HIDDEN HISTORIES KAVITA PURI on how the world found out about the Bengal famine
I HAVE SPENT A LOT OF TIME OVER THE PAST year interviewing eyewitnesses and reading archival material relating to the 1943 Bengal famine. It has all been part of the research for my new BBC Radio 4 series Three Million, which I wrote about in last month’s issue of BBC History Magazine.
The famine – which took place in British India in the middle of the Second World War – was devastating, and through my investigations I told some of the stories of those who helped ensure that the crisis was reported. One of the people I got to know quite well when researching the series was a man named Ian Stephens (1903–84), who served as the editor of a British-owned newspaper named The Statesman, which was based in Calcutta (now Kolkata). His courageous editorial decisions meant the world learned about what was happening, and arguably saved many thousands of lives.
By the time the famine occurred, Stephens had been in India for 13 years. He was part of the colonial class, but also rather unconventional. Unlike most other Britons, he preferred to cycle to work shirtless on hot days, rather than take a driver. He was also addicted to yoga and had many close Indian friends.
But following the outbreak of the Second World War, things changed. As Stephens would explain in a radio interview in the 1970s, work on the newspaper became a lot more difficult: “The circumstances when I was editor were harsh. They were all wartime circumstances... all moral judgments were harder, rougher, quicker.”
In the summer of 1943, Stephens faced probably the biggest moral judgment of his career. The streets of Calcutta had been transformed: it was the height of the famine, and the city was full of people who had come in from the rural areas hoping for aid. They collapsed on the pavements and around dustbins, often dying silently. Yet under the colonial government’s emergency rules, he was not allowed to publish the word ‘famine’ for fear that the enemy could utilise it for propaganda purposes. Initially, he toed the line, but he soon found himself wrestling with his conscience: was his job to be patriotic, or to report what was really going on?
Eventually, Stephens decided to test the censors, and on 22 Aug
