Indians were starved while being lectured on duty and sacrifice

Описание: Indians were starved while being lectured on duty and sacrifice

In wartime India, air-raid sirens and blackout drills in Calcutta share the night with cheerful World War II propaganda films like the Indian News Parade, insisting that “India unites for victory” while the Bengal famine of 1943 quietly spreads through villages and railway carriages. A boy in a shelter learns to listen to bombs instead of slogans; a girl on a famine train from rural Bengal watches jewellery turn into rice, and a mother realise too late that her baby has gone silent. By the time they reach Calcutta, the city runs on ration lines and relief kitchens, and a child can read “SAVE FOOD, SERVE THE NATION” on a wall and then step around a famine corpse on the pavement.

Visual truth begins to fight back. Editor Ian Stephens at The Statesman publishes photographs of the Bengal famine, turning Calcutta’s streets into front-page evidence and forcing global attention on mass starvation. Artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya’s banned pamphlet Hungry Bengal uses stark sketches of skeletal bodies to show what official newsreels refuse to show; most copies are seized and destroyed, but the images survive in memory and in a few hidden books.

In Delhi, the Red Fort INA trials turn “treason” into a rallying point as crowds shout “Jai Hind,” while in Bombay the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946 explodes from HMIS Talwar, ratings keying “Quit India” and “Jai Hind” into the very wireless sets meant to enforce discipline. Years later, an old man in Bengal labels and overfills his pantry, proof that the real verdict on empire’s propaganda was written not in posters but in one stubborn word that famine survivors carry into every future meal: “Not again.”