His hour of infamy

Churchill’s hand fed the appallingly dire Bengal famine. He comes off here as the fevered colonial of a caricature.

It is an interesting footnote that the death of Winston Churchill in January 1965 was solemnly commemorated throughout the lands that had till recently been part of the British empire. In Calcutta, a city that enjoyed a strange love-hate relationship with the British Raj, The Statesman covered his state funeral in London with a meticulous sensitivity that would have baffled Britons, not least the deceased. The bumptious principal of my school even had a portrait of Churchill put up at a discreet corner near the library.

This posthumous adulation of a man who had waged a determined campaign in the 1930s to prevent limited self-government for India and had once described Mahatma Gandhi as a “half-naked fakir” may seem inexplicable. Yet, it is important to remember that the nationalist mythology of an impoverished mass of Indians rising to boot out arrogant, exploitative colonials in a frenzy of anti-imperialism is a recent creation. The reality was an India that saw British rule in different shades of grey. The enlightened Indian quest for political freedom stemmed only nominally from hate; the seeds of national assertion were contained in the conviction that British rule had become ‘un-British.’

Full review here Outlook

Hindus ask for Britain's apology for millions of starvation deaths of 1943 famine

Hindus want Britain to tender a formal apology to India and relatives of affected families for reportedly about three million starvation deaths in the great famine of 1943.

Noted Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) on Sep 10, said that if allegations mentioned in Madhusree Mukerjee's recent book "Churchill's secret war: the British empire and the ravaging of India during World War II" (Basic Books, New York) were true, Britain should tender a formal apology for what was described as a preventable catastrophe caused by intentional negligence of Britain.

This book by Mukerjee, nuclear physicist with doctorate from University of Chicago and former editor of Scientific American who lives in Germany, reportedly alleges that millions of people of Bengal were left to starve ignoring repeated pleas to Britain for emergency food aid. Some other countries offered to help but were prevented.

Full report here Sify

'Churchill responsible for death of 3mn Indians'

Several actions of war-time British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's government had directly and inevitably led to the death of some three million Indians in the 1943 famine, argues a new book.

Churchill's Secret War by physicist-turned-researcher Madhusree Mukherjee, which investigates unexamined parts of the statesman's records, provides evidence of how the Prime Minister and his advisors chose to use the resources of India to wage war against Germany and Japan, which caused food scarcity and inflation in the empire.

Also, says the author, the deprivation and anarchy of the era had torn the fabric of India's society and Churchill's efforts to retain the colony by means of divide and rule also contributed to partition.

The book notes that Churchill had a profound contempt of native Indians especially Mahatma Gandhi who for him came to represent a "malignant subversive fanatic" and a "thoroughly evil force." He had remarked in a conversation, "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."

Full report here Zeenews

Revenge tale set in the North-East during World War II

During one of his shoots for Aparajito, filmmaker Satyajit Ray wasn’t pleased with the way night-bugs were captured by his black & white movie camera. After several trial shots—which meant expensive reels going waste—he finally made a few men in dark clothes hold small bulbs and prance around to give the twilight shot some reality. This scene barely lasts a few seconds in the film but such was the passion of the master director that he was ready to go any lengths even for a non-descript shot.

Siddhartha Sarma reminds you of a similar intensity—couched under a mellow outlook—that reflects the passion poured into his debut novel, The Grasshopper’s Run, an unsettling tale of an Assamese boy who has sworn revenge for his Naga friend’s death at the hand of Japanese Army during World War II. During the writing of the book, Sarma visited Burma to be familiar with the weapons of the times, and persuaded the Myanmar museum authorities to allow him to fire the rifle used during the early 1940s. Although the recoil and ricochets of the firearm barely crosses a few pages, it comes with an authoritative, unchallenged view of the writer.

Full report here Economic Times

Churchill’s Famine?

A new book indicts Britain’s wartime PM for millions of deaths in the 1943 Bengal famine

Madhusree Mukerjee, physicist and former editor of Scientific American, “currently a housewife” living in Germany with her husband and son, has a curious way of writing books: she catches hold of any subject that she wants to learn about, no matter how difficult or complex, and doesn’t let go until she’s ferreted out whatever it takes to answer her questions as a rank outsider. She puts it down to her training in  scientific method—Mukerjee lived in Calcutta until she moved to the US to study physics, receiving her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1989. “As a physicist, you are trained to simplify problems so that they become more comprehensible,” she says in a telephone interview from near Frankfurt in Germany.

The first time she strayed away from science journalism was when she decided to learn about the aboriginals in the Andamans islands. “I felt at some point that I understood pretty well the basics of science, but there was a lot about the human environment that I didn’t understand.” For a start, she decided to explore the stories she had heard while growing up in Calcutta of how freedom fighters dumped on the Andamans islands escaped head-hunting savages. “I wanted to understand the reality of that.” It led Mukerjee to the Andamans and her first book, The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders, relating the devastating experiences of the hunter-gatherers as they come face to face with modern civilisation.

Full review here Outlook

Revisionism at its best

The book sheds new light on one of Indian history's most important events: the 1857 rebellion.

Tatya Tope's Operation Red Lotus;
Parag Tope, Rupa, Rs. 595

It has often been argued by the early post-independence generation that the Anglo-Indian War of 1857 was the precursor of the nationalist movement, though many Western historians regard it as scattered revolts by peasant landowners with no sense of solidarity against a common enemy. On the other hand, the Marxist historian sees it as a class war against the landlords and the colonial state. Whatever the school of thought may be, the Indian Rebellion was certainly, in the words of C.A. Bayly, Professor of History at Cambridge, “the First War of Independence that some scholars of the 1950s incautiously proclaimed.”

It is not easy to come to grips with the peaceful exit of the British when one considers the horrors, the fanaticism, the rage that is so visible in the bloodiest drama of colonial history: the siege and massacre of the European garrison stationed at Kanpur during the great rebellion of 1857. This resulted in a heartless massacre of thousands of Indians who were either hanged or tied to guns and blown to smithereens. Tatya Tope's Operation Red Lotus gives a brilliant account of this historic event, emphasising the true significance of this war as well as a sustained interest in the dramatic battle manoeuvres of Tantya Tope who is the ancestor of the family that has, with sustained interest in the 1857 insurrection, skilfully put together a work of historical significance.

Blood, Sweat, Tears

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill is among the most overrated men of the twentieth century. As a student boxer at Harrow, he no doubt learned the value of getting in the first, telling punch: witness his self-serving telling of the history of World War II, which came out shortly after the war ended, and for which he won a literature Nobel Prize — not the last time a prize was political, but surely the only time it went to someone who relied on ghostwriters. That multi-volume work, through sheer dogged heft, re-routed his legacy: a prime minister who was comprehensively routed the first time he faced an election became the Last Lion, a fawning reputation that has survived various efforts to examine his record more rationally.

Just as Winston’s stubborn commitment to greatness is foundational for so many men — usually men — of the Right, halfway across the world, equally foundational for generations of Bengalis is the memory of the famine of 1943. Satyajit Ray was haunted by it all his life; and American economists would ask me, puzzled, why Amartya Sen had abandoned “real work” to study famines. When I would explain, haltingly, about ’43, nobody had ever heard of it. It wasn’t part of the story of the War. Why would it be? In all his volumes, Churchill never mentioned it.

Full review here Indian Express

The day of the Grasshopper

As Siddhartha Sarma claimed the first Crossword Award for the Best Children’s Book in Mumbai this week, a bunch of writers at the Jumpstart festival were asking a key question: Should adults read books for children?

Technically, The Grasshopper’s Run is a children’s book — published by Scholastic last year in the emerging category of fiction for young adults. This is a growing segment of readers in India, and an important one: historically, despite the wide variety of literature for children, we haven’t had much literature for teenagers and young adults, across most Indian languages. But as writers from Paro Anand to Samit Basu know, writing for children or young adults effectively consigns the author to invisibility on the book-review pages. This means that kids, and teens, will read Sarma’s book — but adults will miss out.

And that would be a shame. Sarma’s real audience, as he says on his blog, is “all you closet Commando readers” — or anyone interested in the almost-forgotten Japanese siege of Kohima in 1944. “The (Second World) war touched India in many places, but the only region invaded on the mainland was the North-east,” Sarma writes. “It was a time of great misery, great courage and remarkable events. But if you expect much fiction about India and the war, forget it. Mostly it is because a couple of years after the war we began a bigger adventure: Independence and the rest of the jing-bang. People weren’t really into what their soldiers did fighting for another country in some far-off place.”

Full report here Business Standard

Healing invisible wounds

"The people who say - those who go away will return - tell lies." 
Waris Shah (Sufi Poet) 

Noor is a beautifully crafted political novel by Pakistani-Dutch writer Sorayya Khan. Khan paints the pictures of the horrors of 1971 civil war between East and West Pakistan, in which about three million people died. As a result of that war, Bangladesh was created, with the Indian army acting as a scalpel. In Bangladesh, almost everyone has a relative or friend who was consumed by the war. Thousands of Pakistani Bengalis were victims of the atrocities of the West Pakistani army, which included rape and horrific killings.

The reasons for the Bengali conflicts with West Pakistan were convoluted. Initially, West Pakistan treated East Pakistan as a colony and never granted it its deserved status as the second half of the Pakistan body. In addition, cultural tensions, language rights and economic and political disparities widened the mistrust. Eventually, momentum took hold of Sheikh Mujib's political Bengali separatist movement, which provoked the Pakistani army to retaliate.

Full report here Asia Times

War stories

The 1971 war plays a major part in shaping Bangladeshi literature, Mahmud Rahman tells Premankur Biswas

The ghost of the 1971 war looms large over Bangladeshi literature, concedes Dhaka-born writer Mahmud Rahman. In fact, most of the stories of his short story compilation, Killing the Water, launched in Kolkata on Friday, March 6, refer to the war in some way or the other.

“One of my stories talks about a General of the war who retires and settles down in America. Another one is about a second-generation refugee in America. We cannot help but talk about the consequences of the war. It is the single-most important event in our history and has shaped the way we are,” says Rahman who is in Kolkata for the launch.

When Rahman was born, Bangladesh was still East Pakistan. It was during his formative years, in the late 1960s, when the nation was in turmoil.

Full report here Indian Express

Different faces of courage

A Tale of Two Revolts — India 1857 and the American Civil War, by Rajmohan Gandhi, provides an interesting perspective on these two contemporaneous events in history that occurred in widely separated parts of the world. The author says: “One links nineteenth century India with India today, the other links the India of the 1850s-60s with the America of that time”. The American Civil War and the Indian revolt were both cataclysmic events. The civil war had major consequences for society and politics in America. Although the revolt of the sepoys may have had major long-term consequences, its immediate effect on society and politics in India was somewhat limited.

What is telling about this volume is how the author binds these two events through the reportage of William Howard Russell, a correspondent with The Times in London. Known for his riveting accounts of serious issues, Russell had previously covered the Crimean War for The Times.

The first three chapters focus primarily on the Indian revolt as well as reactions to it in the American newspapers. There is mention of four significant Indians, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Jyotiba Phule, and of the Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume who left an indelible mark in the annals of history, but whose work had little to do with the mutinous sepoys, other than the fact that they lived during that time. In fact, the Indian revolt was hardly discussed by the intelligentsia in Calcutta, which was the premier intellectual centre in the country at that time.

Full report here Telegraph

Book on India role in Bangla war

A book, Sonali Egal O Udbastu Samay, by leading Bangladeshi writer Haroon Habib was launched by Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar at the Agartala Press Club in the city last night.

The book, based on Habib’s personal reminiscences as an actual liberation fighter and journalist during the 1971 Bangladesh War, was released at a gala function during the ongoing Agartala book fair. The author, Habib, was the guest of honour at the function.

Published from Dhaka, the 318-page Bengali novel was described by critics here as the first major literary work that depicted the 1971 liberation war in its true perspective.

The speakers at the function said for the first time in literature, the novel presented an undaunted recognition to India’s unequivocal support to Bangladesh’s independence struggle.Sarkar described the novel as an unbiased portrayal of history and praised Habib as a committed humanitarian author, a creative personality and journalist.

Full report here Telegraph