Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Mao: what’s the difference?

If my last post (From Sir Winston to Washington Post) seemed to suggest that I had joined the Churchill fan brigade – known more for its unseemly concern with the Great Man’s dentures than with his Imperial and imperious criminality – as a fresh and overenthusiastic recruit, let me clear the air. What I ought to have said in that post was that his Indophobic outburst in the June 1947 debate on the India Independence Bill in the British Parliament sounds prophetic in the prevailing Indian political context. I stand corrected and abashed for my haste. To save face, my only lame-duck – if that! – excuse could be that, in any case, a visionary – even an accidental one – is sighted and anointed only after the event. If Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust, Stalin for the Holodomor (“killing by hunger” in Russian) or the Great Famine of Ukraine (1932-33) and Mao for the mammoth number of starvation deaths in the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), Churchill needs must shoulder the responsibility for the 2000 a month death toll in the 1942-43 Bengal Famine. In his own words, Indians were “a beastly people with a beastly religion” who “bred like rabbits”. http://ind.pn/UofYOK Ergo, they probably were beyond redemption and not worth saving. What the King Emperor’s First Minister did to worsen the situation in the Bengal Famine was to deny food shipments to India and insist on rice exports from India to shore up the war effort. Churchill’s collaborators in his war crime were: the Japanese occupation of Burma that choked off rice imports to India; an untimely cyclone in the Bay of Bengal that wiped out the winter crop; and a panicky government that confiscated in a knee-jerk reaction all vehicles that used to ferry rice from Burma in order to keep them out of reach of the invaders. The government also started buying food grains on the open market to feed the troops and the war workers, thereby nudging the traders into hoarding the scarce stuff and spawning what came to be known as “the black market”. (I vaguely remember hearing the phrase repeatedly at 233 Khetwadi Main Road for the first time a bit after the Quit India call by Gandhi on 8 August 1942.) In a sense, Churchill was the blackguard who brought the black market to India. 

Second thoughts.

The other day, while watching Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth, it occurred to me that the only victim of partition I witnessed at first hand was a hapless hack Victoria driver being butchered in the 13th Khetwadi Lane facing my 233 Khetwadi Main Road terrace. http://digbig.com/5bafde. Why the “cracking” of India as Bapsi Sidhwa called it could not be achieved without bloodshed and strife and monumental human tragedy is something that has always puzzled me.

Looking around for clues, I’m dumbstruck by the unconscionable haste with which partition was announced and carried out. On 4 June 1947, quite out of the blue, Lord Mountbatten announced at a press conference http://digbig.com/5bafnh that the British would quit the sub-continent by 15 August of the same year, i.e., in less than 3 months − instead of the earlier set deadline of June 1948 for the transfer of power. Eleven months earlier, on Jinnah-decreed Direct Action Day, 16 August 1946, policemen in Bengal were allowed to go on a holiday by Governor Fredric Burrows with Lord Wavell’s tacit assent. The Calcutta massacre went on without police or military intervention for three days. http://digbig.com/5bafng. It is as if the British Raj had washed its hands of the erstwhile Jewel in the Crown and wanted to get the hell out of India at the earliest without involving itself further in the emerging mess.

Had Churchill been the British PM instead of Attlee, the holocaust might have been avoided or at least postponed for a while given that he would never have agreed to the colony’s independence readily. That would have been a blessing in disguise as it might have given the Indian leaders time to think up a cogent and workable plan of action for an orderly partition and the massive migration involved when the moment arrived.

Bizarre behaviour.

I just finished reading David Pryce-Jones' Unity Mitford A Quest (Star, London 1981). It had been lying hidden in one of our cupboards until it caught my eye serendipitously one fortunate afternoon. Many of the events it covers took place before I was born and some, when I was a child. It is a difficult read what with all the Germans and other Europeans peopling it, German, Hungarian and Czech place names and, above all (or, uber alles, as Unity Valkyrie Mitford would probably have preferred it), the dry and clinical style of writing that Pryce-Jones uses. It's a psychological thriller in a sense. It scared me no end to enter into Unity's mind. It ticked like the mind of a latter-day groupie of a rock star or a movie star. She was a British aristocrat by birth and upbringing, related to Winston Churchill. Yet, she was a Fascist, anti-Semite and more Nazi than the Nazis. She followed Hitler, somehow intuiting his movements and whereabouts and managing to be in the right place at the right time to catch his eye. The Nazis thought she was a British spy. The book suggests she was an ardent fan of Hitler who apparently saw her as the perfect specimen of Aryan (Nordic) womanhood. There has of late been speculation if Unity had Hitler's love-child. http://digbig.com/4ymtm and http://digbig.com/4ymtn. Pryce-Jones goes to great lengths to cite hearsay evidence to prove that there was nothing sexual about the Unity-Hitler link-up. Nor, according to him, did she have an affair with the Hungarian aristocrat and closet-Nazi Janos Almasy, the brother of of Lazlo (aka 'The English Patient"). Unity fervently hoped that Germany and England would be allies and jointly "police" the world. When they went to war, her inner world imploded and she tried to commit suicide. Weird!

MK Gandhi aka 'Mahatma'.

Robert Payne's anecdotal The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi is quite an insightful biography. According to his reckoning (ibid, page 290), while Rabindranth Tagore, the Nobel laureate, was already 'Gurudev' (Celestial Teacher) and Gandhi's South African associate, Charlie Freer Andrews, 'Deenabandhu' (Brother to the Poor) in 1915, Tagore was still to bestow the 'Mahatma' title on Gandhi.

Another source, however, attributes the authorship of the Mahatma epithet to Nautamlal Bhagavanji Mehta, an Indian freedom fighter and Gandhi's supporter, and the date and the place of the conferring it as 21 January 1915 and Kamribai School in Jetpur, Saurashtra (Gujarat) respectively. http://digbig.com/4xsbg.

In the 20 January 1927 issue of Young India, though, Gandhi wrote: "I myself do not feel like a saint in any shape or form." Was that a rejection of the Mahatma title earlier conferred on him? Or, self-doubt?

Payne offers this anecdote about an incident that must have occured during Gandhi's last sojourn in Delhi (ibid, page 550):

Once he was asked: "If you are a Mahatma (Great Soul), perform a miracle and save India." He answered sadly: "I am not a Mahatma. I am an ordinary person like everyone else, except that I am much frailer."

By the way, General Jan Smuts who had had first-hand experience of Gandhi in South Africa reportedly told his contemporary and friend, Winston Churchill, that Gandhi "... is a man of God. You and I are mundane people." http://digbig.com/4xsbc.

Payne cites Gandhi telling Manubehn on 22 January 1948, i.e., eight days before he was assasinated (ibid, page 573) inter alia: "I am a true mahatma."

He again quotes him telling her on the night before the assasination (ibid, page 579): "If I were to die of a lingering disease, or even from a pimple, then you must shout from the housetops to the whole world that I was a false mahatma. ... And if an explosion takes place, as it did last week, or of someone shot at me and I received his bullet in my bare chest without a sigh and with Rama's name on my lips, only then should you say that I was a true mahatma."

This pronouncement was at 10:00 pm on 29 January 1948. At about 5:10 pm the next day, he got his wish.

Parting shot: "My respect for the Mahatma was deep and deathless. ... and therefore on January 30, I bowed to him first, then at point blank range fired three successive shots and killed him. " (Nathuram Godse's statement in the court of Mr Justice Atma Charan, Red Fort, ibid, page 639)

Related posts: The Mind of MK Gandhi http://digbig.com/4xrdn. The more, the less sexier. http://digbig.com/4xrdp. Celebrity revisited. http://digbig.com/4xsbf.

Ho – hum!

Too much solemnity makes Charles Morgan a dull and drab writer. Charles Langbridge Morgan, to be precise. This Brit writes well enough but the tone of voice and the whole mood of his play, The Burning Glass (1953), gave me a sense of deep unease, almost malaise. I find it difficult to believe that anyone could write with such deadly seriousness continuously with nary a half smile for relief. It’s no wonder his work has been neglected by and large. His sensibility and views to me seem conservative and of the extreme Right. The biographical sketch at the website dedicated to him http://charleslmorgan.org/page4.php?SessionID=21f09d047d7150b0b6a1 mentions that he was a fan of Churchill apart from “the Book of Common Prayer, Keats’s letters, and the prose of Addison”. That kind of makes eminent sense when you’re reading him. He must have been a melancholy introvert, I reckon. He appears to be uncomfortable in his surroundings and sometimes within his own skin, if you get what I mean. His The Burning Glass I happened to read in an abridged version “adapted” for adult readers whose second language is English. I happened to find it lurking in a stack of old books. I hope Jennifer Taylor who worked on the adaptation did full justice to his style and flavour. This humourless play – no apology for this priceless aside: I came across a Daily Mail news story (11-03-2008) headlined ‘The cheek! Humourless American says we Brits are miserable. You've gotta laugh’, about travel writer Eric Weiner’s claim that the Brits “don’t merely enjoy misery – they get off on it” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/dailymail.html?in_article_id=530237&in_page_id=1790 – is about the moral dilemma of a weather control scientist. He has accidentally stumbled upon a way to set his weather machine so that it can concentrate the solar heat and aim it at any target to wreak total destruction. Both he and his wife are – you guessed it! – paragons of virtue. His partner is not. He is a rebel and keeps bad company. At the height of the Cold War, he refuses to part with his knowledge to the Briish PM. The worthy seems to be no Churchill and accepts his terms that he or his wife would only “set” Machine Six to do the dirty work in case of an attack by the opposition. There is an East German spy lurking in the neighbourhood. He kidnaps the straight-laced paragon of virtue. In his absence, the equally straight-laced Paragon No.2 “sets” Machine Six in order to strike the fear of God in the atheist Commie hearts with proof that Britain has the ultimate weapon and won’t hesitate to use it under extreme provocation. Paragon No.1 is released and all ends well, except for the death of his partner. Ho-hum! Were the pre-Hiroshima Einstein and Oppenheimer his inspiration?

Never judge a book by its title. The cover is probably the better bet.

We owe a lot to Shakespeare including many a famous book title. Aldous Huxley borrowed from him, if memory serves, at least two titles for his novels (Brave New World, Time Must Have A Stop). On 6 September 2003, I had written in my weekly column about a BBC opinion poll. Poor Willie had to play fourth fiddle to Newton, Churchill and Princess Diana in it. http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_361190,00030007.htm. Then I stumbled on another gross miscarriage of justice when Stephen King walked away with The United States' National Book Foundation’s 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This puts him on par with John Updike, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison. I like the way Yale University Professor Harold Bloom sums up the situation in his comments to The New York Times: "He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy." http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s946535.htm. One is tempted to say at this point: “What did you expect from the moronic Britons and Americans?” The temptation is a passing phase, though. Soon, one remembers it happens all the time anywhere and everywhere. The entire human race is subject to the hypnotic influence of top-of-mind icons and images – irrespective of caste, creed, gender or nationality, I guess. But wait a second, there's solace for those who're discouraged by the ignoble defeat. Read No doubts about his genius at http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mag/stories/2003083100270400.htm. Did you know that 'the genius' used as many as 9,36,433 words in his literary output in the 16th Century – which works out to five times the number of words in modern German!

More about Shakespeare from my personal QuiteATake.com Archives [Issue #76]

AS YOU LIKE IT. Sites-for-types department.

For Shakespeare aficionados, Hamlet: an executive summary (and S-W-O-T analysis) in PowerPoint at bmillar1.users.btopenworld.com. For nitpickers and one-person fault finding missions, Movie Mistakes, Hollywood's Big Brother movie-mistakes.com and for movie goers in a hurry, Ruined Endings ruinedendings.com. For surfers who prefer to pose their queries in plain English, French, Spanish, German, Italian or Portuguese, Answer Bus (it doesn't work at times, though) misshoover.si.umich.edu. For disbelievers of the 'real' computer bug, NMAH Object 1994.0191.1 americanhistory.si.edu.

'Great game' for them. Vivisection for India.

The Great Game! ‘Tournament of Shadows’, the Russians called it. Both terms, the first one coined by Arthur Conolly, an East India Company man, and later popularized by Rudyard ‘Kim’ Kipling, signify “the rivalry and strategic conflict between the British Empire and the Tsarist Russian Empire for supremacy in Central Asia”, (for “the oil wells of power”). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Game. How India was vivisected as a part of The Great Game is the theme of an absorbing account of the sub-continent’s partition written by Narendra Singh Sarila (The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India's Partition). He is heir to the princely state of Sarila in central India, an erstwhile ADC to Lord Mountbatten, and a member of the Indian Foreign Service (1948-1985). Equally important, he is an excellent raconteur. What makes his account gripping is his research in the British and American archives where the top secret and recently unsealed government documents are kept. The Indian leaders of the Freedom Movement – Gandhi, Nehru and the rest – come out as pygmies in front of their gargantuan adversaries – Churchill, Lord Linlithgow, Lord Wavell and Jinnah – totally out of their intellectual and strategic depths. Apparently, the Congress Party was outmaneuvered all the way by the British Raj. How utterly shame-making, as Evelyn Waugh would have put it. http://pavi.net/reflections/. (The 17 September 2005 post has a thought-provoking comment on the book.)