Janam Mukherjee's 'Hungry Bengal'

Some hunter gatherers can walk a 100 kilometers at a stretch. Even poorly nourished peasants can cover 20 km in a day, though there would be casualties. Human beings, absent coercion, are unlikely to settle in a place from which they can't get away in the event of a food availability deficit.

Furthermore, they are likely to develop multiple food sources and diets or else suffer invasion by more diversified food producers. In good times, certain low prestige foods are given to the livestock. In bad times, they are eaten by the family.

Human beings also practice charity and maintain a client base so that in bad times it is the low status individual, or the one less close in blood, who goes to the wall. In addition to mutually supportive or charitable relationships, human beings also enter defeasible contracts giving rise to entitlements which collapse in bad times. The same holds true of forms of Government.

Economics, as a wholly academic and worthless legitimating ideology, is about pretending that low status people or contracting parties with a deficient threat point , or those who put their faith in Governments or non government organizations or the legal system or religion or some political party won't get pushed to the wall during bad times.

A lot of public discourse is a similar sort of pretense.

Amartya Sen got a Nobel Prize and the title  'Mother Theresa of Economics' because of his utterly worthless 'work' on Famine. The cretin didn't get that his subject is about getting people to grow and eat more food. It isn't about displaying stupidity, ignorance and mendacity of a stupefying sort so as to leave one's portion of the Globe more, not less, dependent and exploitable by the countries where- like a drunken helot- you teach by but the example of your own onanistic or auto-intoxicated crapulousness.

A few years after Amartya began immortalizing himself by writing stupid shite about the 'Great Bengal Famine', another Sen- the film-maker Mrinal- released the utterly meretricious 'In search of Famine'.

Prof. Janam Mukherjee in 'Hungry Bengal' writes-

In another scene, perhaps the most well known in the film, the director plays a "picture game" with his crew. Having dug up pictures of famine from newspaper archives and private collections, the director challenges the crew to locate them temporally: Director (holding up the first picture of an emaciated body): Tell what period this is from? Bubu: Should be 1943. Rathin: '43 Montu: Famine, that's for sure. Nilkantha: 1943. Dipankar: May I? (the director nods) 1959. Smita: How could you guess? Director: He knew. I told him. There was a famine in 1959.

In Mizoram- sure because of 'Mautam' which has to do with bamboo and rats. The Commies in Bengal were pretending there was a famine in Bengal. The joke was that it was Mao who would preside over the biggest twentieth century famine.  

A picture from then. One of the hunger marchers. Smita (Holding up another picture): This one now? Dipankar: '43 Rathin: '43 Nilkantha: 1959? Smita: 1943. Smita (holding up a third picture): Identify this. Nilkantha: That's '43. Montu: '43 Jochhan: Once again? Rathin: This is '43. Dipankar: Well - what is it? Smita: 1971. Director: Bangladesh. Don't you remember?  Another picture from the archives baffles one and all - it is a picture of the starving Buddha from a second century Kandahar sculpture.

WTF? The '43 Famine was caused by the Japs, though no doubt the elected Bengali politicians running the Province worsened things so as line their own pockets.  In 1959 the Communists organised a 'Price Increase and Famine Resistance Committee' which demanded various measures which would have caused a big famine of the Chinese sort if it had been implemented. Its main result was to delay the election of a Communist Government in Bengal and to increase State Capacity to kill and imprison Leftists. It is likely that the picture supposedly depicting the '59 famine used in the film was 'fake news'. The Bangladesh famine was in 1974 not 1971. The Americans refused to send food aid because the Bangladeshis, very stupidly, did a trade deal with Cuba.

The 'starving' Buddha corresponds to a deliberate act of self-mortification which, however, the Buddha saw had no soteriological benefit and which he henceforth rejected.

Bengalis may think Mrinal Sen's movie was profound. Non-Bengalis like me who saw it because we had studied Famines in places like the LSE wondered if it was a roman a clef satire. The truth is, Bengali savants were notorious for getting Agronomy and Agricultural Statistics completely wrong. Mahalanobis prevailed in India and got Sukhatme exiled to the FAO in Rome where he quickly brought in plenty of Indians from Western India.  Sukhatme's followers influenced the 'Supply side' solution which did in fact end famine under Malthusian conditions of agricultural involution. However, in the more elite type of academy, the cretin Sen prevailed with his ludicrous 'entitlements' approach.

The big question raised by both Amartya and Mrinal Sen is 'why are Bengali Hindu 'bhadralok' intellectuals so utterly shite? Fuck is wrong with them?'

Janam Mukherjee, a half Bengali American, answers this question-

Through such dialogic and cinematic means Sen is able to complicate both the temporal location and ontological meaning of famine in Ākāler Sadhāney. The famine that the crew has gone in search of cannot be framed.

More particularly if Bengali actors are as fat as fuck.  

Rather it escapes boundaries, resists narration, reverberates in the present, and replicates itself in the contemporary social context.

Amartya Sen thought that Mrs. Thatcher would create a famine in the UK. His pals suggested he shut the fuck up.  

The "story" that the director would like to tell, a story that incorporates all the tropes that are often assumed to encapsulate the Bengal Famine of 1943, is pulled apart by the contingencies of social distance, historical presumption and structural continuity.

Mrinal Sen was a shitty film director. If you want a film about the Bengal Famine, bring in a Speilberg or an Attenborough.  

Famine obeys none of the rules of circumscribed representation.

Come to think of it, Audrey Hepburn suffered sever malnutrition as a kid in Nazi occupied Holland. She was thin enough to represent a famine victim.  

The problems that the film crew experience are problems that will remain in any effort to frame an "event" as massive as the Bengal Famine. In my own perhaps even more quixotic search for famine

he'd gone to India to find out about the Partition riots in which his dad had suffered trauma. Being as stupid as shit, he thought the Famine had caused Communal violence even though Punjab which had no famine had even worse carnage. 

these problems of framing have been, likewise, acute. The distances I have traveled, both geographically and socially, "in search of famine" have dwarfed those crossed by Sen's film crew in Ākāler Sadhāney. In this light it would be impossible for me to presume to be able to capture famine in still life. What I am capable of, however, is a further expansion and complication of the frames in which famine has been represented. As such, my aim is to let the monster out of the box. 

What great 'distances' has this shithead traveled? He spent 7 years in libraries to produce this dreck. Does he have an economic theory of famine? Don't be silly. The fucker's aim is 'to let the monster out of the box'. So, this book is about an evil Jack in the Box from a Steven King novel. How fucking puerile! Does he really think people reading this will say- 'wow! how sensitive and smart this Bengali, or half Bengali, is?' No. They will say, 'High Caste Hindu Bengalis who don't do STEM subjects quickly turn into utter shitheads. Not so Muslims or Namasudras or Sylhetis or anybody else who actually works for a living. Just 'bhadralok' anglophile tossers in shite Departments of foreign Universities.'

Consider Mukherjee's invocation of 'ontological meaning'. If Famine has any such thing then it is a necessary feature of existence. This worthless shithead is, therefore, a Malthusian of the most ignorant type! What's more, he's a racist cunt. White peeps don't got famines coz they belong to a different species. Only some brown people must have famines coz their 'ontological meaning' is they have shit for brains.

The British Raj got rid of Famines as they had gotten rid of Slavery and Suttee and so forth. Had Curzon's partition of Bengal been allowed to stand, power would have passed to more sensible people than Sens and Mukherjees and Bengal would have started to grow out of agricultural involution towards manufacturing might. But, this didn't happen because of stupid Hindu 'bhadralok' who talked and wrote high falutin' shite.

No doubt, high caste Hindu Bengal played a notable part in the Independence movement. But, it was also a major casualty of the result. Thus this class was impoverished and ethnically cleansed from East Bengal and Burma and doomed to continually lose ground to less educated but more sensible parts of Hindu India.

It is quite true that the Hindu bhadralok- with 'the sly cunning of the Rich'- found profitable, if meretricious, avenues of emigration as well as rent-seeking opportunities and enclaves back home. But, there was a 'tragedy of the commons' here. Bengali intellectual availability cascades, outside STEM subjects, featured ever greater Preference Falsification and manic protestation of a puerile sort.

I suppose one could say- 'the Jews make a big deal of the Holocaust. Why shouldn't Bengali academics make a big deal of the Famine?' The answer is that Bengalis could have prevented the Famine. The Jews could not prevent the Shoah. However, they took very sensible steps to ensure it could never happen again. Bengali blathershites, by contrast, want to make the Famine so universal a feature of their social ontology that it would have a necessary, intensional, meaning in saecula saeculorum.

Mukherjee writes

A central argument that I will be making throughout this work is that the most profound factor influencing the structural, political, social, economic, and communal fabric of Bengal - during this entire era - was famine. As such, a primary aim of this work is to de-link famine in Bengal from the year 1943, and to demonstrate the to extent to which hunger, scarcity, starvation and disease remained central to the torturous and volatile socio-political circumstances throughout this seven year period. Though 1943 was, perhaps, the most graphic and extreme stage of famine in Bengal - particularly in the capital city of Calcutta - famine, as in the words of historian Mike Davis, "is part of a continuum with the silent violence of malnutrition that precedes and conditions it, and with the mortality shadow of debilitation and disease that follows it." Famine, in this sense, is inextricably woven into the fabric of famine societies, and as a "part of a continuum," as Mrinal Sen has portrayed, leaps out of every frame that is constructed to contain it.

This cretin knows very well that there was ethnic cleansing in Punjab without any Famine, and there was Famine in Malabar without any ethnic cleansing. Why speak of Bengal as a 'famine society'? It is now no such thing because blathershites like himself have been wholly disintermediated. They are welcome to eke out a modest living teaching some shite subject to gormless Americans who crave a credential. But, they are figures of fun or- now the TMC is the effective opposition in India- an Aunt Sally for the ineffectual bludgeoning of elderly Hindutva hooligans like myself who pine for their glory days when their blog had some marginal topicality.

Before returning to Mukherjee's screed, let us pause a moment and ask- 'why was Bengal so malnourished?'.  The answer has to do with the vested interest of land owners to keep a service & handcraft population around so that, after good harvests,  excess grain could be transformed into positional goods and services and high value to weight commodities to be exchanged at the metropole. There were some 'institutional' safeguards to ensure this precarious population survived bad harvests. However with the advent of autonomy, Fazlul Huq, the Premier, abolished or restricted these safeguards. Furthermore, with the Japanese occupation of Burma, title in land was no longer as fungible. Thus there was bound to be a 'crunch'. But, precisely because there was a War and the Brits had unloosed their purse strings, sensible Bengali leaders- who ought to have known that Japanese conquest would be ten times worse than that of Robert Clive- should have, under the silly arse Governor Herbert, made hay while the sun shone, wholeheartedly supported the war-effort, and transferred their rural labor surplus into manufacturing and construction. As a front-line Province Bengal could have got the rest of India, and even the Americans, to pay for road construction and pontoon bridges and so forth, which would have remained valuable assets after the war.

Instead of doing any such thing, Bengali politicians fought with each other. Why? Because Curzon's partition of the Province had not been allowed to stand by stupid Hindu bhadralok blathershites.

Mukherjee, clearly, whatever his actual maternal parentage, is seeking to present himself as a pur-sang Bengali blathershite of a wholly vanished type.

Thus he writes that his- ' aim (is) to detail, on a much more comprehensive scale, the intricacies, agencies, and ideologies that defined the making of the Bengal Famine. It is a truly monumental affair to kill off at least three million people in the short span of (as few as) three years. rather than actual scarcity, as the determining factor leading to famine, lending persuasive theoretical weight to the popularly held contention that the Bengal Famine of 1943 was "man-made."

The Bengal Famine was made by Bengali men. Why? Their province had not been partitioned in a sensible manner. Thus the Hindus and Muslims were at loggerheads. Both, of course, would shift the blame to the Brits who, however, had devolved all responsibility for Food to these stupid, corrupt, incompetent natives.

Killing 'three million' was no 'monumental affair' as the bloodletting in Punjab proves. There could have been an equal or greater blood letting in Bengal but the Bengali bhadralok earned infamy by alacrity in running away. Nehru, famously, was confronted by some such complaining that their property was being grabbed and their women raped. Nehru said 'why are you here? You should be defending them! How come, you've escaped but your womenfolk haven't?' The Government of India did little to resettle Hindu refugees from Bengal. Why? It was because they wouldn't take the law into their own hands to eject Muslims so as to compensate themselves. By contrast, the Punjabis were quite prepared to use muscular tactics and thus had to be compensated.

The Bengali bhadralok habit of thinking that someone else, not they themselves, should protect and nurture them brought infamy upon this class of people. They wouldn't help themselves but rather sharpened their teeth to bite any hand that fed them. The Great Bengal Famine was God's way of telling these worthless cunts to emigrate and become pedagogues in shite University Departments.

Mukherjee speaks of 'High Colonial Policy' which, sadly, was to let the Bengalis rule themselves. They fucked up massively. Compare the British Food Ministry and the manner in which it cracked down on the black market with what the Bengalis achieved. Sir Charles Tegart, who had crushed the Jugantar revolutionaries in India, was put in charge of the vigilance branch of the British Food Ministry. Bengal could have appointed the Bengali police officers Tegart had trained to perform a similar function. It did no such thing. Why? Wallace Ayckroyd- who served on the Inquiry Commission- computed the excess profit made on each famine death in Bengal in '43 to have been about $200 back when the Gold was pegged at 35 to an ounce. Perhaps the outcome would have been different had Bengal been divided on confessional lines- i.e. if Curzon's partition had not been pusillanimously reversed. The Muslims would see that the Famine couldn't be the fault of the Hindus. It must be the fault of their own Ministers.

I recall meeting the scion of the one Hindu Princely family in what was undivided Pakistan. I was surprised to hear the head of the family had chosen not to return to Bangladesh and preferred to settle in the West Wing. But, the thing made perfect sense. The Chakmas got shorter shrift going forward. The parallel with the Rohingyas' fate under Aung San's daughter is not far to seek.

Mukherjee, not understanding that Bengalis had been in charge of the Food Ministry since 1937, writes

High colonial policy, of course, usually in the name of the war effort, played an important role, but responsibilities were widespread. Seeking colonial favor, or entrenched in "opposition," the response to famine by Indian politicians in both Bengal and New Delhi, was also guided, often enough, by political interest rather than public welfare. This disconnect between the misery of the masses and the expediency of the elite was even more pronounced in relation to the involvement of large capital interests. In a time of record profits, industrial firms in and around Calcutta played a central role in the extraction of rice from the countryside that effectively left villagers to starve.

Why? Because Bengali politicians were corrupt and incompetent and busy fighting with each other for the spoils of office.

Partnering with Government, business interests - Indian and European alike - descended on the country-side in repeated and rapacious rice appropriation schemes in the name of feeding industrial Calcutta.

No European descended on the countryside. This was a purely Bengali affair.

With each consecutive effort, prices escalated further, more stocks went into the black-market, and more inhabitants of the province sunk into starvation. It was therefore at least as much profit that motivated the rapacity that ravaged Bengal, as it was the colonial creed of racial and cultural superiority.

Some 'Kulin' or 'Ashraf' Bengalis certainly felt 'racial superiority'. Even if Mukherjee is not 'kulin', his father's people certainly claimed 'cultural superiority'. But their true excellence was in the purely athletic field of running away.

In meticulously detailing the ways and means, as well as the ideologies and prejudices, with which policies leading to famine were enacted, I hope to capture some measure of the outrage and anguish with which so many have reminded me that the Bengal Famine was "man-made."

Non Bengali Indians feel 'outrage and anguish' when stupid Bhadralok blathershites try to 'man-make' Famine and Poverty for the rest of us. That's why we have gotten rid of the Planning Commission which was once presided over by Amartya Sen's mentor- Sukhamoy how-shite-am-I? Chakraborty.

Now that Mahua Moitra appears to be the Voice of the Opposition- Rahul having done a runner- the American educated Bhadralok blathershite must expect to be scourged and ridiculed as never before. Fuck is wrong with you cunts?! Couldn't you at least set up an 'East Georgia University' to give a Doctorate to Mamta Di?

Is this 'Janam' or born Muckershite adding any conspicuous imbecility of his own to this academic availability cascade? Dunno. But the cunt mentions Foucault and 'bio-politics' so may be it thinks it is soo-oo clever and up to date and thus not shite at all.

Consider the following-

The supposed exigencies of war were also used instrumentally to circumvent the nascent democratic process in India. The Government of India Act of 1935, which had established the principle of “Provincial Autonomy,” allowed for the election of a Legislative Assembly in each province. At the head of the Legislative Assembly was to be a Chief Minister who was the principle elected Indian executive on the provincial level. As provinces had been—ostensibly—granted pervasive “autonomy,” this democratically established executive was at the heart of the new system. In Bengal, however, war and famine were used repeatedly to side-step the principle of self-rule, and “provincial autonomy” proved contingent. Twice during the period the Ministry in Bengal was summarily dismissed and “Emergency Rule” (Section 93) declared. This allowed the province to be governed by executive fiat from the Government of India in New Delhi and, ultimately, His Majesty’s Government in London. Throughout the period, moreover, the supposedly “essential” necessities of war were repeatedly cited as necessary grounds to enact drastic—and often disastrous—policies without any consultation with the elected provincial authority

Why are there so many scare quotes in this passage? Autonomy had been granted- or, more accurately, had been taken- and some Provinces were better run in consequence. Bengal wasn't because of the Hindu Muslim divide as well as widespread factional infighting. This meant that Ministries in Bengal were corrupt, incompetent and unstable.

Then came the War which genuinely did create 'exigencies' of a very serious nature more particularly after the fall of Singapore.

Why does Mukherjee think the Brits were using some imaginary war to subvert democracy? The Japanese threat was wholly genuine. Far from wanting to waste White manpower micro-managing any Province, the Brits wanted Indians to run things for themselves and, in return for generous amounts of the money Britain was borrowing from India, raise resources and manpower for the war effort. Obviously, Indians who were gaining a claim against Britain denominated in pounds sterling would also have an interest in seeing the Allies win.

Mukherjee is not saying that the Brits were making a mockery of autonomy in other Provinces. He is saying they only did this in Bengal.

In Bengal, however, war and famine were used repeatedly to side-step the principle of self-rule, and “provincial autonomy” proved contingent.'

Since better administered Provinces didn't have the terrible famine, though some faced severe food availability deficit, Mukherjee is saying that the Brits deliberately singled out Bengal for some wholly irrational- and therefore all the more diabolical- reason and sabotaged its autonomy in some occult manner.

However, the fact of the matter is that, absent the Congress party, every feasible Bengali administration was bound to be unstable, corrupt, incompetent and bedeviled by factionalism.

 Twice during the period the Ministry in Bengal was summarily dismissed and “Emergency Rule” (Section 93) declared.

 Both times, there was no 'summary dismissal'. Rather, it was the case that Premier, Fazl ul Haq, had to resign because of factionalism within his own ranks as well as the implacable enmity of the Muslim League which wished to monopolize representation of Muslims.

Thus, a rebellion within his own Krishak Praja Party forced Haq to resign on 2 Dec 1941. Governor's Rule commenced but ended 10 days later when Haq cobbled together a coalition which included the Boses' 'Forward Block' as well as the Hindu Mahasabha. However, with allies such as this, his was a bed of nails for which- with Bengali logic- he blamed the Governor, who, admittedly, was the weakest and most incompetent one with whom the Viceroy had to deal.

Mukherjee, at a later point, writes

Herbert conveyed his dissatisfaction with Huq to the Viceroy, who, annoyed, proposed to let them "fight the battle themselves."  The budget session in the Bengal Legislative Assembly, however, had begun by early March and the acrimony between Huq and Herbert was complicating an already excruciating process. Herbert, seeking to rid himself of the Chief Minister somehow, proposed to the Viceroy that Fazlul Huq would be an excellent choice to replace Azizul Huque as High Commissioner to India in London. Once Huq was shipped off, Herbert maintained, he would be able to work Muslim League stalwart Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy into the chair of Chief Minister. The Viceroy approved of the idea of a Muslim League Ministry, but had little confidence in Huq - or for that matter Herbert, who he asserted was the weakest of all his provincial Governors. Meanwhile the budget session ground on and the impasse of a fragmented Assembly wore on the Chief Minister, who suffered only luke-warm support from the European Party, and obstructionist opposition from the Muslim League. Huq informed Herbert on the 26th of March that for the good of Bengal he would be willing to resign if that would facilitate the installation of an all-parties Ministry.

How is this a 'summary dismissal'? Huq is whimpering and pleading for someone, anyone, to put him out of his misery and secure him a 'fat job' somewhere faraway. He had previously himself touted the idea that he could be sent to Mecca as an Envoy or else get a well paid sinecure on the Viceroy's Council which, given his notoriety as a disloyal blathershite, was not possible.

Herbert's mistake was to let Huq sign a resignation letter the Governor's staff had drafted. The Viceroy was furious with Herbert for giving the wily Huq a chance to pretend that he had been forced out.

Herbert now saw his chance. On the eve of the final budget vote, the Governor summoned the Chief Minister to his office where a letter of resignation was already waiting. Huq initially refused to sign, but the Governor was persuasive. He assured Huq that the letter would be used only in the interests of forming an all-parties Ministry. He would keep it as evidence of Huq's goodwill to all parties, and use it only to lobby support for a coalition. Huq, however naively, signed the letter.

Herbert was a political non-entity. Huq was a great lawyer and a political giant. To suggest he was 'naive' is simply not credible. The truth of the matter is that Herbert was out of his depth. He was acting like the Lord Lieutenant of an English County. In 1942, he urged Legislators to visit rural areas. Indeed, he asked Ministers to tour coastal areas. He thought the job of a politician was to rally his constituents to the cause of defense against a ruthless and diabolical  aggressor while making sure vulnerable sections of the community received a 'social minimum'. In England, people like Herbert were getting the better off in rural areas to open their homes to evacuees from the Cities. But the people of England were united in a common cause. Bengal was indifferent to its own conquest- Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who had escaped to Nazi Germany where he met Adolph Hitler and helped recruit Indian P.O.Ws for the German war effort, returned to South East Asia via submarine in February of 1943. Fazlul Huq had wanted Netaji's elder brother, Sharat Chandra, to be Home Minister in his second Ministry! Sharat was arrested but Huq's dependence on the Hindu Mahasabha's S.P Mukherjee did not make his path easier. Moreover, at this time, the Muslim League could hoodwink the Scheduled Caste leader, J.N Mandal, that their only enemy was the high caste Hindu. Thus, the fact of the matter is, the Muslim League was not going to allow Herbert's approach to yield any fruit in Muslim majority areas, while the Hindus were more inclined to support the radical 'Quit India' ideology. Thus only one Minister visited his own constituency- Bakargaj- which had a 'Faraizi' Muslim majority and a large Namasudra minority. Naturally, this was a Muslim League stronghold and so the aristocratic Minister was met by Muslim League black flags and no countervailing support from any other quarter because the Namasudras weren't expelled from East Bengal until after Partition. They genuinely thought they were scoring off the high caste Hindus. Later the High Castes- reincarnated as Communists- got their revenge on the Namasudras with the Marichjhapi massacre. Later still, a 'subaltern' Hindu- Mamta Bannerjee, with a fake PhD from a non existent 'East Georgia University'- used the Namasudra vote to get rid of the Commies whom her goons have beaten with such vim and vigor that many of them now vote for S.P. Mukherjee's BJP!

Herbert, without question, was the wrong man in the wrong place. But Fazul Huq was a 'useful idiot' for the Muslim League. If there was a strain of naivete in Huq, that strain was equally present in S.C Bose & J.N Mandal. They all thought that Muslims would not ethnically cleanse Hindus wherever they could. Thus, they refused to accept that the Muslim League, not some wide-eyed talk of Socialism or Secularism or Mass 'Shtruggle', would establish Pakistan with their help and then ruthlessly discard them. Huq won the '54 elections in East Pakistan (there was none in the West wing) and got his revenge on the Muslim League and his arch-rival Sir Nazimuddin. But it didn't last. Two months later, he was under house arrest. J.N Mandal had previously fled to India where he could not restart his political career. Huq was more fortunate. He is considered a great Bengali and honored by the present administrations in both East and West Bengal. The pity of it is that if Bengal had been partitioned in 1905 and the Hindu Bhadralok had talked less bollocks about 'Imperialism' and so forth, the highly productive, law-abiding, decent, courageous, Bengali Muslim and Namasudra and so forth could have all come up together. It is as though the very ubiquity amongst all sections of the Bengali population of the highest nobility and altruism and heartfelt political and religious idealism conspired to create a 'tragedy of the commons' such that what shaped History was the basest type of 'Nash Equilibrium', red in tooth and nail, Darwinian 'matsyanyaya'- or law of the big fish eating the little fish.

The Muslim League, like the Communist Party, promised a redistribution of assets. But the Communists would not say who'd get the assets. They were not specifying 'Hohfeldian rights' but just talking worthless Universalist shite. The Muslim League, on the other hand, gave a credible promise of Hohfeldian property rights whose basis was Sharia itself. Thus 'redistribution' would be to Muslims and the assets would come from Hindus. Thus 'incentive compatabilty' was created. This is why the Muslim League prevailed in Hindu minority districts or those where the non-Muslims could not or would not fight back.

Mukherjee, never having been a stupid as shite campus ruffian, has no understanding of how actual politics works. He thinks Huq was 'naive'. No doubt, Huq had naively sucked off some passerby who told him this was part and parcel of his duty as Premier of Bengal. It turned out that the passerby was actually Emperor Hirohito! Thus Huq's naivete led him to tender his resignation coz you know what them Japs be like. Always with the cameras. Also them Japs be very cunning. Herbert might well be a Jap himself- like Ian Duncan Smith.

The next morning his resignation was already a hot topic on the Assembly floor. The budget session was adjourned and the Ministry fell. On March 31st Emergency Rule was declared in Bengal under Section 93 of the Defence of India rules and Governor John Herbert, himself, signed the budget into effect. 

 Haq's failure to handle the famine- itself caused by the contradictory nature of his cobbled together coalition- meant the Governor put pressure on him to resign, but the Muslim League which had intrigued for this (and which was far more important to the War effort) was able to form a Ministry within a month.

However, the reason Huq failed was because East Bengal was being prepped for ethnic cleansing. S.P Mukherjee's people had been documenting instances of Hindu oppression by Muslims in places like Naokhali. This was a predictable pogrom which, if not planned in advance, nevertheless had been meticulously prepared for.

Mukherjee can't accept that S.P Mukherjee and the Hindu Mahasabha were right. The Muslims were going to get rid of the Hindus. He knows very well that this was the outcome. But, he also knows which side his bread is buttered on.

Thus, he pretends that everything was the fault of the British. An Evil British Governor subverted democracy in Bengal and seized power for himself so as to starve millions of poor Bengalis to death.

The truth was the Muslim League had their own agenda- ethnic cleansing- and would only support the Brits, or appear to do so- provided they could get on with this objective. Mukherjee himself writes-

'The Governor, having received a stern letter of reproof from Linlithgow, sent off a "personal apologia" to the Viceroy, and forged ahead with his efforts to boot-strap Nazimuddin into power. On the 13th of April he called Nazimuddin to form a Ministry, which in composition was entirely antithetical to the promise of an all-parties coalition that he had made to Fazlul Huq. In the 11 days that followed, a Ministry consisting largely of the Muslim League, the Bengal Legislative Scheduled Caste Party and the European Group was formed and ushered into office on the 24th of April.  On the same day that the Ministry was formed, opposition leaders addressed an ad hoc meeting in the Calcutta Town Hall. Hindu Mahasabha President, and former Bengal Minister, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, issued a stark rebuke to the newly formed government. "Sir Nazimuddin can never hope," he declared, "to serve Bengal at the head of a Ministry which is opposed by a strong section of Muslims and by the entire Hindu community. The grave problems that confront us, specifically relating to food and internal security, imperatively demand unity of thought and action." The composition of the new Ministry, and the animosities that it entailed, confirmed the Viceroys forebodings about alienating caste Hindus. All Muslim cabinet positions went to League members, and only token Hindus could be persuaded to participate. With the installation of a Muslim League dominated Ministry politics in Bengal became increasingly communal, and with starvation mounting across the province, the primary issue at stake from the inception of the League Ministry was the "food situation," which lent a certain elemental, and for many, existential, hue to the acrimonious political (and increasingly communal) relations that characterized the Muslim League Ministry

This passage shows that, contra Mukherjee's assertion in the introduction to his book, Bengal was not ruled by the Governor or White Civil servants in Delhi or London during that month. Rather the local administration continued to be subservient to elected leaders- or their paymasters. Mukherjee can provide no proof that either New Delhi or London had any means of ruling Bengal by 'executive fiat'. We are speaking of a corrupt, incompetent and disloyal provincial government machinery which could be bribed or threatened by local bigwigs and their muscle-men but which was wholly incompetent. It so happened that the British Governor, too, was incompetent. But this would not have mattered if Huq had been supported by the Muslim League.

Meanwhile, the Brits could get essentials for the war-effort by paying for it with money borrowed from the Indian exchequer. Other big players, too, were using their money power in a thoughtless or callous manner. Mukherjee mentions the American obsession with ice as the reason fishermen had to throw away a third of their catch because they had been crowded out of that market. No doubt, it is absurd to think most Bengali fishermen were using ice but this is a good rhetorical flourish.

What can't be doubted is that the wealthy backers of the local politicians made huge profits during this period.  Rohith Wanchoo writes- 'Mirza Ispahani, a Muslim League supporter, got a contract worth 150 million rupees to collect paddy stocks in 1942.'

Mukherjee lays great stress on the Allies 'scorched earth' policy as if it were motivated solely by a desire to see Bengalis starve. What he doesn't seem to understand is that the Japanese would have confiscated any food or materiel they could lay their hands on.

Mukherjee, with Bengali logic, asserts two very different propositions- firstly, that the Brits were inventing a bogeyman so as to cling to power and, for some diabolical reason, grab food from starving Bengalis; and secondly, that there was a serious Japanese threat which the Brits were not protecting the Indians from.

“Defense,” in this sense, merely served as the ideological cover by means of which the poor of the province were disadvantaged to the point of mass starvation. When the city was bombed by the Japanese in 1943, as I will detail in chapter five, the colonial State’s rhetoric of “defense” was revealed to be extremely hollow. Calcutta was, in fact, almost entirely undefended, and Japan was able to mount a large-scale attack, in broad daylight, unopposed. Meanwhile industrial laborers of Calcutta, whose “priority” had been so central to the policies which had precipitated famine, were revealed to be of less than vital importance to either the industrial firms that relied on their labor, or the colonial administration, which had long cited the welfare of Calcutta’s labor force as central to their war-time economic policies in Bengal. In the wake of the bombing, the bodies of dock workers were left unidentified and untended, and afforded little more concern than the hundreds of thousands who had died of hunger that same year.

Why did the Brits not give a proper burial to these dock workers? The answer is that the Brits did not live in Bengal. Bengalis did. Why did the Brits not order the Bengalis to do something to help their compatriots? The answer is that the Bengalis would not listen. Indeed, they were not legally obliged to do so. They had autonomy. They were answerable to their own elected Government. But that Government never declared a famine.

Mukherjee gives a curious account of the manner in which White RAF officials removed bodies and complained of the inaction of the Indian civilians- which also impugned British business leaders who paid those Indians their salaries.

 "Who did the actual handling and removal of corpses?" The - perhaps at the time, seemingly innocuous - answer was given: "R.A.F. and other European Officers volunteered to lift and remove bodies to mortuary in lorry loaded by the R.A.F.."  .... In the subsequent days, with the number of "unidentified" bodies generating public and administrative unease, the record was summarily clarified. More than two weeks after the bombing, the A.R.P. Controller for the Railways sent a memo asking the Home Department to "kindly correct" query 15 (i) to read, in answer to who had moved corpses: "Volunteers from among the B.N.R. officials, and Indians, including a Sikh, 2 Brahmins, and Indian Christians of the B.N.R. Sanitary Staff... with the help of a lorry provided by No. 978 Squadron R.A.F.." Nothing remained of the R.A.F. but the lorry, and in the place of their personnel, now sat this somewhat comical "rainbow coalition" of colonial Indian cooperation. 

Mukherjee appears to have a sharp eye for the failings of his own people. Yet he pretends everything was Whiteys fault. Why? Is it because he teaches at an American, not Indian, University?

It is an uncomfortable fact that Bengal suffered two big famines because of the incompetence and corruption of its Muslim politicians. The second time around- under Mujibur Rahman- the Brits were long gone. Still, the Americans had denied food assistance because the Bangladeshis were selling jute to Cuba. Perhaps Mukherjee is laying the foundation for a new chapter in Grievance Studies such that blame for the Bengal Famine is fastened on Americans and their demand for ice which reduced fish consumption among Bengalis and thus caused them to lose their humanity.

Mukherjee's rhetoric attains its highest pitch of indignation when discussing the disposal of dead bodies.

In the countryside, bodies lay were they had fallen, rotted in the sun, or were torn apart by wild animals.

This suggests that the Bengali people lacked civic virtues. It is odd that, long after Pakistan had become independent, Mujibur Rahman could write, after the 1970 Cyclone Bhola, ‘We have a large army but it is left to the British marines to bury our dead.’ Why did the native people feel unable to dispose of their own dead?

In Calcutta, which had its international image to maintain,

During a War, no city has an 'international image' to maintain. Mukherjee is being silly.

however, corpses needed to be removed from public view, categorized and disposed of in orderly fashion.

For hygienic reasons.

But because famine victims were the most marginal citizens of empire, the record kept of corpses collected by the authorities in Calcutta was extremely limited.

This is a reflection on Bengali politicians and administrators. White people were not employed in this sort of job. Some Whites may have volunteered to move bodies after a Japanese air-raid but this was not the job they were paid to do.

In fact, the sole criteria used to classify the dead—as was also the case after the Japanese bombings—was religious affiliation. Ostensibly such distinctions were made in order to conform with religious practices concerning the disposal of the dead (Hindus cremate and Muslims bury), but given the total lack of concern or care that was afforded these bodies before death, such belated delicacy speaks of less culturally sensitive motivations as well.

Rubbish! A petty clerk had a genuine fear of being lynched if he cremated a Muslim or buried a Hindu. Not being killed by a mob was a strong motivator. 'Belated delicacy' only exists in Mukherjee's fevered imagination.

Even determining how authorities went about “identifying” the “religious affiliations” of these destroyed bodies is entirely unclear from the historic record.

Idiotic! The man is Bengali. Does he not know how Bengalis can tell who is of what religion? I suppose he thinks Bengali peasants wore zoot suits and berets. In that case, you'd need to check dicks to see who was or wasn't circumcised.

In this light, that the state was want to recognize these otherwise nameless and abandoned corpses as simply “Hindu” or “Muslim,” must also be seen as an extension of the simplistic binary which they were want to categorize the population of India more generally.

Utter shite! They categorized the population of India into Princes, big landowners, educated professionals and civil servants, and so forth. The Muslim Bengali was not highly regarded whereas the Muslim Pathan or Punjabi- so called 'martial races'- were respected.

It is quite true that the Muslim League, as well as Fazl ul Haq who endorsed the Lahore Resolution, did see India in terms of a simple 'Hindu/ Muslim' binary. It is also true that they took power democratically and proceeded to ethnically cleanse Hindus or make their lives intolerable. But this was not British policy. 

That even corpses were thus understood by the State, lent a certain biological “proof” to the long-advanced discursive argument that the Hindu/Muslim distinction, alone, was paramount in understanding the Indian population.

This was the distinction Jinnah and Iqbal and Shurawardy and so forth insisted on.

Together with the cheapening of life that famine and war entailed, the contention that communal affiliation adhered to the very bodies of the citizens of Bengal represented a dark portent of the violence to come. Among the population of Calcutta there was yet, however, a remarkable solidarity of purpose, which was expressed in large anti-colonial demonstrations that rocked the city in late 1945 and early 1946.

So, these idiots were demonstrating against a Colonialism which had already disappeared. This type of solidarity was utterly foolish. Anyway 'Direct Action Day' was soon to drive that point home. The Muslims got their 'moth eaten' Pakistan. According to a Bangladeshi writer, those Bengali Muslims who chose to emigrate from the West to the East did so for purely economic reasons. Not so the Hindus expelled from the East. The Communists, needless to say, endorsed not just the creation of Pakistan- which entailed ethnic cleansing- as well as that of Israel.

The main political parties, Congress and the Muslim League, meanwhile, were busy jockeying for position in a future independent India, and so distanced themselves from the political will of the people, continuing to angle for a more narrowly “disciplined” constituency that would do their political bidding.  

What on earth was 'the political will of the people'? Mukherjee has depicted them as utterly bestial. They let their compatriots die in the streets and won't even dispose of their corpses for hygienic reasons unless paid to do so by the State.

When Colonialism was at its height and India was turning a profit for the Brits, this 'political will' was nowhere on display. The Brits had enjoyed 'disciplined' consituencies in their Presidencies. If they hadn't they'd have made a loss and there would have been no Empire in India.

The harvest of 1945, meanwhile, had been a bad one, and newspapers were again running headlines that millions were doomed to die of starvation in the coming year. A high-level Cabinet Mission had also been sent from London to negotiate a final settlement for a transfer of power, but had broken down around the intractable issue of Pakistan. In this context, with Bengal again careening into starvation by the summer of 1946, violence erupted in Calcutta on an unprecedented scale—and this time it was directed, not at the colonial state, but at fellow inhabitants of the city, Hindu and Muslim.

The Calcutta Riots That the Calcutta riots of 1946 (often referred to as the “Great Calcutta Killings”) were a catalyst and point of departure for the catastrophic violence that accompanied the partition of India, is a fact that is widely acknowledged by many historians, but about the Calcutta riots themselves very little has been written.

Why are more Bengalis, or half-Bengalis, writing big fat books full of stupid lies about Direct Action Day? If not a Mukherjee or a Sen, at least a Chatterjee could write a hefty tome proving

1) all Bengali Muslims were non-violent Belgian nuns living in convents in Europe and thus they couldn't have killed any non-Muslims

2) Hindus of all castes kill and eat Muslims even if this means having to raid convents in Europe so as to bring back some sweet and innocent Muslims to kill and eat. 

Not a single full length monograph has been published, and minimal scholarship exists. Very little of anything that has been written on the topic, moreover, gives any plausible explanation of the extent and ferocity of the cataclysmic violence that devastated the city in August 1946. Participation was extremely widespread and defies the simple logic of political instigation, which is the most commonly attributed cause.

Punjab had worse massacres. The cause couldn't have been famine. It must have been Jinnah's demand for Pakistan.  

The sheer scale of the violence committed is also not easily explained by political provocation. What were the larger socio-political factors at work? What was at stake for participants? What historical variables influenced the course of events? And why was the violence so pervasive? Towards an answer to these questions historian Ayesha Jalal notes that the Calcutta riots were “just one symptom of a more generalized and diverse unrest … (engendered by) the endemic rivalry of scarce resources.”

Resources were always scarce. Yet not till an elected Premier declared a 'Direction Action Day' when civil servants were given a day off to run riot was there such a prolonged blood-letting. It decided the fate of Calcutta. Had the Muslims prevailed it would be part of Bangladesh. But it was the Hindus who won because Hindu industrialists and migrants from other parts of India were determined to protect their wealth or their livelihoods. That is why Calcutta is part of India.

The received wisdom on the riots, she contends, has proven insufficient: “everyone who describes these killings, runs for the shelter of communalism to explain the inexplicable, or more accurately the unacceptable, face of violence. But the killings still await their historian.”

Ayesha Jalal might not be able to explain Direct Action Day from a Marxist perspective but she isn't particularly bright. There was money in Calcutta. It had a large criminal underclass. It was worth killing over.

The most commonly advanced theory to explain the Calcutta riots of 1946—which represented a scale of urban violence entirely unprecedented in India—is the acrimony between Congress and the Muslim League that followed in the wake of Britain’s failed Cabinet Mission in the summer of 1946. According to this line of thought, the Muslim League’s call for “Direct Action” after the collapse of negotiations is cited, de facto, as sufficient explanation for the violence that laid ruin to Calcutta.

Shurawardy thought his goons would prevail. But the Hindu industrialists and Punjabi and Bihari immigrants were prepared and took the fight to the enemy. The force of numbers told. Moreover, the Indian Army regiments available included Gurkhas who were Hindus. Muslim soldiers tended to be from Punjab and preferred Sikhs to the local people. Thus the defeat of the Muslims was a foregone conclusion. However, had it been a simple matter of Bengali versus Bengali, the Muslims would have prevailed. Indeed, the Province may have remained united as a separate nation.

Shurawardy would later claim that his enemies had not tried to retain Calcutta for Pakistan because then Calcutta would have had to be the Capital. Thus the Bengalis would have dominated the new nation. This was of course a fantasy. The 'martial races' of the West wing looked down on the darker skinned Bengali. Still, a United Bengal was a possibility. Obviously this would have involved the steady decline and marginalization of the Hindu element- but that could still happen under Mamta. This may improve economic and human development outcomes because the bhadralok intelligentsia gets disintermediated.

The League’s program of “Direct Action,” however, was, in itself, merely an indefinite political posture taken by the central command of the All-India Muslim League. It included no explicit call for violence and was, moreover, intended as a mass movement against the British, at least as much as against Congress supporters, no less Hindus more generally.

What was the point of a movement against the Brits when they had ants in their pants to get out as soon as possible? The 'Wavell plan' was to evacuate the Whites from the South and the East for embarkation from Karachi.

The Muslim League, above all else, wanted to prove that it, like Congress, could organize mass protest.

Muslims had shown they could do mass protest at the time of Khilafat. Shurawardy was interested in seeing if the Hindus would observe a 'hartal' at his command. They wouldn't. The next question was if some blood letting would change their minds. However the non Bengali industrialists and workers were determined to fight for their place in the Sun. They prevailed and would have been backed by the Army because of a prejudice against the 'unmartial' Bengalis- Muslim or otherwise. On the other hand, the industrialists did not want to ethnically cleanse Calcutta. The just wanted to keep its money making power in Indian, not Pakistani, hands.

In fact, Direct Action Day was observed peacefully all across India—while only in Calcutta was there mass violence. That Muslims—mostly poor and immigrant—comprised only 25 per cent of the population of Calcutta at the time, would also tend to make explanations of one-sided Muslim instigation implausible. It is, furthermore, generally accepted—though no reliable statistics were ever compiled—that more Muslims were killed in the violence than Hindus.

There is no great mystery here. Bengali Hindus may have been in the majority- but they were cowardly and factionalized.  Had the Hindus observed the hartal it would have meant that Calcutta could be claimed for Pakistan- or else a separate unified Bengal was on the table. Shurawardy took a punt on intimidating the Hindus. But Marwaris and Sikhs and Biharis were determined to give the Muslims a bloody nose. However, it wasn't the Calcutta riots which was decisive. Rather it was Liaquat's out-maneuvering Patel by threatening to tax the Hindu businessman out of existence.

In the most often cited, and most thorough work to date on the topic, Kolkata University historian Suranjan Das expands on the logic of political instigation. In his 1991 book, Communal Riots in Bengal: 1905–1947, Das engages in a meticulous and extremely well-researched survey of Hindu/Muslim conflict in Bengal during the twentieth-century, concluding with a chapter that is devoted primarily to the Great Calcutta Killings. Previous riots in Calcutta—most notably those in 1918 and 1926—Das contends, provided “a channel for an expression of the socio-economic grievances of the lower social order.”

In other words, the Bengalis are a shitty people. They won't bury their dead but will happily commit mayhem if they have socio-economic grievances even though behaving like beasts does not ameliorate one's socio-economic position in any way.

In these cases, Das argues, “the riotous crowd had their own perceptions [and] their participation in the violence was dictated as much by their own consciousness as by a response to mobilization attempts by communal leaders.”

The 'consciousness' of Bengalis leads them to kill random dudes. What a strange discovery for a Bengali intellectual to make!

The 1946 riots, however, Das concludes, “were organized and overtly communal; religious and political, and not class or economic considerations, primarily determined the crowds’ choice of targets.”23 The murderous mobs in 1946, he adds, “Hindu as well as Muslim— came to be motivated by a kind of political legitimization.” 

Das goes even further to suggest that in 1946 “the rioting crowd appears to have been broadly aware of the objective of the violence in which it was participating. It was inspired by the same sense of ‘moral duty’ as had motivated the French revolutionary crowd to perform tasks which the magistrates had shown themselves unwilling to do.”

Das is a Hindu. So was Mukherjee's father. Perhaps the aspect of their rhetoric which I find bizarre is just a coded way of saying 'Muslim Bengalis are horrible.'

This is not a sensible view. Relations between Indians and Bangladeshis are extremely cordial- more so between Bengali speakers, irrespective of religion- especially among intellectuals.

The only other explanation is that Bengali historians are as stupid as shit or are content to appear so in order to genuflect to Foucault or some other such dead white cretin.

Mukherjee knows full well that lots of places suffered famine because of the War. There were other places which had ethnic cleansing but no famine. There is no link between the two things whatsoever. But, because Bengal is so special- i.e. its people are assumed to be utterly bestial- it can have a 'biopolitics' indicative of Bengalis belonging to a wholly different species than the rest of humanity.

But, in fact, the violence during the 1946 Calcutta riots was highly variegated and the list of motivations, objectives, grievances and expressions, is hardly exhausted by an examination of communally minded political instigation, and, most importantly, the socio-economic context in which the riots took place can not be so easily dismissed. This context, it should be understood, was defined above all else by famine. Das does mention the impact that famine had on the population of Bengal, noting: The ‘man-made famine’ of 1943 was [a] devastating experience for the Calcuttans, as thousands of hungry people from all parts of the province moved to Calcutta, begging even for gruel when they lost hope of being given rice. Great numbers starved to death on open streets, precipitating some of Calcutta’s worst ever epidemics of cholera, malaria and smallpox… in popular perception these developments reduced the value of human lives. There was a brutalization of consciousness on a mass scale, as if the people were being prepared for the inhuman episode of August 1946. But Das’s emphasis on the political aspects of the violence obscures the more pervasive structural relationship between famine and riots in Bengal. The Bengal Famine was not merely a psychological prelude to the riots, it was the primary feature of the socio-political landscape in which they took place. By 1946 Bengal represented a society in which any idea of “moral duty” had been so attenuated by the ravages of famine and the uncertainties of war, that for many millions it can be said to have ceased to exist. Famine had not merely “brutalized the consciousness” of the population, it had distorted and deformed certain fundamental structures that define daily existence. Meanings of concepts like “health,” “territory,” “hunger,” “home,” “community,” and “priority” (to cite just a few) had gone through many complicated and rapid layers of transformation in the tumult of war, starvation, and death. Famine and war had also transformed the geo-political importance of Calcutta. Millions had died—and continued to die—of deprivation and disease, so that Calcutta, the colonial war effort, and Capital could thrive. With the countryside increasingly understood as merely a buffer zone to the city, both in terms of defense and supply, establishing a legitimate foothold in the city had increasingly meant the difference between life and death. “Belonging” to Calcutta meant “priority,” which, in turn, meant survival. Meanwhile, bodies themselves became tokens of social value, with certain bodies—the bodies of the poor and disempowered—sacrificed for those deemed “essential.” In this way, the bio-politics of famine also congealed identities, hardening distinctions in the furnace of necessity and survival, transforming, but at the same time cementing, affiliations of community, class, and caste.

This all sheer baloney. There were plenty of fat people waddling around Calcutta while the poor starved. They weren't doing anything 'essential' at all. This is because the Brits weren't running things. The Bengalis were. They did not understand that in exchanging a British for a Japanese Emperor, they would be slitting their own throats. Foucaultian biopolitics has no purchase in a situation where there is merely corruption, incompetence, factionalism and- as in the writing of Mukherjee or Das or Sen or any other such bhadralok fathead- a moral passing of the buck of the most absurd and pseudo intellectual sort possible.

Bengal, like most parts of India, had a large economically marginal population which nobody wanted 'biopower' over because nothing could be gained by it. The game was not worth the candle.  Such bodies weren't 'tokens off social value' they were someone else's problem. If they died, the Bengalis could indulge in pious indignation at the callousness of some wholly unconnected community. The Bengali famine made this clear. It led to no great political upheaval.

Calcutta at that time was much more important, industrially speaking, than Hong Kong or Singapore. But the British 'managing agencies' were already cash strapped and letting in Marwaris on their boards. After Independence, most such firms were taken over by Marwaris and were very quickly run into the ground. This was even before the Bengali intellectual class turned to the Left.

Mukherjee's book is worth reading. But it seems more an exercise in self-loathing than a genuine contribution to 'Grievance Studies'.

Consider this passage about the Japanese air-raids on Calcutta

The house that my father grew up in, on Mominpore Road, was one of those dwellings that had been damaged in the raid, and was never made whole again.

Because the Brits had left. It was their job to make Daddy's house whole again. Bengalis are too righteous to repair their own houses so as to let Perfidious Albion of the hook.

Apart from the cracks in the foundation that had resulted from close proximity to the bomb blasts on the docks, there was also unseen damage seemed to linger on indefinitely. My father carried with him, for the rest of his life, a profound and deep seated terror and anxiety that had been imprinted on him by this attack.

Coz he hadn't the nous to repair his own house and thus have some confidence that the roof might not collapse on his sleeping family killing or maiming some of them.

Our family's connection to the docks and to the air raids themselves had been, to be sure, uncommonly extensive. His father, the retired policeman with dwindling accounts, had property along the docks in the bustee settlements of migrant laborers, whom he shook down for rent on most weekends

So grand-daddy was an extortionist not a good cop working to make the community safe and prosperous.

 My father's older brother - who even at this time was more or less the head of the household at 24 years of age - was an A.R.P. warden in Mominpore. Under his jurisdiction the morgue, less than a mile from the house, also fell.

So, if Bengalis had behaved with decency at that time, Jaman would know about it even if the thing was not documented in the archives.

The neighborhood itself was inhabited mostly be underemployed and impoverished laborers associated with the docks and its concomitant factories, warehouses and workshops, and had been swamped after the bombing with terrified dock laborers "lying up" in its by-lanes and bazaars. Flocks of "sightseers" had also moved through the area to observe the damage - and had moved back out bearing witness.

Bearing witness but not shifting any dead bodies or performing any type of humanitarian service. Bengalis are not just bestial, they are voyeuristic beasts.

Nowhere in Calcutta, in fact, could the "rumors," panic and trepidation have been more pronounced. Surely the complex of factors involved must have impacted my father's young mind profoundly. But it was simply, in fact, the actual visceral, terrifying and apocalyptic sound and magnitude of the blasts that had shattered his nerves and continued to haunt him throughout his life.

What a frail flower he was to be sure! His son was especially qualified to become a curator of snowflakes in the 'safe space' of some American campus.

He had already lived in midst of famine, with bodies, particularly in that area of the city, pilling up on the streets day by day. And he would live through, after only a very short interval, events that one would imagine would be even more deeply traumatic. But, perhaps because of his age at the time, or perhaps because of his temperament, the impression left on him from bombing of the docks was the deepest and most nagging of all. He never described (and possibly could not have even processed at such an age) the details of the event. In fact, from listening to his stories, I was under the impression that Calcutta had been bombed almost every night - as perhaps he was. He only referred to the bombings as the shattering of windows, the cracking of the foundation, and the repeated ear splitting reports that made him feel that the world itself was coming to an end. It was a story without beginning or end. No time frame or outline of events seemed to punctuate his memories and make them chronological. The bombings, in this sense, were memory without context. 

Mukherjee's book too is memory without context. Like the brief air raid on Calcutta which, for his father, was endless and outside Time, so too is the Bengal Famine something endless and outside time for our author.

He records the end of the famine in a manner which links it to the appointment of Wavell as Viceroy.

 By December of 1943 it was apparent that the all-important aman crop, harvested in late autumn, would be a bumper crop. With London's continued refusal of imports, this promising aman yield, above all else, was being counted on to relieve famine. The new Viceroy, Field Marshall Archibald Wavell had also managed to implement an extensive and efficient military relief operation, almost overnight. Major-General Stuart (in over-all charge of military assistance) had, at his command, twelve to fifteen thousand British troops to aid relief operations, and Major-General Wakely (in charge of movements) was given considerable transportation priority to move rice out of Calcutta and into the districts. Although the official line was still that famine had been precipitated by the hoarding of cultivators, orders were passed that seemed to belie a less perfunctory understanding of the causes of famine. The export of rice and paddy from Bengal was strictly prohibited early in December.m Direct purchases from large industrial firms were banned, and a ban was also levied on the movement of rice and paddy out of 12 principle rice-growing districts. Perhaps most importantly of all, the Central Government in New Delhi committed itself to feed Calcutta through direct imports from outside of Bengal.

That was the great advantage of getting rid of the populist Haq and putting in the deeply conservative Nizammudin.  The Bangladesh famine of the Seventies was associated with the bungling of the charismatic populist Mujib but did not recur under the deeply boring dictator Zia.

Mukherjee concludes by trying to link the Famine with the communal blood-letting associated with the Muslim League program and the eventual partition of the country. However, that blood letting was worse in Punjab, where there was no famine, than in Bengal. Why? You don't have to kill people of another community if they have no fighting spirit. In Calcutta, the Hindus had fighting spirit and beat the Muslims which is why Calcutta is in India not Bangladesh. In East Bengal, the Hindus who were targeted had little fighting spirit. They did not- as Indian Muslim refugees had done- target Muslims in Hindu majority districts and throw them out so as to resettle on their land. The relatively supine nature of the Bengali, both Hindu and Muslim, led to both independent India and Pakistan draining Bengal of wealth to pay for industrialization elsewhere. Bengal began to fall behind. In the case of Pakistan, discrimination against Bengalis was racist and open- indeed, it featured militarized genocide of a particularly repugnant sort. In India, Bengalis were honored for their intellect and aesthetic sense but Bengal itself declined economically, at least partly because of economic policies formulated in New Delhi. It is true that Bengali mathematical economists and other such intellectuals contributed to this foolish policy but that does not alter the fact that Bengal's decline is not wholly the fault of its own noble-minded but somewhat febrile and silly political and polemical proclivities. Still, on balance, it must be said buddhijivis buggered Bengal.