When I wash my hands for too long, I think of my grandmother. My mother says I was born with my fists closed, like a boxer: “you were fighting me even when you were inside me”. I choose to believe it, she is seldom wrong. Owing to the neonatal boxer in me, I’ve always had palms that look like a starving poet’s failed attempts to straighten out a scribbled, crumpled sheet of paper. So when I wash my hands , the translucent whitish yellow skin on my palm shrivels up, forming wrinkles, bumps, and white lines. I stare at the water dripping from my disproportionately long fingers and think of my grandmother hovering over the kitchen slab on Sundays. There are tomatoes on the chopping board, small yellow-lid plastic jars of kalo jeere (nigella seeds), occasional shouts of “where’s the salt” and “where’s the sugar”, and then comes the strangely familiar smell. She is stirring the potatoes in the pan and dipping her wrinkly, lined fingers in the boiling hot gravy to taste it. The pan is simmering, but those ungloved boxer hands are unflinching. She smacks her lips and nods. I impatiently tap away at the plate.
Shada Alur Torkari (white potato curry). We still eat it on Sundays. My grandmother is older now. Her knees are not as kind as she is. But every Sunday, when I sit down to eat, she looks at my bowlful of alur torkari and mutters, “I gave them instructions, but it won’t be as good as mine”. I dip my ruti (flatbread) in the gravy and smile, of course it won’t be.
One would seldom associate their everyday, innocent meals with one of the worst disasters in twentieth century South Asia. But a long, hard look at the average Bengali-middle class’ lunch spread would surprise you. From obscure, your-grandmother-is-the-only-person-who-knows-how-to-cook-this viands like lau-er khosha bhaja (Bottle Gourd Peel Stir) to every monsoon’s main cameo: Khichuri; the food of the Bengal Famine, even 81 years later, lingers quietly in corners of Bengali kitchens.
To briefly set the context, Ponchasher Akal (The Bengal Famine of 1943) was the only famine in modern Indian history that didn’t occur as a result of serious drought, but the failure of Churchill-era British policies. During the time of World War II, Bengal witnessed a decline in its food provisions due to a series of natural calamities, crop infections, and the loss of Burma – a primary rice supplier – to Japanese control. But despite these challenges, Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen has argued that there should still have been enough supplies to feed the region. The mass deaths came about as a combination of wartime inflation, speculative buying and panic hoarding, which together pushed the price of food out of the reach of poor Bengalis.
One of the biggest shortages that occurred in this famine was of rice. My very North-Indian friend’s sister’s biggest takeaway from a wedding in Calcutta was: “They love their bhaat (rice) and bhaat-ghum (post rice slumber)”. But this very sentiment, that only rice can warm a Bengali belly, came crashing down in the years of the famine.
Bengal has three seasons of rice—aman, aus, and boro—the winter, summer, and autumn crop. In 1942, there came a cyclone that wrecked the winter rice crop, setting off a devastating famine. But what started as a natural disaster soon escalated under British policies, led by Winston Churchill. The Denial Policy, aimed at thwarting the Japanese, seized over 40,000 tons of rice from rural Bengal. When British officials wrote to Churchill saying that the Famine had escalated, he commented, “Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”. The boat-denial policy further worsened the situation, destroying the boats used for transportation in flood-prone regions. Without boats, the fisher-men had nothing. Thus started the scarcity of fish, another Bengali staple. As rice and fish started to disappear, villages crumbled, leading to mass migrations to the Sundarbans or Kolkata in search of food.
One of the most well documented stories of the Bengal famine is the story of the starving poor begging for the water that the rice is cooked in, outside of Kolkata’s middle class homes. Satyajit Ray’s Asani Shanket (Distant Thunder, 1973), alongside depicting this harrowing poverty of the famine, also shows the different levels of panic that was quietly spreading everywhere in Bengal. There’s a scene where Soumitra goes hunting for rice to Nibaran’s house. Nibaran refuses to sell, but invites Soumitra in for a meal. Soumitra refuses initially but when he hears that there is fresh fish from the pond, he gives in. The scene continues with a close top shot of Soumitra mixing fish and rice. He pauses for a while. We see his face at a low angle. Khenti, Nibaran’s daughter asks him if his wife is waiting at home. Soumitra answers quietly: “She puts everything on my plate, forgets to keep anything for herself”. Khenti replies, “Finish eating and come to the back of the house, I’ll give you some rice to take home”
There are certain films you can’t watch for a second time because of the way it haunts you in the first. I could never watch Ashanti Sanket twice.
But as rice and fish started to disappear, people started cooking with whatever they could get to fill their stomachs. While it would be very ignorant, and downright crass to say that the Bengal Famine had any “good” effect in Bengali cuisine; it is undeniable that it brought some fundamental changes to it. It was during this time that wheat, in the form of flatbread, entered Bengal’s kitchens. Owing partly to the rationing system introduced later, in the 1950s, and majorly because the experience of the famine emphasized wheat; many Bengalis got used to having chapatis. Ruti, as it is called in Bengal, is still very much a part of the everyday diet. When I go back home to Calcutta, my friends and I have a long standing ritual to visit a particularly odd looking place in Office Para (area) that looks like it’s about to fall and crumble at any given point in time, and gorge on Ruti-Mangsho (flatbread and meat).
If I talk about Ruti, I have to talk about Alu (potatoes) next. I have lost count of how many times I have groaned and moaned over my tiffin in school. It would literally always be Ruti-Torkari (Flatbread and Potato curry), and I’d always eye the Lotte Choco Pie tiffin being devoured next to me. But this staple, simple and innocent ‘tiffin’ was also a direct consequence of the famine. In East Bengal, present day Bangladesh, people turned to atar ruti because of the availability of wheat and owing to the potato production there locals started substituting rice with alu shedhho (mashed potatoes) and alu tarkari (potato curry)
Dishes like these have lived what many would call a double life. That is they have become something to be cherished like a warm piece of home. ‘Comfort foods’, so to say. But be it studies on Bengali culinary traditions, the cookbooks, or simply us; we rarely pause to remember the impoverished history that predates them. How many times have I paused to think about the extent of anguish, hunger and poverty it takes for a man to write: Poetry, today I give you leave/ In the realm of hunger, the world is prosaic/ The full moon is like scalded bread (Translated excerpt from Sukanta Bhattacharya’s He Mohajeebon)
Talking about Janus-faced ‘comfort foods’ brings me to khichuri, a popular rice-lentil dish with a long, pan-Indian history. Ask any Bengali about Khichuri, and they’ll tell you enviable stories of rains, mothers and fevers. Chandrabindu, a popular Bengali band, has a love song that (after loosely translating), goes like: You’re like the sunlight that bathes my room, after the fever passes. Growing up, everytime this line played, I would try my hardest to imagine a prospective-Derrida-reading-dreamy-eye-batting-young-man, but would end up picturing a steaming hot plate of Khichuri. I’m convinced that the only reason I survived having Malaria in 7th grade, is Khichuri. But what is seldom remembered is that Khichuri originated from the unavailability of anything else. Watered down Khichuri, with left-over vegetables, lentils, and anything that people could gather to fill their stomachs, was being eaten by desperate Bengalis in meager aid camps. It is still cooked in massive quantities, limp and brothy, for refugees at Indian borders and displaced populations in tents.
Even lesser known foods, like Googli, which is still popularly known as the ‘poor man’s meat’ can be traced back to the famine. Googlis are essentially snails that are eaten extensively by people in rural Bengal. When fish and boats started to disappear during the famine, people would catch these from small ponds and cook them into thin stews. In a beautiful Atlas Obscura article, Aditi Sen, a researcher based in Canada, writes about how her grandmother, a survivor of the Famine, would fry up marigold flowers for her grandchildren as a snack. Along with the foods of this famine, a lot of Famine-era techniques also largely persist in present Bengal. It struck me today that I’ve never really wondered where such odd bhajas (fries), which I’ve eaten countless number of times with daal, like kumro phul bhaja (pumpkin flower fry), bok phul bhaja (heron flower fry) or lau-er khosha bhaja (bottle-gourd peel fry) came from. These techniques of cooking with vegetable skins and eating flower petals can all be traced back to the scramble for food in the years of the famine.
I’ve always had a strange relationship with food. Sometimes good, and sometimes deplorable. Today being one of those deplorable days, I'm trying my hardest to figure out a way to conclude this article. But all I can think of— are all the hands that came before me. How my mother mixes the perfect bit of kochu shak (the stem of Taro) with the last grains of rice. How my grandmother glares if you waste even the smallest piece of alu (potato). You, quite literally, can't. She'll snatch it away and drop it on her plate in no time.
There’s a slant yellow light that’s falling on the wall right opposite of me. The A4 poster on it, reads: “The night sky is filled with the intoxicating smell of rice/ even now, someone out there/ cooks rice, lays it out to eat/ And we are left sleepless/ Praying, all night long/ swathed in the whiff of intoxicating rice” (Translated excerpt from Birendra Chattopadhyay’s poem). I’m staring at it, hoping that once in a while, you look down at the palm of your hands and imagine your grandmother’s silhouette; kneading a ball of wheat with no care for the world. She's humming an oddly familiar Manna Dey and you have realized, looking at her, that Muhammad Ali could never.
Picture Credits - https://images.app.goo.gl/XmhvXFAKnZorK9ZT6
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