Editor's Note: According to Richard Stevenson's book "Bengal Tiger And British Lion, An Account of the Bengal Famine of 1943," on November 9, 1943, the Mayor of Calcutta sent a telegram to the Emperor of India asking him to "appoint a Royal Commission to investigate the causes that led to the famine in Bengal causing death of thousands of men women and children in the Province." In June 1994, the Viceroy set up a Famine Inquiry Commission to "investigate and report to the Central Government upon the causes of the food shortage and subsequent epidemics in India, and in particular in Bengal, in the year 1943." This Commission was headed by a retired ICS officer, Sir John Ackroyd Woodhead, and included Mr. Afzal Husain, who wrote a minute of dissent (available on this website), and Sir Manilal Nanavati,who secretly saved the detailed papers of the Commission against the Chairman's orders.
Editor's Note: According to Richard Stevenson's book "Bengal Tiger And British Lion, An Account of the Bengal Famine of 1943," on November 9, 1943, the Mayor of Calcutta sent a telegram to the Emperor of India asking him to "appoint a Royal Commission to investigate the causes that led to the famine in Bengal causing death of thousands of men women and children in the Province." In June 1994, the Viceroy set up a Famine Inquiry Commission to "investigate and report to the Central Government upon the causes of the food shortage and subsequent epidemics in India, and in particular in Bengal, in the year 1943." This Commission was headed by a retired ICS officer, Sir John Ackroyd Woodhead, and included Mr. Afzal Husain, who wrote a minute of dissent (reproduced below), and Sir Manilal Nanavati, who secretly saved the detailed papers of the Commission against the Chairman's orders.
Mr. Husain's dissent is reproduced below. The complete report is available in the attached pdf files.
Tapas Sen was born in Kolkata (1934), and brought up in what now constitutes Bangladesh. He migrated to India in 1948, and joined the National Defence Academy in January 1950. He was commissioned as a fighter pilot into the Indian Air Force on 1 April 1953, from where he retired in 1986 in the rank of an Air Commodore. He now leads an active life, travelling widely and writing occasionally.
Editor's note: This is a slightly modified version of article that originally appeared on Air Commodore Sen's blog TKS' Tales. It is reproduced here with the author's permission.
Planting our crops
We had just moved into our new and half-finished house at Himaitpur. It was early 1943.
The riversides of Himaitpur were full of Jute growing to its full height. The flood plains along the river were a very fertile tract. The land was of course sandy and loamy\; not quite fit for the cultivation of fine varieties of rice. However, the farmers had the choice of sowing jute, sugarcane, or the aus variety of rice. Some of them also experimented with maize at times. These flood plains, known as char-land were fit only for single or double cropping while the land further inland regularly produced three crops a year.
