Life in a Bengal village at Independence

We are celebrating 75 years of Independence. However, there are not many survivors from the time of Independence. I am one of the fortunate few. I was born three years before Independence and Partition, in a small village in undivided Bengal.

How was the social and political awareness in such a remote village at that time? WWII had formally ended when I was only one. So, I have no direct recollections of the war. However, my grandmother used to sing a lullaby in Bengali (“Sa re gama padhani/bom pheleche Japani/ bomer bhetor kewte sap/British bole bap re bap”) which, roughly translated, would be like: “The Japanese have dropped a bomb; a ferocious cobra has entered inside; and the British are crying: Oh my God”. Clearly, the narrator was relishing the plight of the British at the hands of the Japanese. It shows that the common Indians (especially the Bengalis) had a soft corner for the Japanese as they – an Asian race – were fighting the British, our European colonisers, and Netaji Subhas Bose’s INA was taking Japan’s help to free India from the British.

I also heard about the war from my father and relatives. These included stories about the barbarism of the Nazis under Hitler, the spirited leadership and oratory of Churchill (though, otherwise, Churchill was a hated figure in India because of his strong opposition to granting us freedom) as London was routinely bombarded by the German war planes, the landing of ‘Allied Forces’ at Normandy on D-Day, suicide by Hitler in the bunker, the fleeing of Indians from Burma as the Japanese forces advanced, the exodus of people from cities to their ancestral homes in smaller towns and villages to escape Japanese bombing, the exploits of the INA, and the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

However, the biggest legacy of WWII was the continuation of severe rationing of the most basic things of life like rice, cloth, kerosene and sugar.

The shadows of the Great Bengal Famine and Partition were very much in conversation. I heard stories about how scores of emaciated people roamed in the villages in search of something – in fact, anything -- to eat. Some of the better-off villagers arranged a gruel kitchen for them. Among the hungry people sitting in a row was a mother with a dead child in her arms, silently eating for self-preservation. Another person without food for days ate the maximum he could and then died as his shrunken intestine burst.

Our village was virtually unaffected by the deadly communal riots and the Partition of Bengal. Only a couple of Hindu refugee families from East Bengal (which overnight became East Pakistan) had taken shelter by building huts on the outskirts of the village. But instead of sympathy for their plight, the villagers used to sneer behind their backs when they wistfully talked about what they had to leave behind in their own villages from which they had suddenly been uprooted by a cruel turn of history – their homes, land, fish-filled ponds, Durga puja. Many villagers thought that these refugees were making up exaggerated stories about their better-off life in East Bengal. Perhaps this attitude persisted because the villagers had no known relatives who had suffered the same fate as these refugees.

India had by then become a new independent republic. Independence Day used to be celebrated in our village with a lot of emotions. My father (incidentally a revolutionary freedom fighter interned in Andaman Cellular Jail) had a silk tricolour which used to be hoisted up a bamboo pole. The most popular national heroes were Gandhiji and Bose. However, some people had resentment against Gandhiji because of his strong and open disagreement with Bose and his supposedly soft corner for the Muslims. Some also (erroneously) believed that Gandhiji could have prevented Partition but did not. Caste inequities did not concern the common people. If caste issues were ever talked about, it was because Gandhiji had made a movement for allowing the entry of ‘untouchables’ (whom he called ‘harijan’) into the Hindu temples.

In my childhood, I saw people with begging bowls moving from house to house, singing patriotic songs, eulogising revolutionary freedom fighters. The INA’s marching song: “Kadam Kadam Bhadaiye Ja” was more popular than the national anthem. So, more than the non-violent freedom struggle led by Gandhiji, the heroics of the revolutionaries and the INA stirred up the imaginations of the villagers.

At the same time, a huge gloom descended on the village when news came that an assassin’s bullet had taken away Gandhiji, the apostle of peace, within six months of Independence.

(The writer is a former Professor of Economics, IIM, Calcutta, and Cornell University)