the Axis powers. Subhas Chandra Bose, a family friend, was a friend of the Japanese and the leader of the Indian National Army. He went off to Japan and from there to Germany and married a German wife. Kolkata airport is named after him. So there was this synchronic commitment to the Allies and to the Axis powers. The lines were crossed. For the Europeans it was the Holocaust, but for us it was a World War, it was the end of colonialism perhaps.

Why is Spivak saying Bose went to Germany from Japan? The opposite was the case. Why mention his Austrian wife? Spivak's mendacious memory reveals the truth about her scholarship- it is just the  bluff of a silly school girl.