“The Bengali famine did not create an exodus of people out of the accursed country, as did Mengistu’s Ethiopian famine. From the summer of 1943 until November that year, when the round-up of starving street people by the military and police began, the greatest movement was towards Calcutta and other Bengali cities. A swell of people travelled without tickets on the railways, sitting atop the roofs of rolling stock, clinging to doors and windows in prodigious and apparently impossible numbers, or... riding the rattlers beneath the carriages or freight trucks. Massive crowds of skeletal people waited at every station trains pulled into. Destitute women were raped at night while lying on the roads without strength to resist. The writer Bhabani Bhattacharya witnessed the flight of people from the mofussil and describes the refugees who tried to hang from any railing or window frame of trains going west. As cane-wielding Red Turbans attempted to force them to the ground, they cried, ‘Give us a ride to the great city.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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