{"id":817,"date":"2017-05-10T08:30:43","date_gmt":"2017-05-10T07:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/?p=817"},"modified":"2017-05-30T17:37:09","modified_gmt":"2017-05-30T16:37:09","slug":"we-become-crazy-as-lunatics-responding-to-the-bengal-famine-in-indian-letters-from-the-second-world-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/2017\/05\/10\/we-become-crazy-as-lunatics-responding-to-the-bengal-famine-in-indian-letters-from-the-second-world-war\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We become crazy as lunatics\u2019: Responding to the Bengal famine in Indian letters from the Second World War"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Diya Gupta<\/a>, PhD researcher, Department of English<\/em><\/p>\n

Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War.\u00a0 Their experiences are little remembered today, neither in the UK where a Eurocentric memory of the war dominates, nor in South Asia, which privileges nationalist histories of independence from the British Empire. \u00a0And yet military censorship reports from the Second World War, archived at the British Library\u2019s India Office Records<\/a> and containing extracts from Indian soldiers\u2019 letters home, bear witness to this counter-narrative.\u00a0 What was it like fighting for the British at a time when the struggle for India\u2019s freedom from British rule was at its most incendiary?<\/p>\n

Extracts from these letters, exchanged between the Indian home front and international battlefronts during the Second World War, become textual connectors linking the farthest corners of the Empire and imperial strongholds requiring defence against the Axis alliance.\u00a0 Such letters map the breadth of a global war and plunge deep into the Indian soldier\u2019s psyche, revealing ruptures in the colonial identity foisted on him.<\/p>\n

“Whenever I sit for my meals, a dreadful picture of the appalling Indian food problem passes through my mind leaving a cloudy sediment on the walls of my heart which makes me nauseous and often I leave my meals untouched.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Food dominates much of these epistolary conversations, with Indian soldiers reflecting on their army rations and diet abroad.\u00a0 Rumours of a great and devastating famine sweeping India, and particularly Bengal, in 1943 reach them, despite censorship of news and letters.\u00a0 A Havildar or junior officer, part of the Sappers and Miners unit, writes from the Middle East: \u201cFrom my personal experience I can tell you that the food we get here is much better than that we soldiers get in India.\u00a0 But whenever I sit for my meals, a dreadful picture of the appalling Indian food problem passes through my mind leaving a cloudy sediment on the walls of my heart which makes me nauseous and often I leave my meals untouched.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"zoinul\"<\/a>
Representation of a family struck by the Bengal Famine of 1942 by Bangladeshi artist Zoinul Abedin. \u00a9British Museum 2012,3027.1<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The soldier highlights his solidarity with this imagined community of sufferers through images of his own body, and his reactions are expressed in physiological terms \u2013 he visualises the walls of his heart being covered with \u2018cloudy sediment\u2019 at the thought of food shortage in India.\u00a0 In visceral terms, this is how he understands empathy. \u00a0The spectre of famine in India hovers, Banquo-like, before him every time he sits down to eat his rations carefully provided by the colonial British government; the projection of food deprivation in his homeland thousands of miles away reaches out and, almost literally, touches his heart, preventing him from eating.<\/p>\n

\"\u00a9<\/a>
Edward Bawden, A Hindoo Kitchen: RIASC 8th, 10th and 12th Indian Mule Coys, Zghorta, Syria \u00a9 IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 2220)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0The spectre of famine in India hovers, Banquo-like, before him every time he sits down to eat his rations carefully provided by the colonial British government…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another letter from a Havildar Clerk to relatives in South India relates the helplessness caused by famine to the extraordinary conditions of the wartime marketplace: \u201cI am terribly sorry to learn about the food situation in India and it seems as if there is no salvation for me.\u00a0 From my earliest days to the present time I have always been in this abyss of misery.\u00a0 It was with grim determination to see you all free from poverty that I allotted my whole pay of Rs 85\/- to you, but cruel Fate is determined to defeat me in all my purposes.\u00a0 What is the use of money when we are unable to obtain the necessities of life in exchange for it? \u00a0The situation would drive even the most level-headed of us to madness and when we think of conditions in India we become crazy as lunatics.\u201d<\/p>\n

“When we think of conditions in India we become crazy as lunatics.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How can the soldier\u2019s earnings help his family when ordinary people have been priced out of food because of soaring rates of wartime inflation?\u00a0 The letter reveals both the economic bonds linking the Indian soldier\u2019s participation in an imperial war, and the psychological despair of being unable to rescue loved ones from hardship \u2013 as traumatic for the soldier as the heavy fighting he witnesses on the battlefield.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________________________________________<\/span><\/p>\n

This blog post was first published by the British Library’s ‘Untold Lives’<\/a> series. Read the original post here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Find out more in\u00a0this short King’s film<\/a>.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________________________________________<\/span><\/p>\n

You may also like to read Loving, Living and Resisting: A Postcolonial Conversation<\/a>\u00a0and South Asians and the First World War: Reflections.<\/a><\/p>\n

Blog posts on King’s English represent the views of the individual authors and not those of the English Department, nor King’s College London. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Diya Gupta, PhD researcher, Department of English Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War.\u00a0 Their experiences are little remembered today, neither in the UK where a Eurocentric memory of the war dominates, nor in South Asia, which privileges nationalist histories of independence from the British Empire. \u00a0And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":685,"featured_media":825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,24,25],"tags":[60,237,50,22,56,207],"class_list":["post-817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-20th-21st-centuries","category-colonial-postcolonial-and-transnational-culture","category-life-writing-creative-writing-and-performance","tag-archives","tag-empire","tag-india","tag-life-writing","tag-postcolonialism","tag-second-world-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/685"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":895,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817\/revisions\/895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}