The year 1943 saw many walkers. At first, half a million refugees trudging to India from Burma, often dying en route. Later, Deepak writes, "Many thousands of people walked from rural areas to Kolkata in hope of a meal."
Illustration/Uday Mohite
On a warm September morning in 1943, Chand Ali Khamaru walked eight gruelling miles with a small bundle of rice to his father in Medinipur, in rural West Bengal" is the first line of Sharanya Deepak's stirring and expansive online essay on how the cuisine of poor Bengalis, holds the history of hunger and poverty caused by the Bengal famine, and how, for the poor, any setback devastates generations.
The year 1943 saw many walkers. At first, half a million refugees trudging to India from Burma, often dying en route. Later, Deepak writes, "Many thousands of people walked from rural areas to Kolkata in hope of a meal."
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Our times too have seen this spectre of migrant workers making the long, shattering walk home, leached by the burning sun and an indifferent system.
"An estimated 2.1–3 million Bengalis died…However, contemporary mortality statistics were to some degree under-recorded, particularly for the rural areas, where data collecting and reporting was rudimentary even in normal times." This is a line from the Wikipedia entry on the Bengal famine.
"No such data is maintained". This is a recurring line from the ongoing Monsoon session of Parliament.
No data is maintained on the deaths of migrant workers, in 2020, 73 years after the transfer of India from colonial rule to self-rule. "The question of compensation does not arise" as there is no data maintained said the Labour ministry, nor is any proposal to document the unorganised sector underway. No data maintained by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, on the number of healthcare staff, affected by or dead from COVID-19. No data on how many police officials have died. No data maintained by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment on how COVID-19 has affected safai karamcharis dealing with waste.
There is also "no data available", on how many political prisoners India has incarcerated this year. But, there is 40 GB of data—11 lakh pages in material terms—from surveillance (a form of data collection) of the student activist Umar Khalid. And, we assume, data on hundreds of unnamed others.
Those who care to, have maintained data though. The Indian Medical Association announced that 382 doctors aged 27-85 have died from COVID-19. The Stranded Workers Action Network puts migrant deaths at 972 till July 4. In Maharashtra, of the 20,367 police personnel struck by COVID-19, 208 have died, 319 ASHA workers across India, carrying out frontline work without proper masks or salaries, are infected. They protested in August for masks and salaries, but no data, no listening perhaps.
May be there is data on how many hours of television news is not spent reporting this. Those who congratulated themselves on covering the migrant exodus, don't seem interested in its impact, or in recording their continuing hunger and hardship, now that they do not supply a narrative of spectacle and apocalypse. (Consider, over half the Bengal famine-related deaths occurred in 1944, from resulting disease).
The provincial government denied the Bengal famine at first. Debilitation was exacerbated through the diversion of funds for military expenditure, and a lockdown on boat traffic, devastating for a local economy dependent on water transport: decisions of a colonial government focused on its supremacy and its war, not the lives of poor Indians. Any resemblance to persons living is purely coincidental. Resemblance to persons dead? No data.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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