If Nivedita spent time working out and forcefully propagating ideas for India’s rejuvenation she was always ready to immerse herself in hands-on humanitarian work caring a trifle for her own safety. Much like her work during the plague outbreak at the turn of the century she did exemplary service during the floods in East Bengal in 1906 when the region was in grip of a severe famine with hundreds of thousands in severe misery.
Nivedita, despite being unwell, left everything to live among the poor, starving villagers and strove to bring succour to them. She moved from village to village, studied their conditions, and presented to the rest of the country a deeply insightful first-hand account of her findings through a series of pieces she wrote for the ‘Modern Review’.
These articles form the evocative study, compiled in form of ‘Glimpses of Famine and Flood in East Bengal in 1906’, which is greatly insightful about the dynamics of the village economy of the region and revealing on how the colonial policies had systematically pushed East Bengal from being the granary of Bengal to a land always vulnerable to famines. Her reportage from the field helped generate awareness of the abysmal conditions in the region and exposed the Governments’ lies that things were under control. She greatly praised the efforts of the Barisal-based nationalist Ashwini Kumar Dutta, a titanic figure – a lawyer, educationist philanthropist and freedom-fighter in galvanising a very large number of volunteers who worked for the people in the countrywide.
Ashwinibabu was seen by the local people as a great soul, a ‘Mahatma’. He had set up schools and colleges and was actively involved in the nationalist movement of his times through the Congress platform. He set up the Brojomohan College (known as the BM College) which is now a huge University with around 30 thousand students. It has had illustrious alumni like the towering Bengali poet Jibanananda Das (who many consider to be the greatest Bengali poet in the post-Tagore era, Jogeshchandra Mandal, the first Law Minister of Pakistan, and Narayan Gangopadhya, noted author and creator of popular character ‘Tenida’. The College has also produced several luminaries in independent East Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Ashwinibabu had met both Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. It is interesting to note that when he had met Sri Ramakrishna, the latter expressed his wish that he meet Naren (the future Vivekananda). That did not happen then but after about twelve years they met in Almora, by which time the young boy Naren had become the World Teacher Swami Vivekananda, and thus Sri Ramakrishna’s wish eventually came to fruition. Ashwinibabu’s letter to Mahendranath Gupta (Sri M) forms an appendix section in ‘The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna’.
Ashwinibabu was very active in the Swadeshi Movement and formed the ‘adwadeshi Bandhab Society’. He was incarcerated for two years in Lucknow Jail. Upon his release Nivedita arranged for special celebrations and decorations at her school. He kept worming for the poor of the country till end of his.life like the Barisal Cyclone of 1919 and the struggle against intense exploitation of tea garden workers in Assam. Mahatma Gandhi, in 1922, visited Barisal and paid his respects to this patriot-sage. This great man passed away the following year.
In her reports from the ground while surveying the aubmerged villages in affected districts if East Bengal Nivedita writes :
“I had seen poverty in my life, plenty of it. I had known, who has not – the longing that would fain protect and bestow, but that the means are happily denied but I have never experienced anything that enables me to imagine what it means to be one, of what is officially declared to be eleven hundred thousand persons, all in the same district, who have not had a sufficient meal for months, and who even now are wholly dependent, for what they expect to eat, on a precarious charity.
She described the famine crowds and sympathised with the relief workers even when the aid given was not adequate enough as she knew they were trying their best. The relief workers also did a great job in keeping the morale of the suffering people up. Nivedita recounted, “I could not blame the relief workers, rather I thought they deserved commendations – for the fact that when some small help was given they demanded from them a hearty cheer the very act of giving the pseudo joy shout was doubtless good for them, mentally, morally and physically. But I would rather not have heard it there was something unutterably ghastly in the hoarse and feeble utterance that ought to have been so loud and bright, from the throat of these famished and starving people. It seems much more common, when words of hope and comfort had been spoken, to see them lift their hands spontaneously to their heads, and cry mournfully and piously with a single voice, ”Allah send the day ! ”
She described the abysmal conditions in which she found the suffering people, thousands, of them, women, men and children alike :
“The people were clothed in nothing of the sort for the first care of the relief workers had been to put an end to such a state of things by giving them fabrics, which though scanty, were nevertheless decent yet I met some at Matibhanga who had known this extreme of suffering and I myself talked with one woman who was covered with a piece of old mosquito – netting for sole garment. “The whole place was under flood and the crowd who stood to receive us – as we stepped from the comfortable river steamer into the precarious-looking boats that were looking – were waist-deep in water. Each one looked thinner and waner than the last and cries of “ Mother ! Mother ! Give ! Give ! ” were heard on all hands.”
The pathos upon seeing the little bazars in the flooded areas,, laying out in open boats since the shop – floors were unfitted for this purpose, did not leave Nivedita unmoved. The pitiful smallness of the stock-in-trade displayed in these boats, showed the misery as well as the resilient spirit of getting on with life even in face of devastation at once. The commodities on these boats-shops were a few cucumbers or bananas or chilies, from distant cottage gardens that were not yet wholly under water.
Nivedita, then probed with her penetrative intellect the first causes of such a calamity and the conclusion she drew was the rapacity and callousness of the colonial regime which saw no stake in the wellbeing of the people it was purportedly administering. She also observed that the organic connect between the urban class and those dwelling in the countryside afar was all but snapped. That she found a natural concomitant of the modern age but the buffering and the mitigation role that needed to be played by any regime to maintain this link was no longer borne by the unconcerned and insensate regime and its impassive bureaucracy.
“After seeing the famine villages, the fact is impressed upon one that there are in the modern world, everywhere, two humanities, one the more or less illiterate rustics, who pay to the centre, on the other, educated and literate and city-bred, who are paid in one way and another, directly or indirectly, from the center and between the two there is a great gap. There seems to be no vital connection between the farmer-folk of country places, and the business and professional people of our twentieth century cities.
“But in India the presence of a foreign bureaucracy adds immensely to an evil characteristic of the modern epoch. Have we here but an added proof of the eternal verity of the worlds, ‘He that is a hireling whose own the sheep are not seeth the wolf cometh and leaveth the sheep and fleeth. The hireling fleeth because he an hireling careth not for the sheep!”
Nivedita then noted how systematically the region had undergone a massive change from being a rice economy that had food security inbuilt within it to a jute economy based on cash. This change doubtless was to advantage of the regime and its core constituents in the island of their origin from where the Jute agents, manufacturers and traders came.
She recorded the sweeping changes that had taken place within not to long a time :
“Twenty years ago it is said the cultivation of jute made its appearance on something of a commercial scale in these East Bengal districts. At first however it spread slowly. But seven or eight years ago it made a sudden advance, and today the culture of plant is going forward with leaps and bounds. As one goes down the river from the Khulna to Barisal, one sees on all hands the fields of jute alternating with the fields of rice, and this particular line of country is not as yet one of the worst affected, as one watches the boats being loaded it is always with jute and even about Calcutta, hour after hour, day after day the carts come pouring along the open country roads laden with their bales of jute.
In this way the granary of Bengal has been, and is being transformed into one vast jute plantation. The temptation to the peasant was, what always is everywhere, recklessness to the future, in the face of large financial reward, for jute at present brings him a good price.”
In a nutshell her razor-sharp insight was that “the commonwealth based upon rice was being transformed inevitably into the commonwealth based upon money.”
Nivedita was livid at the attitude of British high officials who even under this situation were thinking only about furthering the interests of the Scottish and English Jute agents.
Sir Andrew Fraser, the lieutenant governor, in charge of the western half of Bengal while addressing the gathering of merchants in Dundee in Scotland had given the assurance that he would employ all his power to link the European manufacturers through European agents, directly with the jute growing peasantry.
Even more deplorable was the action of Lieutenant Governor Fuller who had done an inspection visit to Barisal and after six weeks of official relief announced the closure of official famine relief. Presently, the government made the statement hat the famine was non-existent.
The Greatest thing ever done in Bengal
Even under these utterly hopeless conditions the fact that Indians, including the landed gentry came forward to do whatever was within their might was something that struck a deep chord within Nivedita and she joyously hailed it.
“The people of East Bengal fortunately refused, on the present occasion, to take the word of the government, for the flourishing condition of things in their own midst. This occurrence drew the attention of all the Bengali people to the terrible state of affairs about them. But as the crops were not exhausted till May, stray relief only was given by that time however the need was understood to every part of the distressed territory. The cities began to send help. The Zemindars were themselves suffering from loss of credit owning to the famine yet every nerve was trained by them to assist the peasantry.”
But what the volunteers organised by the Barisal freedom-fighter Ashwini Kumar Dutt simply left Nivedita, as also the whole country, enthralled. They demonstrated, perhaps for the first time on such huge scale during the colonial regime, that Insians have to stand in their own feet and neither keep looking at help coming from Government nor waiting for a change in their fate. Here was Vivekananda’s teaching of assertive manly action, based on faith upon one’s own self and collective amd cooperative enterprise best manifest practically. Vivekannada would have been greatly proud of this had he witneased this while he was alive.
Ashwinibabu’s cadres served and possibly saved thousands of lives. Nivedita called it the greatest thing ever done in Bengal.
She was proud to note that “in Calcutta, children going to school saved their luncheon pice for the famine and every Indian school and office organised a fund.”
But the supreme potency of the response by citizenry in Barisal surpassed anything that had happened in the past. and the man at the centre of it was Ashwini Kumar Dutta. A relief organization was started on 11th of June that deployed hundreds.of young men of the city, and open relief centers in 160 different places in the district of Backergunge. Each center served and provided relief to 6 to 12 villages in its circle. The organisayion of the wjole thing was so meticulous that every village relief-centre had its own village committee to superintend the work. Ashwinibabu’s organization continued to serve for more than six months, till December 22nd.
And about this Nivedita was emphatic in her opinion “as the greatest thing ever done in Bengal.”
Nivedita clearly underscored that the highlighting feature of the British imperialism in India was the financial exploitation through overtaxation, doibg awaybwith any welfare measures, and the strangulation of the traditional economic ways of the society that had within them some in-built risk-mitigation features.
She surveys several such imperial regimes and marks seemingly different ways of operation, but all directed to the single goal of subjugation and exploitation :
“Under Modern Imperialism the methods of exploitation are different from the past. Only outwardly is their garb the same. Empire always means the subjugation of one country by another but the methods of this subjugation are different when Assyria subdues Judaea or Spain or Mexico or Belgium of the valley of Congo, from those employed by the Rome in Gaul, or by Britain in India. In the last – named case, the subjection has been financial and the growing exploitation proceeds along the lines of finance. Over taxation, the building of railroads the destruction of native industries and the creation of wide spread famine, these are so many landmarks, as it were, in a single process of subordination and exploitation.”
She also made a fairly long prescription of what all could be done towards restoring the healthier economic conditions in the region. She advocated a huge systematic campaign for promotion of rice cultivation, help to have itbstand on iytsbfeetbagain through access to credit for procurement of farm tools and animals, boycott and subsequent overthrow of jute, and a call to the youths to dedicate themselves to work in villages. Once food security was vouchsafed, Nivedita also envisioned formation of cultural and community-educational centres and setting up of small industries.
“It follows that the most pressing of all questions is the restoration of rice in the present economy. Associations might be formed in cities, for promotion of rice-growing and by them seed of the best quality distributed free. If it is worthwhile for jute merchants to distribute free jute-seed, it cannot be less so for rice merchants in the interests of their trade, Zemindars of their estate, and public-spirited citizens out of love to their country, to give that of rice! The same organizations should undoubtedly send out agents to oppose the growing of jute. It should be taught with no uncertain voice that money is no substitute whatever for rice. The opposite is the error which is at the bottom of all our misery. Money is no substitute for rice.
“The Boycott which the Bengal has declared against foreign goods, should be extended and deepened by this crusade against jute, and in similar ways. Capital should lent at low interest or given, for buying back of tools and animals. In doing all this, there could not fail of a closer union between town and country. The students who have already sacrificed so much, in so manly a fashion, to carry relief to the famine stricken, would confer us still greater good on the same people if they would establish their own homes permanently in the villages where they have now worked. If this were done, we should have in every such village home a culture centre, not unlike the western parsonage in the village of artisans.”
She envisioned that from this would emanate “knowledge and impulse towards the establishment of small industries.”
Clearly, much before the Gandhiian programs of Constructive Program, later called ‘Sarvodaya’, Nivedita had placed before the countrymen a similar program which was both practically possible and had an elevated vision with high idealism.
Today the name of Ashwini Kumar Dutta, the great man whose efforts, inspirational leadership and organising abilities saved hundreds or perhaps thousands of lives in the flood and famine of 1906., is largely forgotten even in Bengal, not to speak of rest of India.
This phase was also another heroic chapter in Nivedita’s life when she spent so much time in perilous conditions on ground zero. But it took its toll and at the end she was down with Malaria which seriously broke her health even further as it came on top of the life-threatening meningitis she suffered from in the previous year. Her health would never be the same again. All this would factors in her demise five years later even before her 44th birthday.