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WORK TITLE: Hungry Bengal
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http://www.ryerson.ca/history/faculty/faculty-spotlights/mukherjee-janam/ * http://www.ryerson.ca/history/about-us/faculty-and-staff/faculty/mukherjee-janam/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Michigan, B.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator and writer. Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada, instructor in history, 2013–.
AVOCATIONS:Creative writing, antiwar activism.
AWARDS:Yale University, Agrarian Studies Program, postdoctoral fellow.
WRITINGS
Has published articles in journals, including South Asian Review, and contributed chapters to books, including Strangely Beloved: Writings on Calcutta, edited by Nilanjana Gupta, Rupa Publications India (New Delhi, India), 2014, and Wild Animals Prohibited, by Subimal Misra, HarperCollins India (Noida, India), 2015.
SIDELIGHTS
Janam Mukherjee earned his B.A., with honors, in Asian languages and cultures at the University of Michigan. He then entered the university’s Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History and completed a Ph.D. In 2013 he joined the Department of History at Ryerson University, in Toronto, Ontario, where he has taught courses focused on South Asia, particularly Hindu/Muslim relations, World War II, colonialism and colonization, and empire.
His research interests center on colonial India, in particular the turbulent early 1940s in Bengal, when the region experienced a famine. He has published on this topic and its social and political effects in various literary and historical journals, including the South Asian Review. He contributed a chapter on the subject to Strangely Beloved: Writings on Calcutta. Mukherjee also writes about modern-day India’s society and politics, historical anthropology, and Bengali literature. He penned an introductory essay about the experimental Bengali novelist Subimal Misra for Wild Animals Prohibited, a collection of Misra’s short stories. Mukherjee is himself also a creative writer.
Before joining the faculty at Ryerson, Muherjee was a fellow in the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. There he wrote his first book, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire, which was published in 2015. In this book, Mukherjee explores the complex and interrelated social history of the region during the early 1940s, focusing on World War II, the 1943 famine in Bengal, and the 1946 riots in Calcutta pitting Muslims against Hindus as colonialism gave way to partition and independence. In particular, he investigates the effects of this period of turmoil on people’s lives within their families and communities and how these events hastened Indian independence.
R.D. Long, in a review for Choice, termed the book “impassioned,” “emotionally charged,” and a “fierce indictment” of both the British and Indian officials in charge at the time of the Partition. Long called the book “essential” reading. A critic in History Today, Zareer Masani, called Mukherjee’s book an “engrossing account of the most tragic event in the history of Bengal.” He further pointed out that “what singles out Mukherjee’s book is his thesis that the famine was at the root of the Hindu-Muslim violence that consumed Calcutta” and led to the “cataclysmic partition of the subcontinent a year later.” Masani, however, was not entirely persuaded that there was more than a “coincidental overlap between very distinct historical catastrophes.” Glyn Ford explained in the Asian Review of Books that the famine stemmed from the British “scorched earth policy,” which laid bare the “vast deltaic coastline of Bengal” in an attempt to thwart the Japanese advance toward India. Officials then seized surplus rice and individuals’ boats and pushed thousands of people off their land in order to build military facilities. Meanwhile, Indians engaged in “profiteering” that turned “simple greed into a capital crime,” and “Hindu and Muslim political factions allowed themselves to be played off against each other” in “squabbling over rewards, position and preferment as their public lay dying.” Ford offered his opinion that “in this outstanding polemic, Janam Mukherjee tells the victims’ side of the story.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016, R.D. Long, review of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire, p. 1217.
ONLINE
Asian Review of Books, http://asianreviewofbooks.com/ (July 10, 2016), Glyn Ford, review of Hungry Bengal.
History Today, http://www.historytoday.com/ (November 11, 2015), Zareer Masani, review of Hungry Bengal.
Ryerson University Web site, http://www.ryerson.ca/ (March 23, 2017), author profile.
FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
JANAM MUKHERJEE
DEPARTMENT
History
EMAIL
janam.mukherjee@history.ryerson.ca
Dr. Janam Mukherjee joined the Department of History in August 2013 as an historian of South Asia.
Dr. Mukherjee completed his PhD in the University of Michigan’s Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History. His research focuses on the tumultuous period of 1939-46 in colonial India, particularly the political economy of famine in Bengal. Prior to his appointment to Ryerson, Dr. Mukherjee was a Fellow in the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, where he completed his book, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, Riots and the End of Empire. Dr. Mukherjee is also an anti-war activist and creative writer. His research and other writings have been published in both historical and literary journals.
In his new research, Dr. Mukherjee explores the social history of war, famine, and riots in Bengal, specifically the complex ways that theexperience of trauma and turmoil affected the lives of individuals, families, and communities.
His teaching includes “Colonization, Colonialism, and Independence,” “East Meets West: Asia in the World,” and “Themes in Modern Asian History.”
MUKHERJEE, JANAM
PhD
Education:BA (Hons) in Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan. PhD in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan.
Office:JOR 511
Telephone:416-979-5000 Ext. 3140
Email Address:janam.mukherjee@history.ryerson.ca
Specialization:
Asia: South Asia; Famine; Hindu/Muslim Relations in India; Second World War in India; Food Studies; Colonialism, Resistance, and De-colonization; Empire
Biography:
Dr. Mukherjee’s primary research focuses on colonial India in the 1940s. His first book, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, Riots, and the End of Empire 1939-1946, published by Oxford University Press in 2015, examines three interrelated crises that shaped the social, economic, and political context of pre-partition Bengal: the Second World War in India, the Bengal famine of 1943, and the Calcutta riots of 1946. Dr. Mukherjee also has investigated the social and political impacts of these same events in articles, such as “Hungry Bengal: The Long Journey Home” in South Asian Review, 2011, and “Exit Empire: The Turbulent 40s in Bengal” in the 2015 volume Strangely Beloved: Writings on Calcutta. Dr. Mukherjee also has published articles on contemporary Indian society and politics, including an analysis of the 2008 outbreak of “bird flu” in West Bengal, published in 2012. In addition, Dr. Mukherjee writes on theoretical issues related to interdisciplinary anthropology and history, including a 2008 article, “Structure and Violence: Toward a Historical Anthropology of Violence,” and essays on Bengali literature, most recently an essay on anti-establishment writer Subimal Misra in the collection of that author's short stories titled Wild Animals Prohibited. Before coming to Ryerson, Dr. Mukherjee was a postdoctoral fellow in the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. Janam Mukherjee is also an anti-war activist and creative writer.
Mukherjee, Janam. Hungry Bengal: war, famine and the end of empire
R.D. Long
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1217.
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Mukherjee, Janam. Hungry Bengal: war, famine and the end of empire. Oxford, 2015. 329p bibl Index afp ISBN 9780190209889 cloth, $34.95; ISBN 9780190492182 ebook, contact publisher for price
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DS485
MARC
This impassioned, emotionally charged volume had its origins when the author began to study the Great Calcutta Killing of 1946 and when he interrogated his father, who was a boy during the Bengal famine, about those times. The famine killed an estimated 1.4 to 4 million people in 1943 and in the following years. The book is a fierce indictment of Winston Churchill and the British officials who governed India, as well as a condemnation of Indian political leaders who, according to historian Mukherjee (Ryerson Univ., Toronto), did little or nothing to alleviate the conditions of the dead and dying in Bengal. The British were condemned for putting the war effort above all else, destroying transport networks and supplies that would aid the Japanese Army on the borders of India. The author also condemns local traders and Indian industrialists. This volume is a thorough examination of the famine and can be read along with such volumes as Amartya Sen's Poverty and Famine (CH, Apr'82); Suranjan Das's Communal Riots in Bengal (1991), with which Mukherjee disagrees on various issues; and, more significantly, Madhusree Mukerjee's Churchill's Secret War (CH, May'l 1, 48-5236). It is required reading on the subject. Summing Up: **** Essential. All levels/libraries.--R. D. Long, Eastern Michigan University
Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire
By Zareer Masani
Published in History Today Volume 65 Issue 11 November 2015
Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire
Janam Mukherjee
Hurst 288pp £30
Janam Mukherjee has written an engrossing account of the most tragic event in the history of Bengal, the Great Famine of 1943, in which an estimated three million people died. The book is also a rediscovery of Mukherjee’s family roots in pre-independence Calcutta. ‘Though my tone may be angry’, he tells us, ‘it is the sorrow of my father and his generation that I have been at great pains to redeem in these words.’
Mukherjee claims that he is covering a neglected chapter in Indian history but his impressive bibliography includes illustrious Bengali predecessors, including the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and Harvard’s Sugata Bose. The Great Bengal Famine has figured prominently in just about every narrative history of British rule in India. What singles out Mukherjee’s book is his thesis that the famine was at the root of the Hindu-Muslim violence that consumed Calcutta during the Great Killings of 1946, thereby contributing to the even more cataclysmic partition of the subcontinent a year later.
No doubt the horrors of the famine accustomed the people of Bengal to death and suffering as never before. Nor can one deny that Bengal’s frontline role in the Second World War triggered the deadly spiral in prices that put food out of the reach of the poor, even though – as Amartya Sen has established – there was no actual shortage of supplies. But, controversially, Mukherjee then argues that famine was somehow inherent in colonial racism and capitalist greed and suggests that the famine of 1943 was a major cause of inter-communal violence three years later.
Mukherjee’s economic determinism does not explain why most of the subcontinent experienced a major wartime economic boom, but nevertheless succumbed to sectarian violence in 1947. Indeed, Punjab, the breadbasket of India, experienced far worse communal massacres than Bengal and the provincial capital, Calcutta, was the area of Bengal least affected by food shortages. Mukherjee’s account does not explain such contradictions but relies instead on what he terms ‘cumulative violence that began with chronic, multi-generational poverty, was compounded by war, and brought to a catastrophic head in devastating famine’.
Mukherjee’s anger is understandable, confronted with the monumental mismanagement of Bengal’s famine by the colonial authorities in Delhi and London and the democratically elected provincial government of Bengal. But he fails to persuade that both the Bengal Famine and the partition of the subcontinent were the result of what he calls ‘the intimately entwined ideologies of war, colonialism and capital’, rather than a coincidental overlap between very distinct historical catastrophes. It is even harder for this reviewer to accept Mukherjee’s conclusion that America’s current state of ‘perpetual war … with mantras of “patriotism” and “security” monopolising all airwaves’, has ‘an eerie feeling of simultaneity’ with Bengal in the Second World War.
Zareer Masani's most recent book is Macaulay: Britain's Liberal Imperialist (Bodley Head, 2013).
War & Famine in Late Colonial Bengal
SOUTH ASIA May 9, 2013 - 1 comment
Bengal_famine_1943_–_A_worried_woman
A review of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, Riots, and the End of Empire 1939-1946, by Janam Mukherjee.
Janam Mukherjee’s dissertation is a thorough study of late colonial Bengal in the context of war, famine, and riots leading up to the eventual dissolution of empire. The central argument of the dissertation is built on the claim that famine was the “most profound factor influencing the structural, political, social, economic and communal fabric of Bengal” during this period (p. 5). The author provides a vivid illustration of the famine’s “awesome magnitude” in terms of its impact on the socio-political landscape of Bengal (p. 7). Before proceeding to the core content of the work, the author makes three important revisions to our understandings of the famine: first, he complicates the chronology of the famine, which is otherwise more commonly referred to as the Bengal Famine of 1943. Secondly, he shows that the war efforts and business interests, both centered in Calcutta, were responsible in equal measure for the devastation that ravaged rural Bengal, thus leading to the famine. And by looking beyond the actual famine victims and drawing a more explicit link between rural and urban Bengal, this work also demonstrates that the Bengal Famine was indeed “man-made.” Finally, contrary to the claim that the famine victims “died without a murmur” (Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure, and Politics, 1919-1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) the author argues that by broadening the chronology of the famine the active resistance of the victims becomes evident.
Chapter 1 shows that Britain’s war against Axis powers became central to governing India. Even before there was any substantial threat, the government co-opted India into the war effort. Beginning in 1939, as troops passed through Calcutta on their way to other strategic areas in Southeast Asia, the city’s defense, both for its military as well as industrial significance became the government’s primary goal. In the meantime, rural Bengal, caught in a cycle of increasing impoverishment, was pressed by a more fundamental concern for survival worsened by the depression of the previous decade. Never quite recovering from the depression, for Bengali agriculturalists illiteracy, ill-health, and hunger, as well as their basic struggle for survival, was far more pressing than the war that was foremost in the minds of the government.
By early 1942, with the fall of Malaya and Singapore, British war efforts focused squarely on Calcutta as is shown in Chapter 2. Central to the government’s proposals was the operation of “denial,” which was essentially a scorched earth campaign devised to deprive the invading Japanese troops the means of sustenance as they advanced to Calcutta. The government reasoned that if they were able to “denude the coastal region of the resources that might enable invasion” they could possibly discourage Japanese attack without making “unnecessary expenses on defense” (p. 83). Implementation of the “denial” operation meant the removal of rice (the staple of Bengal) from coastal areas and the destruction of boats (the primary mode of conveyance in riverine Bengal), both contributing further to worsening the condition in an already impoverished countryside. In the meantime, Calcutta’s vulnerability as well as its preparedness was severely tested in December 1942 when consecutive Japanese air raids only added to the urgency of making sure that the city “kept going at all costs” (p.120). Government priority of maintaining Calcutta and its consequences are discussed in Chapter 3. In the wake of the bombings, the government decided to secure stocks of rice in order to provide for the industrial interests in Calcutta. Government began buying supplies of rice from stockists and mill owner at prices below the existing market rates, pushing the rice trade “under-ground” while leaving officials to speculate estimates of rice in the province. The only way to tackle this uncertainty, the government believed, would be to increase the stock of rice in hand, thus taking them once again to the countryside adding further pressure on the already desperate farmers who in some cases had even eaten their seed stocks.
By early 1943 all indicators provided ample evidence of a famine, which makes up the content of Chapter 4. Mukherjee points out that although starvation and hunger plagued Bengal at least since 1940, the “begrudging official recognition” of a famine only came in mid-1943 (p. 168). As a way of addressing the famine, government instituted the Food Drive, where it went into the hinterland to some ten million homes in order to assess and confiscate the rice supplies of the province. This was brought to Calcutta and taken mainly to provide for the industrial area. In the meantime, the people in the countryside as well as in Calcutta suffered the ravages of starvation and disease. By the end of the year, Calcutta’s suffering only worsened when the city was bombed in broad daylight by the Japanese. The bombing of the port of Calcutta and its aftermath are discussed in Chapter 5. In the wake of the bombings the colonial authorities were eager to point that the famine had ended, which as the author points out “would be one less open wound” they had to deal with (p. 264).
Contrary to the government’s claim, Chapter 6 shows that the famine had not been contained; instead the reality of it was more deeply enmeshed in the collective psyche of Bengal, made more visible by the growing number of dead. As the bodies of the famine victims were being accounted for, the only classification provided for them was their religious affiliation. In his final chapter, Mukherjee draws attention to the Calcutta riots of 1946, generally understood and defined as communal. Instead, he argues that the killings had to be understood in context of war and famine, which had “insinuated itself into every aspect of life” (p. 321). Calcutta was a society completely ravaged by famine and the uncertainties of war and had lost any idea of “moral duty” leading ultimately to the violence. The violence itself, we are cautioned, should not be grouped into a single category such as “communal,” “political,” or “economic.” Instead as the author demonstrates, the motivations for the violence were highly diverse and so were the perceptions.
This dissertation will be of particular interest to historians of South Asia for it makes an especially significant contribution to our understanding of how the Second World War affected colonial Bengal. The thorough study of wartime policies and its impact on Bengal leading to the famine provides a fresh context for understanding imperial, national, and provincial politics and communal violence. Mukherjee’s convincing analysis and detailed research has broadened our understanding of the Bengal Famine not only in its chronological sense, but has done so also by demonstrating how hunger, starvation, and death shook the very moorings of Bengali society. In doing so, this work takes a significant step in offering a fresh interpretation of communal violence in Bengal.
Aryendra Chakravartty
Department of History
Penn State University
axc967@psu.edu
Primary Sources
Center for Studies in Social Sciences
West Bengal State Archives
National Archives of India (Nanavati Papers)
British Library, India Office Records
Dissertation Information
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 2011. 395 pp. Primary Advisor: Barbara D. Metcalf.
Image: Bengal Famine 1943. Wikimedia Commons.
Glyn Ford 10 July 2016 Non-Fiction, Reviews
“Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire” by Janam Mukherjee
Hungry Bengal is the story of Bengal’s man-made famine in 1942 which killed two million people over a period of eighteen months to two years, all while Imperial Britain’s leaders in London looked on unconcerned. It was the British who provided both direct and indirect causes of the famine. When the War with Japan broke out the “little yellow men” proved far doughtier warriors than ever envisaged by Whitehall. British troops were swept aside as the fortress of Singapore fell and the Japanese swept northwards through Burma towards Imperial India.
Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire, Janam Mukherjee (Hurst, May 2015; Oxford University Press, September 2015)
Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire, Janam Mukherjee (Hurst, May 2015; Oxford University Press, September 2015)
The question of possible nationalist collaboration with Japan with its promise of “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” was answered with a scorched earth policy that manufactured malnutrition. In the vast deltaic coastline of Bengal, largely undefended by the British, the cheap answer to Tokyo’s threat was “denial” by denuding the coast of the resources that Japanese forces in Malaya and Burma had used so expeditiously to facilitate their advance. In April 1942, the first action was the appropriation of all “surplus” rice with government contractors smashing the local rice market by buying, under duress if necessary, all the available rice forcing prices to rapidly spiral upwards.
Second was the “country boats”—the lifelines of the local communities and industry: 66,000 boats were registered and, of these, 46,000 were confiscated. The livelihood of generations was destroyed for a miserly three months compensation. Third, hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted overnight to carve out space in the countryside for aerodromes, encampments and supply dumps. In the end, Britain’s actions were the cause not the cure: the reorganization of the Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose in early 1943 saw large numbers of Indian soldiers desert.
By 1 July 1942—as rice and paddy prices continued to rise precipitously—attempts were being made to impose price controls but these were swept aside by a rampant black market. By August, official stocks of rice in Calcutta were running dangerously low, threatening the ability to feed the workforce engaged in war production. Civil supplies were to ensured for “essential” industrial labor, leaving the other 56 million people in the province to their fate. Companies were allowed to write-off otherwise ruinous costs as they bought rice for their workforce at extortionate prices. This was the trigger that resulted, over the next years, in the unnecessary deaths of 3-5 million people.
The Government in India did eventually acknowledge and appreciate the calamity. The Marquess of Linlithgow, as head of the newly constituted Food Department, reported in early December 1942 to London that the food situation in India as a whole had “deteriorated seriously” and requested the immediate import of 600,000 tons of wheat with military needs to be given preference over civilian. Only 130,000 tons was provided and it takes little imagination to realize there was little trickle down to the hungry poor. But perhaps hardly surprising. Churchill saw famine as a “weapon of war” which he had deployed against Germany in 1914-18. It worked just as well against “internal” rather than external enemies. Used against Germany there was no compunction with regard to India; after all, earlier in September Churchill had said, “I hate Indians. They are beastly people with a beastly religion.”
A terrible story, but one largely rehearsed earlier in Madhustee Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II (2010). But Hungry Bengal is both more comprehensive and accentuated with deeper research and goes further in two important respects. First, Janam Mukherjee consigns responsibility more widely. Justly the British—more in London than Delhi—are assigned the lion’s share of the blame for crimes of commission and omission that killed these millions. Yet the Indian Nationalists and Nationalism are allocated their share. Among the commercial class, there was a venal communalism that tainted mere profiteering transforming it from simple greed into a capital crime, while the squabbling Hindu and Muslim political factions allowed themselves to be played off against each other by the British administration in the most cynical manner, squabbling over rewards, position and preferment as their public lay dying. At best, British and Indians shared complacency and misjudgement, greed, myopia and political spite, at worse conducted in tandem joint crimes against humanity.
Second, Hungary Bengal attributes the savage communal pogroms of the 1947 Partition to the practices and lessons learned in Bengal. The breakdown of the economic and moral order as the poor of Bengal faced annihilation through deprivation. Death and dislocation destroyed communities and left final refuge in communalism. To survive was to watch people die and choose whom to save. The scale of the catastrophe was dehumanizing as compassion and dignity died. To put food in one mouth was to take it from another. The easy choice was communal, Muslim or Hindu, and often accompanied by violence. The Calcutta Riots of 1946 were an early battle in Imperial India’s civil war of religion that was to follow. The savagery had been bred as a product of Bengal’s famine.
The victors write history, but finally in this outstanding polemic, Janam Mukherjee tells the victims’ side of the story.