|
Kalpana Bardhan's website for recent translations (by herself and, to the extent possible, by others) from some of the best works of Bengali/Bangla literature and social studies.
This website is for recent works of translation from Bengali/Bangla fiction, memoir, essay, poetry, pieces not yet out in printed form. Send me (as e-mail attachment:kalpanabardhan@bangla-translator.net) your as-yet unpublished works of translation (or translation-related ideas) in literature & in social/cultural studies.
|
The Bengal Famine of 1943-44: a drawing and a story
The drawing one of many done by Zainul Abedin .
Born in 1914, the young Zainul Abedin traveled through parts of famine-ravaged Bengal doing a series of sketches which, first published in the Calcutta daily Swadhinata, and exhibited in London and Paris in 1948, proved highly effective in raising public consciousness of the century's worst famine that was man-made, a result of the scorched-earth policy of the colonial administration,to help the British fight the Japanese on the Burma front, a result also of major default in taking the steps that would have prevented the foreseeable massive death from starvation. The city residents were covered by rations of grains and cloth, but the masses of landless and near-landless rural population were not. Starving, they trekked to the city, dying either on the way or on the city streets, often too late to save through ill-prepared relief kitchens.
|
|
WHY DIDN'T THEY SNATCH FOOD TO EAT?
a story by Manik Bandyopadhyay
(translation by Kalpana bardhan from the Bengali short story, "chhiniye khaye ni keno?" about the 1943 famine; the story below was written in the mid-forties)
|
|
|
-
"Dying in hordes, they still didn’t snatch the food to eat. You know why, Babu?
"Not one, not ten, but hundreds, hundreds of thousands, they went to their deaths. They stretched their hands to beg, tossed in the pain of hunger, they begged for the gruel drained off cooked rice to make it fluffy, they fought with stray dogs pawing through rotting dumps, but they did not put their hands to snatch food. Yet food was within their reach. With stacks of good-to-eat stuff in the shops, they waited on the roadside before those shops to lick the serving leaves for bits of syrup and crumbs. The marketplaces had piles of fruits and vegetables and the grocery shops and warehouses held rice and lentils, salt and oil, the illegal godowns were bursting with rice, the storerooms of rich homes stocking ten to twenty years’ worth of food. The word ‘food’ gained currency thanks to you people, Babu, so that even the stupidest weaver of the remotest village know what the word means. They know that the staples of rice, lentils, oil and salt that disappear through hidden transactions from one godown to another, bypassing the hungry mouths of the poor, are called food. Yes, they do know that fish-and-meat, milk-and-butter, those are also food. You’ve given currency to the word food to save your work of saying and writing down ten different names for ten kinds of food; you’ve shouted slogans demanding that the food problem be solved. Well, as far as they’re concerned, you didn’t need to bother so much. You could just as well use the word rice. Just rice, cleaned or not, bug-infested or not, any kind of rice in any form. The people who died from hunger were, of course, not asking for meat-fish, milk-butter, oil-salt. They could’ve done with just some rice, without your having to worry about ‘food.’ There were leaves on trees, roots in forests, and they wouldn’t have died. One can live even by chewing up and swallowing just a handful of dry, uncooked rice a day. You won’t believe it, Babu, but one can. No matter how weak they’d get on that diet, they could go on barely surviving."
Outside the shed of his hut, afternoon shade was turning to dusk over the thatched huts surrounded by farmlands and barns and the usual clusters of mango-jaam-jackfruit trees. Sitting on his haunches, Jugi absently takes chest-filling puffs of tobacco smoke and keeps slowly releasing the smoke. Smoking right in front of me, without the slightest pretense to hide it or turn aside a bit in inhaling or exhaling. Something quite noticeable. After preparing his hookah-top tobacco bowl, he has of course offered it first to me, the elbow of his offering right hand politely touched by his left hand. When I was young in age I could take in the hot smoke off that strong tobacco, but no longer. I light a cigarette and offer him one. Jugi accepts it with a mild smile and saves it up behind his ear.
I had heard that he was a well-known dacoit, that hearing his name made people tremble. What I had imagined him to look was not at all how he actually looked. A small squat man, his body must be quite strong, but nothing more than that. Not even the legendary shoulder-length bushy hair. Maybe they had close-cropped the hair while he was in jail, and it hasn’t have the time to grow. I have read about native bandits famous for their running on stilts, of stopping bullets with fast-whizzing clubs, of their mounting an attack on a wealthy zamindar house after giving notice beforehand, of their extreme cruelty to the rich and kindness to the poor, I’ve read stories of wiles and generosities of those famous dacoits , with immense bodies and inhumanly strange physical strength. The kind of bodies seeing which got people in locked jaws, the kind of shouts hearing which caused women several miles away to miscarry. Robbing money from the rich, they distributed it among the poor. At the time of the famine, the bandit Jugi too supposedly took upon himself the noble task of saving people’s lives. He used, too, to tend to the dying people he came across on his forays, robbed foodstuff as the opportunity arose and gave it away. They say he rescued several young women by snatching them away right from the grips of their buyers. In an attempt to rob a rice boat of the government on the Fifteen-Mile canal, he got caught and was sentenced to two years in jail.
Seeing that in his reveries Jugi had lost track of his point, I reminded him, "You were talking of why they died instead of snatching food."
"Oh yes, Babu, yes. I know why they didn’t snatch food, I’m the only one who knows that. Nobody else does. I’ve asked many gentlemen like you, they all talk about this or that, in complicated, roundabout explanations, tall tales really. All pointless talk, big talk. Nothing of the main thing. How can they, when they really know nothing of it. One babu said – most of them are poor farmers, honest harmless folks, never done anything illegal, can’t even think of robbing to eat. Makes me mad as on fire! Makes me want to slap the bearded cheek and tweak the ears. Doing illegal things, illegal! A chap who knows he’s going to die unless he snatches some food worrying about its being illegal and getting caught by the police, being put in jail. He’d have been lucky to be put in jail. Talk of laws for a chap who’s forced to sell his wife and daughter, make whores of them, forced to strangle another weaker near-dead fellow for a handful of broken rice if a chance arises. Another babu said –I’ll tell you what, Jugi, the thing is that they’re all uneducated, poor tillers of the soil, they believe in fate, they died thinking it was the gods’ will they starve to death, so they didn’t bother to eat by robbing. Have you heard of such a thing, Babu, such gut-frying stuff to show off scholarship? Snakebite, disease, fire, flood, famine, these things come as ill luck, gods’ curse, who doesn’t know that? But don’t people put binding over snakebite, don’t they get the healer? In sickness, don’t they take herb-extracts and cures, don’t they vow offerings to the gods? When there’s a fire, do they sit resigned on the porch smoking tobacco? When the waters rise, don’t they try to save their crops? Didn’t they sell everything they got so as to eat, everything including their children, wives, sisters? Didn’t they run for the city, to the relief centers the babus arranged? Yes they believe in fate, yes they know they’ll die if that’s their fate, but won’t they try even once and see if they can live on by snatching food? Yet another babu said – "
"I know what the babus say, Jugi. Tell me what you think."
"Listen to this one, Babu, it’s funny, it will make you laugh. What did he say? He said – eating half-full, going hungry, fasting, these they’re used to for ages. Aren’t they selling their pots and pans, their land and things all their lives for the sake of their stomachs? He said famine was an yearly thing for them. Talking of it really made him teary-voiced, the babu did feel for the poor. He blew his nose, cleared his throat, and said, so they tried their usual way to live when the big famine came, the way they handle it when there’s no rice at home. I said, babu, I grant you that they were used to go hungry. But, Babu, were they also used to dying of hunger?"
Jugi bursts I into a laughter – ha-ha-ha! I get it that even after many tellings to many people, this old macabre joke hasn’t lost its juice to him.
"I said, imagine a grocery shop, with a stock of rice in it. Only two or three men inside the shop. Twenty or thirty people who have gone without food for seven days, people who know they can live if they get hold of that little stock of rice and otherwise they’re going to die. Even if they don’t think it out like that, they know the hunger gnawing at their guts. If they ganged up to raid it, there weren’t enough people in the store to stop them. Instead of doing it, why did they whimper merely begging for some? When the storekeeper shooed at them, why did they limp away to beg elsewhere? So I’ve seen them so many times not making use of good opportunities to snatch away to eat. merely crying and begging for food and dying without it. The babu hummed and hawed and gave some explanation. Mentioning the habit of going hungry, of not knowing how to band together to rob, not being used to even thinking of it, instead of just fighting with each other for pathetic crumbs. Not really an answer to my question. How can he answer when he doesn’t know himself? I know the answer. Only me, no one else. Now listen to me."
"Did you call me?" It was dark inside the hut, my eyes went there as soon as a lamp was lit. Lamp in hand, out came a gangling young woman dressed in a cheap black-bordered sari, unbleached white as in mill-made. The thought crossed mind if she’s one of the girls Jugi had rescued. Then it occurred to me that after spending two years in jail Jugi had been out just about three months ago.
"Bring me some tobacco, will you," Jugi said to her.
The girl set the lamp down by the threshold and went to prepare the tobacco.
"My wife," Jugi said, "She was lost. After coming out of the jail, I looked for her for a month to a month-and-a-half and found her downtown."
Guessing what had happened from that slight hint, I kept silent. Outside, the light of day all gone, the light of a nearly full moon was growing clearer.
"As I was saying, Babu. You know all about those murderous days, you’ve seen with your own eyes. I don’t have to go into details for you. I was quite taken aback at the time. In my mind a terribly sadness from seeing people fallen dead in the streets from starvation. And anger burning through my body, a terrible burning, fresh from seeing the activities of the Saha landlord, of Nanda the godown-owner, Karim-saheb the government officer, of Pulinbabu and his likes. I even went down to Calcutta and spent a week there looking around, walking the streets. Couldn’t make no sense of the matter. The more I kept thinking about it, the more my head felt dumbed, there was no lack of rice: then why were so many people letting themselves die instead of snatching it to feed themselves? Even the cows and gets, when there’s nothing on the fields, go into cropfields, don’t budge easily even when beaten with sticks, they get in the gardens to eat the flower plants, they pull thatch off the roofs of homes and eat. And what were these humans doing? I did rob a couple of places for paddy and rice, and gave it away here and there, but my mind stayed troubled. By myself, with two-to-four mates at the most, how many was I going to feed for how long by robbing? I never had a fixed gang of my own, I wasn’t really a professional dacoit, never mind the bad things people and the police say about me. I’m not going to hide it from you, I’ve occasionally set up a gang and looted cash and jewelry, did some beating up, but never had I killed anyone in my entire father-given life, if a father did give me life. Once the job was done, I always broke up the gang. Now I tried making a gang to loot rice and paddy instead of money, but except for just two, none of my mates came up for it! After hearing that I was going to rob rice and paddy instead of gold jewelry, and that too to give away, they thought I must have lost my nuts or was joking with them. The two that came with me were youngsters in age, respected me as a master in the trade. With just two, tell me, how could I go for big catches, just a few easy bundles on the side, some two-to-ten maunds here and there, running out almost as soon as started giving out. All those people throughout the land with their bellies covered like little bats with bare skin – how many could I give to? Forget it, I decided! Enough of this luxury of bravado. How can this flood of death be stopped by my dyke of two handfuls of sand? Maybe I could have some result if I tried something instead. I got to teach those starving to death how to snatch food for themselves. If they don’t want to do something to fill their own bellies, then why should I bother! No? What do you say, Babu?
Jugi’s wife, whom he had retrieved from a city slum of ill repute and brought home, now came out blowing on the lighted tobacco bowl. On her rather longish plain face, lit red on and off by the bowl’s embers, I detected no stamp, none at all, of a fallen woman’s slum life; instead I saw the stamp of calm, unworried trust.
Setting the tobacco bowl she handed him atop the hookah, Jugi said, "You’re sitting here with me for this long," as his wife stood waiting for him to finish saying it, "but this poor man’s home has no means to offer you a cup of tea. Will you have a couple of crisp-sweet chidva moa, Babu? They’re freshly made with the season’s new date-palm gur."
Sensing his unease in having a gentleman as guest, I replied, "Of course I’ll have it. Asking after so long? Here I’m so hungry and thinking what’s the matter, doesn’t Jugi have any of the muri-chivda stuff at home that he isn’t offering me!" I half-glimpsed the smile on Jugi’s wife’s face.
"Downtown they had opened a relief center, to distribute khichri. I went there straight. I went in good disguise, in a ragged loincloth, bare bodied and unshaved. Still, as I hadn’t suffered starvation for a single day in the past two or three years, how can I blend in with those skin-and-bones ones there. They kept looking sideways at me, thinking where has this one come from. The macho man in charge of distributing the gruel-thin khichri shouted the moment he saw me – ‘What are you doing here, bastard, go work for your meal.’ One or two women who had been watching tried to get fresh with me, thinking I must have the means to feed them at least a few meals – maybe they had seen me sneak out downtown dressed in regular dhoti and shirt. The sight of those few women going at it brought tears to my eyes. Women, bones draped in wrinkled skin covered with boils and sores. From headlice bites, scratching like crazy the half-gone hair matted in dirt . Breasts like two dry clove-heads, hips pointed bones like two stick-ends. And the bad smell of their bodies, like from a rotting rat, a dead snake. Their attempts to steal a man’s heart for the sake of getting hold of at least one meal to fill their bellies!"
Jugi sank in a stunned sort of silence. Until his wife reappeared with a flat basket containing eight to ten chidva balls and coconut sweets of the tiny size usually offered to deities. His wife too was very thin and gangly – but healthy. As she offered me the platter, I noticed in the folds of her as-yet-unlaundered cheap sari over a blouseless torso her small breasts that would readily to fill with nectar if a baby were to come.
Jugi’s mood of deadly silence passes as he continues to look at her and says, "Did you take the Babu for a monster, hmm? Just a couple of those, leave the coconut sweets and remove the rest. So what if we don’t have a tumbler, the brass jug is scrubbed clean, bring it with the tubewell water stored in the claypot." Pausing a bit, he suddenly remarks to his wife in an apologetic tone, "Today I can’t manage to get some fish, Bindi."
"As if I’m dying for fish," Bindi opened her wifely sharp mouth after all this time.
"I kept telling them all," Jugi continued with me. "Why don’t you snatch and eat? Come, let’s band together and snatch what we need to eat. You do see what’s going on, most of the rice and lentils coming here to feed us khichri gets stolen. Why else should the khichri taste like salty water? Either way we’re going to die, so let’s die fighting to live. The bosses here getting to eat more on top of the plenty they do, and we to die hungry. Let’s snatch what’s ours to eat. Like this, I went on explaining to them, asking them in so many ways, but no one seemed able to hear what I was saying. Only mumbled drowsily, ‘What’s it you were saying, say that again.’ And fell back to drowsing. Right after taking the watery khichri in a single draft, though some of them would show some interest, express resentment at the injustice of so many having to starve amid so much food, by mid-afternoon they would grow drowsy again. Queuing up at the relief center, they’d fall into fighting each other about who was before whom for one measly mug of water off boiled rice-and-lentil – but seemed much less keen about snatching the rice and lentils to eat their fill.
"One day we heard that another government supply was just arrived after a long while, a fat supply this time, and real thick khichri was going to be distributed for not just a week but half a month. But, Babu, I was experienced enough seeing what went on. No matter how big the supplies that came, the khichri for not even one day was to be real khichri, most of the rice and lentils was to go in the black market. I knew a few people of importance downtown. Those people, I mean, I’m not going to hide it from you, they were sort of leaders of city thieves, cheats, goondas, low-life criminals, and the like good at robbing and knifing. Those few people were on good terms with all the higher-ups, none of the government or unofficial higher-ups could do the blackmarketing without their help. One of them had worked with me some years earlier. I had done him a big favor of saving him many years of jail sentence. He was nice to me, just a little. Through him I got together a few others, those too knew of me some, and with their help bluffing and playing the moves, I managed to pull something at the railway station. Something that caused quite a stir. The entire supply of rice and lentils, to the last sack, got to reach the relief center’s storeroom.
"And then, Babu, you’ve to believe me when I tell you this: for four full days batch after batch of the destitutes were fed on thick khichri and a boiled potato each with it. The khichri didn’t run out before half the crowd got it, no one shouted at them, shooing at them with ‘Scram now, wretches, come for the next feed.’ And, Babu, listen carefully to this, the main thing here. After a couple of days of having two meals of a mug each of real rice and lentils, those very wretches who hadn’t paid any attention earlier to my urgings to snatch food, were listening to my words with ears pricked up, they’re nodding in agreement and saying the same in their words – saying, the bastards cheating them off food that belonged to their mouths, it must all be snatched off their hands so we can live on two square meals a day. I still didn’t get to the bottom of the matter, my head felt confused. On the next day they seemed even more keen. The day after, a few of those same people came on their own to me and said they’re willing to raid the storage for rice and lentils, they’re going to cook for themselves. Here I was chanting the idea to them, so I must direct everything the right way, what to do when and how in order to loot the stocks from the storage.
"What a mistake I made that day, Babu. I thought, I can’t go about it haphazardly like this on the spur of the moment, I must train them and teach them the techniques the way I taught my gang before raiding the house of a zamindar with three guns, this time teach them how to go about looting food this time, not money. Thinking on this line, I postponed the raid for a few days. Overnight, half the stocks in storage were removed in military trucks. From next day the yellow water again in the name of khichri.
"That seemed to pump up their desire to eat by snatching. Some hundred and fifty men and women surrounded me demanding I lead them to rob rice and lentils. Even the little ones with them were jumping up and down for it.
"I knew that at least three thousand maunds of rice were stocked up in Baikuntha Saha’s godown. Just sitting there for nearly a month, waiting for disagreements among the bosses to resolve. It took me a couple of days to find its exact location, to work out the strategy about the opportunities and the timings. When I told the group of the plan to rob the rice stocked in the Saha storehouse, the response coming from them seemed to have weakened. I told them not just they’d stand to gain from it, but it’d help at least a thousand starving men, women and children to keep their body and soul together, still the response was sort of depressed, drowsy.
"The next day none of them seemed even to be paying attention to my words. As though they were again preoccupied with just the thought of getting that watery khichri in their mugs and had no mind to spare for anything else!
"That day I understood why so many were starving to death, why they weren’t snatching the food lying in such plenty within their reach. A day without food not only emaciates the body, it also weakens the urge to fight to live, to snatch and eat. It revives only after a couple of days of getting something little to eat. Well, that’s not surprising. Can’t understand why no one gets the point. Isn’t it written in the scriptures that grain is life? Without being fed, do cows give milk, or bullocks till fields? Do engines pull machines without being fed coal?
"There’s that story in Mahabharata of a sage who fasted and meditated day after day. One day he noticed that at the mouth of a hole in the ground some tiny live people the size of dolls were hanging from a thin root of grass, which was being nibbled on by a mouse. The sage said to them: what are you doing there, don’t you see the mouse nibbling at the roots, you’re all going to have a mighty fall on the earth below? The tiny people said to him: we’re your ancestors, dear; you’re the only surviving one of our lineage, you’re this grassroot we’re clinging to, yes look, that’s hell below us; get married, produce a son and save us from hell; the one gnawing at the root with sharp pointed teeth is Dharma. Dumbfounded, the sage promptly went and married the king’s daughter, a girl nourished on royal fare, so as to soon have a son and have his ancestors saved from hell. A year passed, then two years, then three, the king’s daughter did not become pregnant. Getting annoyed, the sage railed at her: Wife, what’s the matter with you? Are you barren, or what? The king’s daughter then let him have it in her loud ringing voice: Aren’t you ashamed to say it? A man becomes stick-thin from fasting and retreat in the forest meditating, he can’t eat, sleep, live for even a day with the wife he married, and then he turns around and asks his wife why she can’t give him a son, if she’s barren. Isn’t he ashamed? Yourself gone sterile from not eating, not able to do it, lost the power to do it, aren’t you ashamed to call your wife barren? Finally intuiting from her words the truth of the matter, the simple thing he hadn’t learned from all the meditating, the sage promptly went to the king and asked for an allowance. He then ate all he could of milk and butter, meat and pulau. You’ve to believe it, Babu, within a year the sage’s wife gives birth to a son –"
The wife of Jugi the dacoit came out at this point and said to him, "Isn’t it late? Doesn’t the Babu have to walk back over three miles?"
It just seemed so, don’t know if it was true or not, but it was hard not to notice her approaching motherhood, especially due to the girl’s gangly lanky build. Seemed as though in three or four months she was definitely going to make Jugi the father of a baby boy or girl. Walking in moonlight the four miles of village paths, I kept thinking: was Jugi that naïve, knowing so many things and not the plain fact of the minimum number of months it takes a woman to give birth after conceiving?
I was having trouble keeping pace with Jugi in walking the grounds of my own country. I stumbled where light angled off, winced from the pricking stubble of harvested fields, kept falling in the cubit-and-a-half gully by the unpaved paths. Jugi steered me and pulled me along through my bumbling and stumbling. Looking at his face I realized the error in my calculations, the mistake in my analysis. Jugi the dacoit was not that sage from the Mahabharata; it’s doubtful if heaven and hell were things that he was given to imagining; he might not be particular about preserving his lineage. After getting out from the prison of the English rulers and scouring through the slums of ill repute looking for his lost wife, now that he had found her and brought her home, he was not inclined to feeling unhappy merely because he was not the progenitor of the baby his wife was going to give birth to. He would be the father of his wife’s baby, son or daughter, regardless. It’s not in human nature to want to be pointlessly unhappy on account of trivial sentiments, sentiments that suit the likes of only those who can cause death to hundreds of thousands of parents and children by blunting even their inclination to snatch food to stem their hunger.
Is it not true that it was hunger that drove his wife to become lost? She had saved herself -- hadn’t she? -- by managing to eat by whatever means she had. After that, can there be any further question?
-
copyright for above translation: Kalpana Bardhan.
-
Quoting from or using any part of this page and the two other pages must be accompanied by acknowledgment of this website and of the translator.
|
|
|
|
|