Free Churchill's Secret War by Madhusree Mukerjee

CHAPTER SEVEN
    In the Village
    “I n Sapurapota village of the 17th Union of Panskura Thana a Muslim weaver was unable to support his family and, crazed with hunger, wandered away,” recorded Biplabi on August 5, 1943. “His wife believed that he had drowned himself in the flooded Kasai River. Being unable to feed her two young sons for several days, she could no longer endure their suffering. On 7/23 she dropped the smaller boy torn from her womb, the sparkle of her eye, into the Kasai’s frothing waters. She tried in the same way to send her elder son to his father, but he screamed and grabbed on to her. The maddened mother had lost all capacity for love and compassion. She discovered a new way to silence her child’s searing hunger. With feeble arms she dug a small grave and threw her son into it. As she was trying to cover him with earth a passerby heard his screams and snatched the spade from his mother’s hand. A kagmara (low-caste Hindu) promised to bring up the boy and the mother then went away, who knows where. Probably she found peace by joining her husband in the Kasai’s cold torrent.” 1
    Such killings were not rare. “Kironbala the Acharjo girl threw her baby into the canal,” attested Bhawbanibala Samonto of Kalikakundu. After Kironbala’s husband died, she had returned to her father’s home with her one-and-a-half-year-old girl. Dependent on her father and hungry, Kironbala had gotten angry over some careless words. She dropped her toddler into the water and came home. Her father went to look for the child but the tide had come, and he returned empty-handed.
    Often, the murderer—or mercy killer—was the father. A “man with a female child requested everybody he met to buy the baby. As nobody
agreed to his proposal, the man threw the baby into the well and fled away,” reported the Hindustan Standard on November 28, 1943. Another newspaper mentioned that Bhogurdi Mandal of central Bengal was tried in September and sentenced to deportation for life (presumably to a penal colony on the Andaman Islands) for killing his three-year-old son Mozaffar, whom he could not feed. Biplabi wrote that on September 15, Gyanendranath Panda of Chongra village, having become crazed with hunger, slew his father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, wife, son, and daughter—everyone in the house. Suicides were so common that the newsletter took to listing these by name, place, and rough date, providing no further details. Another press report related that on October 22, in a suburb of Dacca, a fisherman, his wife, and their small daughter threw themselves in front of a train. The child miraculously survived, but what then became of her was not stated. 2
    The effect on the psyche of prolonged hunger is profound. An American experiment that enrolled conscientious objectors to World War II in a study of starvation revealed that it leads to an obsession with food, intolerance for loud sounds, and sudden bursts of irrational rage. A parent in such straits may well be impelled to do violence to an importuning child. An anthropologist in Calcutta at the time described a mother and son who had received some morsels from a relief kitchen. After eating his portion the boy took a piece of potato from hers, and she began to beat him so mercilessly that the onlooker had to intervene. 3
    Stories of abandonment during the Bengal famine—of a small child found wandering alone in a field, or of a woman who continued to eat at a relief camp while her baby died untended in her lap—are also common. An actress in Calcutta reported that once when her cook poured onto the pavement some phyan , the starchy water in which rice had been boiled, a shriveled-up woman who nevertheless seemed young caught it in her clay pot. Her four children ran up, but the mother ferociously slapped them away and drank up most of the phyan in quick gulps. Then she stopped and looked into the pot, which she must nearly have emptied, peered up at her crying