THE WOKE LEFT DOES NOT WRITE ACCURATE and FACTUAL HISTORY

My take on a rather polemical piece by a feted historian of the British Establishment

THE PARADOXES OF REVISIONISM IN THE   CONTEXT OF THE BENGAL FAMINE OF 1943-44 

Sayantani Gupta

Abhijit Sarkar- Fed By Famine: The Hindu Mahasabha’s politics of religion, caste and relief in response to the Great Bengal Famine, 1943-1944””: Modern Asian Studies:Vol 54, Part 6: February/November 2020. Pp: $20.

Available online at www. cambridge.org./core/journals/modernasianstudies

 In this article I am chiefly concerned with some points raised and assertions made in the above cited article. I do however link it to a recent event for it concerns the selective reading of historical facts and narratives, as is enjoined by the post-colonial and post-modern tendencies of historiography. As a Rankean historian I am  preoccupied about the need to re-create a holistic picture of events as they were rather than only   creating moralistic tropes, grounded in present day political realities.

 I draw inspiration  from Winston Churchill and his adage of “A lie will travel half around the world, before Truth can put on its  boots” and rest my case.

 The recent  academic seminar at Churchill College, Cambridge, (February 2021)which included on its panel Madhusree  Mukherjee of “”Churchill’s Secret War”’ fame re -enforced the recent trend of castigating Churchill as racist. It  then went even further  to suggest that his  so-called racism was far worse than supposed, perhaps at par with that of Nazi Germany, and probably even worse, as the British Empire lasted longer than the Nazis.  The panel  went on to opine that his writings on a History of the English Speaking People, was indicative of his mentality as a White Supremacist. The panel, needless to say did not include Dr Zareer Masani or Dr Andrew Roberts, but was packed with members of what is often labelled as the “”Wokeist “’Brigade, and was definitive in its continued apportionment of blame on Winston Churchill for the millions of deaths in the Bengal Famine of 1943-44.

Much has been written about the afore-mentioned book and its related assumptions on this site, by academicians and historians far more knowledgeable than me. Especially , Arthur Harman’s recent work on this website which clearly brings out the pitfalls of such an approach. My  overall understanding is that the British Empire in India was a complex and  multi-layered historical process, spanning  at least two centuries . To make sweeping assertions on its character, in a one –sided manner, and that too, at a prestigious College of whom Sir Winston was a patron, is to be superficial as well as a-historical, and frankly ridiculous.

Churchill was Britain's Prime Minister during World War Two. His attitudes and utterances about India and Hindus in particular were what we would understand as racist today. But those attitudes were typical of most Britons of the time, and especially of the upper class elites to which Churchill belonged.

Churchill cannot and should not be absolved of ultimate responsibility for the millions of Bengalis who died during the Famine of 1943.

However I argue that the primary culpability for this tragic quasi- genocide lay squarely at the joint door of the British Governor of Bengal, Herbert and his Muslim League collaborator HS Suhrawardy.

India's Left Liberal historiography is in denial of this. Madhusree Mukherjee”s controversial publication listed in the select bibliography at the end of this post is what triggered off a major spat, as she squarely put the blame on Winston Churchill, then British Prime Minister and therefore in overall charge of Britain”s Crown Dominions including India.

Somewhat as a reaction to this Leftist trope is the increasing trend in Britain of an influential section of British academia to conflate present political contexts of Narendra Modi”s India to the events of 1943; and demonize the leading Congress and Hindu Mahasabha stalwart Dr Syama Prasad Mukherjee as an agent provocateur of sorts, who exaggerated the effects of the Bengal Famine for their own political gains.

Proto- Leftist and British academic Establishment scholars like Dr Abhijit Sarkar exemplify this trend. As part of an increased political polarization in India, where the out-of -power Congress Party finds its greatest moorings in a Progressive as well as Right-wing Western Establishment uncomfortable with India”s growing assertiveness for multi-polarity under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the shrill and often ahistorical lambasting of what is perceived as “Hindu aggression” makes readings of colonial Indian history problematic.

In this vein I approach  Dr Abhijit Sarkar’s recent article in the Journal Of Modern Asian Studies .Dr Sarkar claims to have unearthed enough evidence from his reading of a substantial number of  primary as well as secondary historical sources on the tumultuous context  of Bengal in the early 1940s; to establish a counter-narrative of  how the Bengal Famine of 1943-1944 and relief activism during it fed the politics of the Hindu Right.

In this counter-narrative, he  essentially excoriates the role of Dr Syama Prosad Mookerjee, originally a Bengal Congress member, and from  1939  onwards, a prominent Bengali  leader of the Hindu Mahasabha; in fuelling a  Hindu communalist discourse against the Provincial  Muslim League Government of Khwaja Nazimuddin in which  HS Suhrawardy was the Food and Civil Supplies Minister. Such a propagandist portrayal, he suggests,  created a web of anti-Muslim  dis-information , which, on the part of Mookerjee, was entirely self-seeking and directed towards a partitioning of  the un-divided Bengal Province of British India into a Hindu majoritarian West Bengal . Throughout his approximately 65   page long article, the author is harshly critical of Mookerjee , whose claims of communalization of food relief by the League in general and of Suhrawardy in particular , he finds  disingenuous and whose  role in  the Bengal Relief Commitee, a private Mahasabha led effort he finds politically motivated.

 I appreciate as a historian, the wealth of granular data and documentation that he brings to the fore.  His detailed analysis of the vagaries and challenges  of building up  food supplies in famine affected Bengal, food relief processes ,  the role of colonial and provincial  Governmental agencies and the private efforts there-of are an important delineation of the key components in the contemporary data. There is also no denial of the fact that the Mahasabha was a leading player in the private efforts to organise famine relief and that the Bengal Relief Committee as an umbrella organization focussed on primarily Hindu dominated areas, though it also operated in some Muslim areas, but less so.

 However in the following paragraphs I spell out  the  specific reasons for finding Dr Sarkar’s  analysis as one-dimensional and monochromatic, and perhaps a classic case of the present being read into the past. In highlighting exclusively the role of the Hindu Mahasabha and the anti-Muslim League rhetoric of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, while downplaying the wider context of the   British colonial state’s policies and also of the class and religious community dynamics in the politics of the Muslim League, which exhibited as many twists and turns in its internal structures, as did that of the Mahasabha, this scholarly venture is significantly marred.

My issues with Sarkar’s counter-narrative are in the main as detailed below:

1.      The volatile situation in Bengal in 1940-44 do not merit a selective reporting of the facts :

Sarkar  stresses that Syama Prasad Mukherjee  was a  Hindu communalist and used the volatile situation arising out of the war-time conditions in Calcutta and Bengal to politically mobilize the  Bengali Hindu bhadralok  and create a propagandist discourse against the Muslim League. He cites his  resignation from the coalition Government led by Fazlul Haque on  20^TH November 1942 as a deliberate instance and seems to hint that this was a selfish and politically motivated move, to cloak his own culpability for the Bengal Famine. He resigned, according to  Sarkar ‘’ostensibly over police and military atrocities..against anti-colonial activists, duplicity and interference of the British Governor of Bengal and bureaucrats and neglect of relief works in the aftermath of the cyclone of October 1942””. But actually he “”found his  voice in this issue only after resigning from the Ministry’’.

The reality is not so simple. I find it strange that there is scant mention of the fact that Fazlul Huq, the leader of the Krishak Praja Party(KPP), a secular Muslim dominated outfit which  was in coalition with Mookerjee and the Hindu Mahasabha since December 1941, had running political battles with the other Muslim League Supremo from Bengal HS Suhrawardy. In fact, Huq’s sponsoring of the Pakistan proposal in  March 1940 at the Lahore session  arose out of the internal factionalism of the Muslim political bloc as it existed in Bengal of the time.  Sarkar does not go into this factor at all, and projects a simplistic  and superficial analysis of the collapse of the KPP-HM Government, largely maligning Mookerjee as I described above. Although his detailed bibliographical and reference lists mention references to  recent studies on Fazlul Huq,  a succinct analysis of the political pulls and counter-pulls within the Shyama-Haque Ministry as it was popularly known is missing; as are the considerable strategic  and policy differences among its members which may have been a cause for Mookerjee’s resignation.

Janam Mukherjee’s cogent analysis of the build-up to the Famine  in his 2015 book “Hungry Bengal”, highlights the political disarray in war-time Bengal between the considerably weakened British Provincial Government establishment and the political formations which arose out of the 1937 elections, Congress leadership being imprisoned during the Quit India Movement of 1942, and the resultant political vacuum created by the virtual Congress withdrawal from the public political space. With the mainstream nationalist movement going largely underground, ambitious Congress leaders like Mookerjee and Subhas Chandra Bose carved out their own regional political spaces by sponsoring pressure groups breaking away  from  the official Congress line. While Mookerjee joined the Akhil Bharatiya  Hindu Mahasabha then led by VD Savarkar,  Bose radicalized considerably to a more militant anti-British line, first in the Forward Bloc and then in the setting up of the Indian National Army.

In this political vortex Fazlul Huq was an important participant. He was an astute politician with a solid support base in Bengal, a founding member of the League in 1906, who, as Mukherjee points out, had also been a joint secretary in the Congress from 1916-21, and  was not particularly comfortable with the communalist idiom of the League. In the 1936 elections, the Muslim League (ML)won 39 seats, KPP 36, Independent  Muslim candidates 43. Huq became Chief Minister of the   first Bengal Provincial government  in 1937 in a diverse Coalition comprising the KPP and the ML. However the internecine pulls of the various Muslim factions and in  particular, the rivalries between Huq  and  the Suhrawardy  group consumed the first Huq Government. In the second one in November 1941, Huq joined hands with Mookerjee , as a counter-poise to the  Suhrawardy and Nazimuddin dominated ML.

 Although Mookerjee  was Finance Minister in the Government, the British political establishment wasnot comfortable with this formation. One reason was his  discomfiture with the British Govenment’s handling  of the Congress leadership and its crackdown on Congress which had been declared an unlawful organization. He had written to Viceroy Linlithgow for permission to meet Gandhi in jail but was denied. He also fell out with Governor John Herbert about whom he had complained to the Viceroy’s Cabinet as far back as 1942. With the Midnapore cyclone of November 1942 things reached breaking point as Mookerjee  felt the British  Governor  was  misleading the War  Cabinet and  the  Viceroy about  the food situation  in Bengal. He was also critical of the decision to divert rice from Bengal to British troops in the Gulf and Ceylon.

So, to allege that Mookerjee resigned from the Huq  Government in  1942 as a cynical political move, is an interpretation of facts missing an opportunity to have gone into the shifting  dynamics of political alignments and equations of the time; which were far more complex than Sarkar chooses to bring out.

2.       AN APOLOGIA FOR H.S SUHRAWARDY?

Reading this article I was struck by the manner in which Abhijit Sarkar  relies on the documentation of the  HS Suhrawardy  faction of the  Muslim League to marshall his case about the relief-politics of the Hindu Mahasabha and of Syama Prasad Mukherjee.  He   references   Ikramullah , Taluqdar and Begum Shaista Suhrawardy’s  personal memoirs  without  any  detailed  cross-referencing to Khwaja Nazimuddin or to Fazlul Huq’s  personal papers to validate the contentions of those close to Suhrawardy. Nor is the  referencing to  data from official accounts  of bureaucrats from within the colonial Establishment, military intelligence or other sources which are  known to  exist and which do not cast Suhrawardy in a very favourable light-particularly in his ties with the Calcutta food mafia and blackmarketeers of the time referred to.( The accounts of N.M Aiyyar, the I.C.S Officer who succeeded L.G Pinnell as Director of Food and Civil Supplies in May 1943 are a case in point). When reputations are being attacked- as that of SP Mookerjee is, it would be fair and balanced to also refer to sources which are not hagiographies or apologies for Suhrawardy. Even when the data is quoted, as from ICS officer Asok Mitra’s memoirs, on the state patronage of Muslims in the grain trade and the big push given to recruiting procurement agents and retailers on community lines)it is done to attack Mookerjee and his contentions about the communalization of the food trade . The controversial role played by  Suhrawardy  as  Food and Civil Supplies Minister in the Khwaja Nazimuddin Goverrnment after Huq resigned in March 1943 cannot be blanked out as has been done here. If the Mahasabha’s Relief orientation had a Hindu focus, the League, too utilized the scope and visibility of Governmental relief efforts of which it was in charge, as well as through  the aegis of the Muslim Chamber of Commerce. Viceroy Wavell himself had recorded about the “’reckless way  in which  political capital was being made of the Bengal trouble..(that) Nazimuddin was honest and weak..and Suhrawardy..all big talk and small action”.

 Sarkar had the opportunity to utilize the vast data at his disposal to bring out a nuanced picture of the complexities of regional political equations, the role of  European industrial capitalists and the managing agency firms, and of the Calcutta underworld in the food scarcity scenario of the time; and the rival  commercial lobbies which existed –as of the Ispahani Group, known to be close to Suhrawardy; the Marwari caucuses with Congress ties, and of independent Muslim businesses with links to both Fazlul Haque and Nazimuddin. It was also a good opportunity to analyse the close support the  Suhrawardy  faction of the Muslim League received from the Provincial British Governors- John Herbert and Thomas Rutherford in particular, mainly owing to unstinted support for the War effort, which triggered reactions from both rival League factions as of SPM. Sarkar however does not do so, adding diatribe selectively and  without portraying in a holistic fashion the   complicated politics as well as the controversies associated with Suhrawardy, behind the scenes of the overall food supplies scarcity situation.

3.      MOOKERJEE   WAS NOT A  CRUDE  HINDU RIGHT- WING COMMUNALIST AS HE IS PORTRAYED.

 Syama Prasad  was  rather  a sophisticated and Westernized nationalist, who  veered towards a  more  Hindu  oriented  nationalism  as a reaction to what he perceived was a strident Islamization of Bengal orchestrated by the Suhrawardy dominated  League and supported by the British Government.  Venkat Dhulipala in his 2015 work has brought out how from the late 1930s, ‘’far from being a vague idea””, the   secession  of India’s Muslim dominated territories  was being increasingly envisaged as an Islamic Utopia that would be a harbinger for a Muslim renewal, and was becoming a focus for raucous debates in the public sphere. The increasing polarization of Bengal’s politics in the run-up to Partition had its basis in structural and class situations of an elite- peasant caucus of the Muslim League as a counter to the Bengali Hindu landholding and white collar bhadralok shifting its loyalties  between the Congress and the Mahasabha.

Nevertheless, Syama Prasad was not a dogmatic adherent in the early stages to the idea. He  had earlier had significant differences with  Mahasabha supremo VD Savarkar and had even quit the Mahasabha on the issue of membership of liberal Muslims, as well as a more vigorous opposition to colonial rule. As late as 12^th November 1944 at  Ludhiana he  fervently opposed  Partition. He was also an avid initial supporter of the C Rajagopalachari compromise solution in 1944   which was an attempt at a Congress-League detente resting on Congress  conceding on several issues to the League and preventing Partition. These attitudes are certainly not those of a monochromatic and xenophobic  Hindu communalist. Mookerjee’s closest parallel on the Muslim side was perhaps with Huque, his one-time ally. It is an analysis which Sarkar does not go into, but which could have been studied in the wider context of  Hindu –Muslim polarizations in the Bengal of the early and mid 1940s.

Regarding the role of the Bengal Relief Committee(BRC), even Muslim League leader Nazimuddin recognised the role it played by stating that Mookerjee would have lost its face had the food Ministry been able to show some result. Sarkar quotes both Congress leader KC Neogy as well as  Vijaylakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister, who visited Bengal in October-November 1943, both of whom found the limitations of the Government -run kitchens in general and in  Midnapur District in particular to be severe. But  he doesnot again carry this analysis further, to see the reasons why the Bengal Relief  Committee had to play the role it did. Of course, had he cared to do the analysis holistically, the entire thrust of his conclusions about the communalization of the food supplies discourse may have been different. It is also telling that in such a detailed attack on the relief efforts of the Mahasabha in the Famine years, there is neither any District-wise or community –wise disaggregated data of the casualty figures; nor is there any referencing to many personal memoirs of social workers such as Asoka Gupta, whose husband Saibal Gupta was a key  Bengali ICS officer at the time.

 Even the veteran Communist Party Of India parliamentarian Hiren Mukherjee wrote about Mookerjee  that “”’he couldnot be glibly branded as a mere communalist..one could always discern the catholicity..and the rationalityof his outlook..he cherished freedom of opinion ..and was a champion of civil liberties..keeping himself above the narrowness of communal chauvinism”’. Nehru had included him in his Cabinet post 1947, and although Mookerjee often had differences with both Gandhi and Nehru, he remained essentially too much of a nationalist, rather than a narrow communalist.

There are many other issues which I find Abhijit Sarkar glossing over. The  co-relation with the macro-narrative of political events of the time, involving the War, the changing fortunes of the Congress and the League after the cessation of War, the hardening of communal rhetoric of the League in particular and its  steadily hardening communal polarizations and actions  culminating in the Calcutta  and Noakhali riots are some of these. Space constraints prevent me from discussing these, but they were factors which most certainly contributed to the Mahasabha’s discourse.

As has been the case with contemporary accounts of  Winston Churchill,  Abhijit Sarkar’s  counter-narrative of Syama Prasad  Mookerjee is rooted in present day Indian political contexts. He himself declares, “’studying Mookerjee’s relief-politics is particularly important because.. they shape the relief-politics of the Hindu Right...it was he who in 1951 formed the Bharatiya Jana Sangha , the precursor of the present-day Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP).””

 The Indian Left - leaning  intelligentsia has of late  had a deep disdain for the man and his politics, and right now, with an acrimonious electoral battle being fought in West Bengal between the BJP and a Left oriented coalition, the appropriation of  Mookerjee as a symbol of communalism by the Left  rivals the valorising of the man by the  present Indian Right, rendering nuanced analysis a casualty.

A grand narrative of discriminatory attitudes and prejudices of historical personalities, be it of Churchill  or of  S.P Mookerjee, have already been pre-decided by the progenitors of the cause of debunking anyone who does not accord with the present day obsession with the ideals of the nation-state, and with nationalist sentiments-unless they are of the categories and communities deemed politically correct in the present day contexts. Interpretations of patriotism and nation-state ideologies and the movements or processes linked to historical personalities are thus cherry-picked for value-loading as per the Weltanschaung of the committed Leftist and post-modernist historian.

My review of Abhijit Sarkar’s cited article sees the opportunities missed, towards fashioning a historical narrative which is not value-loaded by identitarian presumptions, but which seeks to understand,  the subtleties of context, and which balances the details of contemporary accounts from all perspectives, instead of selectively choosing and/or interpreting the textual and primary Zeitgeists which will craft a particular counter-narrative .

The scope for further historical research on this particular phase of Indo- British history, thus remains as vibrant and perhaps ever more needed than ever.

I am presently attempting a Rankean perspective not aligned with any dogma but seeking only the facts as they were from predominantly primary data sources.

Selected References:

-Madhusree Mukerjee: “ Churchill”s Secret War- TheBritish Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II

March 2018 at www.penguin.co.in

-Arthur Herman, “’Absent Churchill, Bengal’s Famine Would Have Been Worse”’ at

https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu

  October 2017

-Venkat Dhulipala” Creating a New Medina”, Cambridge University Press, 2015.

-Rabi Banerjee, “ The Man, the Melange” at www.theweek.in/authors.Rabi.html  October 2020.

-Janam Mukherjee, “ Hungry Bengal-War, Famine, Riots and the End Of Empire”, Harper Collins, 2015

- Ashoka Gupta, “ In the Path Of Service”, Bhatkal/Sen Publishing, 2005.