Calcutta, the city of contrasts, has withstood many an upheaval in its history of more than 300 years. From a position of being the premier city of British India, it slid to becoming a city of protests and squalor. Of the many dark periods in its history, a little over a decade — from early 1940s to early 1950s — stands apart to tell soul-tearing tales, representing a time of profound and radical change in the city.
Calcutta — The Stormy Decades attempts to capture this most critical period in all its complexities. Among the essayists, some of them are established scholars, but many of them are young historians who bring refreshing ideas.
The volume begins and ends with poems by Rabindranath Tagore. The essays explore urban planning, the chaos following the death of Tagore, the war efforts of the imperial government, the Japanese attack on Kidderpore Docks (Calcutta port), the heroic saga of Calcutta Tramway workers who, besides fighting their British owners for economic demands, rose in unison to support the destitute of the Great Bengal famine and proved their might in the anti-imperialist struggle as well as communal amity, the Bengal famine itself, Great Calcutta Killing, the onslaught of partition and influx of refugees upon the city and above all the role of art and literature reflecting these historical events.
In ‘Famine, Food and the Politics of Survival in Calcutta’, Sanjukta Ghosh describes the many reasons for the Bengal Famine. An apathetic colonial administration, in the name of securing the borders, created the foodgrain shortage, notably of rice, triggering the great famine that claimed more than 1.5 million lives in 1943. Ghosh writes that while the countless destitute villagers who thronged the city cried for phan (the starch which was drained from cooked rice) yet neither windows were broken, nor were shops looted.
On the Great famine again, in ‘Emergence of Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti’, Gargi Chakravarty chronicles the relief work undertaken by the women of Calcutta. For the first time in history, it brought together the women from the bustee and the women of bhadralok families to bring in a semblance of order amid chaos, to provide relief. Besides rescuing destitute women from brothels, the Samiti opened gruel and medical centres across the city. It also conducted training programmes in spinning, tailoring, needle-work and handicrafts to offer the women a source of livelihood. Tagore’s niece Indira Devi and Satyajit Ray’s paternal aunt Lila Majumdar were in the forefront of this effort.
Sohini Majumdar in her essay ‘A Different Calcutta — INA Trials and Hindu-Muslim Solidarity’ traces the seeds of communal tensions that developed after the trials. While INA veterans Major General Shah Nawaz, Colonel Prem Kumar Sehgal and Colonel Gurubaksh Singh Dhillon were acquitted of all charges in a trial at the Red Fort, Delhi, to cheers among the freedom fighters as a moral victory over the British, the seven-year rigorous imprisonment of Abdul Rashid Ali in a trial at Calcutta was taken up by the Muslim League to divide the people along communal lines. However, decrying the sentence, rallies went around the city transcending communal barriers.
Three essays by Nariaki Nakazato, Debjani Sengupta and Anwesha Roy on the Great Calcutta Killing describe the background and main players of the orgy.
The carnage, which started on August 16, 1946, as Direct Action Day demanding partition of India and continued till August 20, 1946, had tremendous repercussions on the social fabric of the city. The disturbances often referred to as the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’ claimed the lives of 4,000, injured more than 10,000 and displaced more than 30,000 according to conservative official estimates.
Uditi Sen brings out the impact of the influx of refugees upon the city in a detailed study of Bijaygarh. After Independence and Partition, squatter colonies were set up by refugees who arrived in thousands from East Bengal. The educated high-caste bhadralok among the refugees used their social and cultural capital and political connections to negotiate with the state to secure legal status for their illegal occupation of land. However, this was unavailable to the second wave of lower caste peasant migrants, who arrived after 1950 with very little resources and ended up in camps in the districts or outside the state.
Anwesha Sengupta in her essay brings out the plight of the internally displaced minority who bore the brunt of communal attacks during this tumultuous decade and eventually were sidelined as citizens and forgotten.
In all, the 19 articles of this volume show that amid chaos and calamities, humanity triumphed each time to restore sanity. In that respect, this book brings out a saga of momentous changes that shaped the subsequent trajectory of this historic metropolis in a lucid manner.
