During a debate in the British Parliament, Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery raised the Malthusian concept that something must be done to outstrip the pressure of population, which, he said, was increasing at the rate of 300,000 per month. This left little of a surplus for the individual farmer or purchaser. When the Bengal Famine Inquiry Commission, established by the government in 1944, said that, of all the provinces of India, Bengal was pre-eminent, in that it had the largest number of mouths to feed, it also declared that the province produced the largest amount of cereals of any province, and it grew jute as well. But, for millions, the balance between viability and family disaster was a very narrow one.
The 1943 drought, unexpected but not unprecedented, even in modern times – since, for example, there had been others in 1925 and 1927 – had its own influence on all three of the annual harvests. The province’s different seasonal crops had distinct names. The aus was a less important harvest sown in April and harvested in the monsoonal rain of August and September. It was a crop meant to see farmers and their families through a lean time in the autumn, and since it was eaten by poor people, among Hindus it was not considered appropriate for ceremonial purposes. Indeed, the aus is not a robust crop and needs to be parboiled to preserve it. The winter crop, aman, was sown in May or June in paddies that had begun to be flooded by the south-west monsoon, if it brought its normal rain to the fields. Harvested in November or December, the aman crop was intended to reach markets in the spring of the following year. It was of finer quality, and was the largest and most important crop from which the farmer took his family’s food, with – ideally – some left over to be marketed. The boro crop was planted in the broad irrigated regions of Bengal in November and harvested the following February or March.
Over the entirety of Bengal, coastal and inland, the 1943 harvest was no more than 5 per cent less than the crop harvested in late 1941 and early 1942, despite the tidal wave and drought. In the areas most affected, it did put the families of farmers and artisans in immediate peril. None of that should have killed the millions whose deaths are attributed to it.
There were similar conditions of landowning between Bengal and Ireland, and Bengal and Ethiopia. The Famine Commission estimated that 7.5 million families depended on the cultivation of land. Of these, fewer than 2 million families held between two and five acres. That is, nearly three out of four families either lived on fewer than two acres or were landless. In good times, then, farming families were able to sell their surplus rice to pay rent and buy necessities in the market. But bad times were upon them.
In November 1943, in addition to the other problems the Damodar River broke its banks and flooded large areas in Burdwan district. Hundreds of villages were devastated by the water, and rice fields lay utterly drowned beneath flood-water. Cholera now broke out and allied itself with other famine diseases.
The seasonal rains elsewhere than Burdwan had fallen and caused no natural disaster, and a fair aman crop planted on larger farms, including land farmed by sharecroppers, seemed likely. But in the later view of the Famine Inquiry Commission, the chief harvesting month of November was probably the critical month of the Bengal famine, since prices were still rising. It was at this point that the death rate reached its highest level. The acute period of starvation was passing, but epidemics were killing millions of the malnourished throughout the countryside. The disease that took more than any other was malaria.
The trigger for the Irish famine was an agent nearly as voracious as army worms, a fungal spore named phytophthora infestans, which either travelled to Europe from America, where there had been a report of blight, on the prevailing westerly wind from the Atlantic; arrived in the holds of American ships; or both. Early in its European career it would afflict crops, particularly in Kent and the Isle of Wight, and elsewhere in England and then Scotland. But resultant want was not as acute in Scotland and England as in Ireland. The Scots, for example, though reduced to hunger, had better supplies of oatmeal and better fishing than the Irish.
At the time, people knew nothing of the blight’s causation, and a Church of England clergyman, the Reverend J. M. Berkley, one of those clergymen whose undemanding work gave him room for natural research – which, in his case, led to an enormous understanding of moulds – and who described the blight as a ‘vampire fungus’, was not listened to.
Yet that is how it manifested itself in Ireland – one day the potato flowers were blooming and rejoicing the cottier’s heart, then, overnight, everything had rotted. The mysterious fungus would within forty years be identified, and a treatment devised – copper sulphate. But phytophthora infestans is still with us, having built a resistance to sprays used against it throughout the twentieth century. It has at various stages attacked grape harvests, still infiltrates potato and tomato crops, and is now responsible for the failure of at least half of Russia’s potato and tomato harvests. Most remarkably, it has also been considered by both the Russians and Americans as a potential instrument of biological warfare, a means of attacking the crops of the enemy.
The blight had led to a miserable Irish winter in 1845–6, but the people who planted their potato-seed crop in the spring of 1846 were full of hope for the late summer harvest. Then, after an early summer drought had in any case delayed the planting and growth of the tubers, continuous and heavy rainfall in late July and early August began to wash the spores of phytophthora infestans down to the tubers in the soil.
When, at the end of the summer of 1846, the potato flowers came out and gladdened the Irish, and indeed the government, an evil awakening of blight was about to occur. The fungus had survived the summer in the moist earth and now, amidst the rejoicing at the robustness of the crop, everything turned to mush as it had the year before, but in an even more widespread and fatal manner. The flower, the stalk, the tuber itself turned to putrescence. A famous Irish temperance campaigner, Father Matthew, a Capuchin monk who was travelling from Cork to Dublin in July, saw the plants ‘in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest. Returning on the 3rd inst [August] I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation.’
The summer of 1847 was spent in hope, but also in anxiety, and indeed in the autumn the crop was blighted again. In 1848 there was a remission from the blight after a less rainy summer, but because of the deaths, weakness or fevers of those who generally did the planting, as well as the fact that many people were labouring on the roads or had wandered to town looking for any form of relief, a much lesser number of potatoes had been sown in the previous spring. So the harvest in general was poor, the acreage under potatoes being barely more than 15 per cent of its 1845 level, with other crops down by 40 per cent. The blight returned in 1849. In 1850, too, it was back, though more local in its impact, and again less of a crop had been grown.
Thus, without intervention, one abnormal harvest could so diminish the number of people planting and harvesting that want could beget want, and food prices based on one shortage created by nature could be compounded by yet another created by the disruption of normal farming life.
4
God’s Hand
PEASANT PEOPLES AND small farmers are generally believers. To many sufferers of want, famine has always been, among other things, a theological event. At the start of the outbreak they see God’s will and God’s anger as the cause of the failure of their food supply. Christ, through the filter of the writers of the Christian Gospels, also represents famine as a theological phenomenon, a sign of the end of the world. ‘There shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places.’
There is a comfort for people who face deadly shortages to see them as an unavoidable penance or a test of faith. For if God and the deities can punish with hunger, they can also be persuaded by fasting, prayer and sacrifice to bring an end to it. A survivor of the Irish famine remembered that ‘several reasons are given as to the cause of the blight. Most people think it was a punishment from God for the careless manner in which they treated
the crops for years previous when there was a very plentiful supply of potatoes.’ Another remembered that, ‘It looked like the hand of God.’ Yet again, a Corkman’s testimony to the Irish Folklore Commission declared that even after the Great Hunger ended, ‘Old people said it was God’s will to have the famine come. They abused fine food when they had it aplenty.’
And if it were not God’s will, then it was the work of God’s dark opposite. It was said that an old woman of Rossport in County Mayo, returning home, saw her potatoes rotting and cried, ‘Oh, the Devil polluted all the potatoes last night. There is not a stalk standing.’
In 1943, Hindus and Muslims in Bengal were almost equal in population – 52 per cent were Muslim, 48 per cent Hindu. Hindus tended to live in the west of the province; the Muslims in the east. Both groups similarly saw the divine hand in what was developing. The Sunni tradition had a less formal hierarchy than the Shia, but now, in the red terracotta mosques of the villages, people were led in prayers to the Source of All Bounty by their most respected ministers. In the Hindu temples of the area, and in worship in their homes, the Hindus also sought to appease their deities and avatars. Inevitably these were more numerous than Allah. Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer were propitiated. The more orthodox set of deities, the god Shiva and his female counterparts, Kali and Durga, were worshipped widely among the upper castes. Devotion to the engaging Lord Krishna, the flute-playing young deity, was popular among the lower. In each Hindu house stood a shrine where the god or goddess of the season was summoned by a small house bell and where small brass bowls of milk, water, ghee, salt and rice were placed in piety. Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and good fortune, received offerings in the home and the temple at harvest time especially, and so could not have been far from people’s minds in 1943. In the waterlands of Bengal, imaginations must also have been drawn to Basanta Chandi, the goddess popular with women, who could conquer cholera and other diseases.
Some Ethiopian farmers in the 1970s and 1980s became desperate enough to revert to the animist practices of their ancestors, and gathered in the fields by night to enact the ancient rain-making rituals disapproved of by their Coptic priests. It was interesting that such rituals had remained, since Christianity had arrived in the fourth century by way of Egypt. The word ‘copt’ is said to have derived from the classical name of Egypt, Aegyptus, and its rituals are related to those of Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Dawit Wolde Giorgis, a former officer in the Ethiopian army, who was in charge of Ethiopia’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, set up in the aftermath of the 1973 drought, remembers that as the Ethiopian famine of 1984–5 struck, people had recourse to masses in the Coptic churches, doing penance for their sins in the hope that the curse might be lifted from them. He saw the same prayers uttered in the mosques – Sunni Islam arrived in Ethiopia via ninth-century exiles from Arabia in the east, and from trade and other influences from the Sudan in the west. Perhaps 30 per cent of Ethiopians were Muslim – many of them nomadic people, but town dwellers and farmers as well.
Religious observance might have edged some Ethiopians towards hunger already. In the Christian parts of the country, there were 293 days of the year when fasting was, according to the strict urgings of the Coptic calendar, to be observed. Some days only meat and dairy products were prohibited, but others involved total abstention from food. Religion, as well as other factors, had made the Ethiopian highlander Christians an enduring race.
A sense of God’s punishment for wantonness was common among those equally hardy Ethiopian Muslims, even the ones who were farmers rather than pastoralists. ‘People had grown reckless. They used to compete at shooting bullets through their stack of harvest grain.’ The practice was a boastful way of proving the plenty and density of the bagged grain. ‘It was such arrogance which brought down God’s wrath on them.’ As an old woman in Wollo declared, ‘When Allah is angry he does not need to cut a staff’, that is, a stick to punish people with. A famine would serve.
There is little doubt that the priests and mullahs agreed with the people’s devout acceptance of misfortune as God’s will and punishment. The question arises of whether the clergy used the reaction of their threatened congregations to extract reward. In Ireland there were tales of priests and parsons who gave the bread from their own tables, and of others who built church improvements in the midst of the dying. Votive offerings are a part of all worship, and sometimes the faithful made a money offering to appease God and the gods in their anger. Much Hindu worship occurs in the home and at the domestic shrine, but the Hindu temples are busy at early-morning prayer time and at such an hour such an offering is normally made.
What is almost beyond dispute is that religious reassurance fortified people in the face of the trial. How early or late that reassurance was swept away by famine’s reality we cannot say.
5
Coping
BEYOND PENANCE AND prayer, starving people have always adopted other and more palpable strategies, and these recourses are again similar, famine to famine.
Among the images of women that appeared during the Irish famine in the Illustrated London News is the memorable Woman Begging at Clonakilty. Clonakilty is a town in West Cork, a region where the famine was at its most intense. In this renowned engraving, the woman has in her right arm a skeletal baby corpse. In her left hand she holds a begging bowl. The woman in the illustration, with her dead baby in her arms, is described as begging for money to buy a coffin for her dead daughter.
Her utter helplessness, however, her torpid look, hides the truth that, like other women in all famines, she has been an actor in her own tragedy, fighting it by every stratagem she can think of. She has pursued all her options with all her energy on her way to this fatal state. Looking at her and her modern sisters, we feel a primal desire to believe that we could never let ourselves arrive at such a pass as this, that we would never become as passive as she seems to be. But there is another issue to raise. Even at these final stages of her hunger, is there any possibility that she is still actively pursuing her duty to survive? Apart from her obvious grief, is she using the small corpse as a begging aid? And should these two possibilities be mutually exclusive? In the extreme mental derangement that characterises famine victims, in the shrinkage of family feeling, which is one of the marks of starvation, both possibilities can operate together. And if she is begging for money for food as well as a child’s coffin, then that is exactly what modern famine experts call ‘a coping mechanism’.
The Red Cross and World Food Program estimate that the average healthy person needs 2010 calories of energy every day to do their normal tasks and resist disease. Yet one of the first coping mechanisms, from the cabins of Ireland to the huts of Bengal and the farmhouses and tuqals of Ethiopia, is to economise on the amount of food eaten daily in the family, thus reducing the intake necessary for good health. In East Africa, men and boys are fed first and the mother eats after them, having cut down on the food placed before the family. The appetite of the males often reduces even further what is left on the plate for women and girls. This is a form of customary practice, profoundly embedded though frowned on in the West, and sometimes condemned in tones that almost question the entitlement to relief of people who practise such cultural faux pas. But it is impossible to alter cultural habits in the span of a famine or even of a century. Besides, it is likely that in the early stages of all famines – historic, recent and present – women in families have tended to take the greater portion of hunger on themselves.
The result of cutting down on food is, within a few days, a weakening of the immune system. As the family rations itself, keeping next year’s seed crop sacredly reserved in a container safe from hungry gaze, it also finds its members have less strength. The farmer and his wife and children, even if they can hang onto their land and their seed crop, will lack as much vigour as they had last year for working hard on the next crop which, even if not attacked by blight, burned off by drought or eaten by l
ocusts, will be less bountiful. Thus shortage begets shortage.
Another coping strategy in famines is the sale of family assets. In Ireland, it was a matter of selling clothes or fishing nets. Sadly, people bringing their goods to town to sell them on market day found the prices they got much lower than they had hoped: many other people were doing the same as them in a glutted market. In Bengal and Ethiopia, families sold radios or bicycles, which had often been bought before the emergency especially so that they could later be exchanged for food in harder seasons. People in Bengal exchanged their pots and pans, furniture and trinkets for the fistfuls of food that grain trading pawnbrokers paid them from pouches they carried about with them. Early in the famine, twenty cart-loads of household utensils moved out of the port town of Barisal. One observer says the buyers were always ‘aprowl’ with their small rice bags and, if necessary, cash.
Bengalis sold the metal roofs of their huts. They sold their plough cattle to contractors supplying meat to the military forces. They mortgaged or sold their rice-producing land. As a result, over 250,000 Bengali families lost all the land they possessed.