Horrors of Colonial Rule: Two European witnesses
Jakob De Roover & Martin Fárek
Among the Europeans living in India during the colonial era, some became acutely aware of the harm inflicted on the Indian people by British rule. They bore witness to the ethical corruption they saw in the behaviour and stances of British officials and traders, and to the way in which it manifested itself in policies and measures of colonial rule. Two new translations published on the ESIND Digital Platform share the reports of two such Europeans: Jacob Haafner (1754-1809) and Milada Ganguli (1913-2000): article 14 | article 19.
Jacob Haafner was a Dutch-German man who arrived in India in 1771, as an adolescent aged 17, and would leave again for Europe more than 15 years later. He tells the story of his adventures on the Coromandel coast and in Sri Lanka (Ceylon, at the time) and Bengal in several travelogues published in Dutch in the early 19th century. While these stories are often engrossing, two dimensions of his accounts are of particular interest to us today: the direct and at times profound relationships he developed with Indian people and his vehement criticism of British colonial rule, which he described as a combination of barbarism, exploitation, oppression, and violence. In the translated excerpt, he recounts his experiences in Madras of “the terrible famine that the British had caused here” in 1782, whose traces he could still notice everywhere in the city during a visit a year later.
Milada Ganguli, née Sýkorová, was a Czech woman and scholar, who moved to India in 1939 in her mid-twenties, together with her husband Mohan Lal Ganguli, a close relative of Rabindranath Tagore; she spent the rest of her life in the country, passing away in Calcutta in 2000 at 87 years old, and became known especially for her work on the culture and art of the people of Nagaland. In the translated passage from her work Pictures of Bengal (1963), she tells the reader about her experiences as a volunteer working during the Bengal famine of 1943, which resulted in the death of millions of human beings.
The significance of these excerpts lies not only in their eyewitness accounts of the events during the two famines, the unspeakable suffering, but even moreso in their characterization of the British responses to the situation. While there is a timegap of more than 160 years between the two famines, the described behavioural patterns and attitudes shared by colonial officials and traders are remarkably similar.
A first aspect of the British reaction was the active denial of what was happening and the absence of any serious attempts from the government’s side to prevent the famine. Ganguli insists that it was possible “to foresee and prevent the outbreak of the famine, but the government showed unbelievable indifference and laziness in its approach to problems regarding food supply.” Instead, it kept exporting rice and ignored agricultural difficulties so long as it received its regular income from taxes and imposed press censorship to prevent reporting about the emerging famine. This went together with a related kind of indifference: the lack of concern shown by the British once thousands of Indian people started dying from hunger. After describing the gruesome scenes on the streets of Madras in 1782, Haafner writes that the English walked past the dying while talking, whistling, and singing; ladies flirting and frolicking with their chaperones happily strolled down these fields of death.
“From all sides came the crying and lamenting voices of the suffering, who, torn by terrible hunger, crawled like insects at the doorsills of the inhumane Englishmen, and raised their arms to beg for a little food – while these monsters sat on their balconies debauching with their whores and making the raging hunger of these unfortunate people even more unbearable by the sight of food.”
Now read Ganguli’s words about the situation in Bengal in 1943:
“The contrast between rich and poor, between people well-fed and those who were starving was never so striking as in the summer of 1943, in those terrible months of famine. The rich did not suffer. They ate, drank, and organized parties as before. I was shocked to experience the lack of human feeling, when I heard sounds of jazz music and laughter of the jolly company from the European Saturday Club garden party. Who cared that behind the wall, many people are dying from hunger?”
Both Europeans also perceived the corruption and speculation that came along with the growing scarcity of food available to the Indian population. In the most difficult of times, countless agents and other profiteers began to profit through food speculation, while “[c]orruption spread quickly and reached the top-level governmental circles”; only the rich could now buy food, as others began to face an acute shortage of it, notes Ganguli. Only those with “enough money to pay the extortionate prices of the English usurers and their agents” could buy the provisions present in the city; others simply had nothing, writes Haafner more than fifteen decades earlier.
What shocked both witnesses most was the refusal of the colonial government and private merchants to provide food to the masses dying from hunger before their eyes. Haafner insists that the warehouses in the Madras of 1782 were amply stored with all kinds of grains, enough to “feed double the number of people who were then in the city – for a long time.” When the government provided anything at all for the crowds of starving poor, observes Ganguli, it was rice of the lowest quality, often full of worms and sold for a barely reduced price. Once again, in the Bengal of 1943, speculators got enormously rich by trading food and medicine stored in secret warehouses.
Unsurprisingly, the behaviour of the British caused hatred and disgust, not only among the Indians whose children, fathers, mothers, and other relatives had suffered and died in a terrible way, but also among these two Europeans who had witnessed the events. While Ganguli and her fellow volunteers were shaken by the awareness of their own helplessness and, in silence, “tried to overcome the pain and deep hatred towards the people who were responsible for the death of three and a half million of Bengalis,” Haafner drew general conclusions about the nature of that people: “Heaven knows how the English ever got the name of being a magnanimous nation, a nation of philosophers, and what not! In India, in any case, they are bloodthirsty and cruel tigers in human shape. If you want to really get to know them – you should go there.”
The striking similarities between the observations of two witnesses—the one a women, the other a man, Czech and Dutch, living in Bengal and in Madras, with more than 160 years separating them—indicates that they were identifying patterns of British colonial rule and corruption which remained invariant across space and time. Thus, research into accounts of British India by authors from different periods and parts of Europe can help us to discover the nature of these patterns of colonialism.
