Who amongst us is disposable?

Boat(Tamil; 2024)
Director: Chimbudeven

This film drew little attention as a movie. Although the build-up initially seemed promising, it could have been more exciting.

It is said to be based on Ernest Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea', his Nobel Prize and Pulitzer-winning novel, and 'Ten Angry Men', a play written by Reginald Rose, which was later made into an Academy Award-winning movie. 

The storyline follows 'The Old Man and the Sea' because much of it occurs within the confines of a boat. Just as in 'Twelve Angry Men', the occupants of the boat (ten of them) have to make the dreaded decision of who two of them should be sacrificed so that the boat does not capsize.

Set in 1943 to coincide with the time Japanese fighter plans bombed areas around Madras, it tells a political story about India, its independence, British colonial rule, divisions among fellow Indians and many more. 

As they see planes flying over the Madras skies and upon hearing rumours of imminent Japanese bombing, Kumaran, a fisherman who owns the boat, dashes to the sea with his grandmother. Seven others followed them and got on to the boat - a Brahmin man with his daughter, a writer from the Kerala border who actually is a Muslim and probably a communist and a Jinnah sympathiser, a pregnant Telegu lady with her son, a Tamil librarian who is actually an INA operative and Rajasthani moneylender. 

Along the way, they pick up a soldier from a destroyed British patrol boat. 

As they hover away from the coast to escape police, they discover that the boat is overloaded and has a leak. The boatman, Kumaran, an expert here, calls the shots. He suggests that two people have to be offloaded to make it back safely. Who amongst the ten should be thrown off the boat?

The real essence of the film starts after this. The British soldier, with a gun, is cocksure that he cannot be the one to be offloaded. He has to carry the white man's burden to civilise the natives. They have a secret voting. Unanimously, Kumaran and his grandmother, being lower on the caste system, being of the marginal caste, should be disposed of. It is immaterial that they are the experts on getting them to shore. 

The discussion goes on to Brahminical supremacy, the North-South divide, Partition, Gandhism and Bose's INA and even the subdivision of Brahmins between Iyers and Iyengars. Much philosophy is also discussed about allowing all life forms to live. Interspersed in the background through a rickety radio are the philosophical songs belted out by the maestro of the yesteryears, Thiagarajah Bhaghvatar. His song questions human values and things about freedom. Symbolically, the British can be seen instigating the rest to fight against each other. Outside danger lurks in the form of a shark circling the boat.

I found this movie quite entertaining despite giving the feel more of a play instead of a feature film.

A playful photograph is inserted into this film.
Shown photographed with Subash Chandra Bose (front)
are L-R: Rajan (Sivaji in 1946 Andha Naal; Senupathy (Kamalhasan
in Indian 1 & 2 ,1996 & 2024); Muthaya (MS Bhaskar in this movie)
All three of INA conspired with the Japanese to bomb Madras.

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History is kind to Victors!

Churchill's Secret Wars (2010)

(The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during WW2)
Author: Madhusree Mukerjee

In 1952, Nehru appeared on BBC TV in his first ever TV appearance. He was invited to the UK to partake in the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. As the head of a former colony of the Crown, Nehru was there, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Winston Churchill, gracing the event. By that time, Churchill had descended from his intense contempt for all races except whites. Churchill must have been brimming from ear to ear as India and many other former colonies had consented to stay under the umbrage of the Crown under the title of the Commonwealth. If two hundred years of looting of wealth from India was insufficient, now their subjects have agreed to make their wealth common! 

It is ironic that Nehru and the bulk of the Congress leaders spent crouched in jail all through the most pivotal years before Indian independence, during World War 2. It was the time all the wheeling and dealing of talk of carving the country was in progress. In 1953, barely ten years after the ugly Partition, there was its leader chummy with their brutal colonial masters. Nehru says no offence in the interview when asked about the 18 years he spent behind bars fighting for India's independence. What the interviewer did not mention was the systematic philandering of India's wealth over 200 years, which saw India spiral down from a country which allegedly possessed over 20% of the world's GDP in mid 18th century to become the sixth poorest country in the world when the British left India.

No wonder the current generation of Indians want to re-evaluate and re-write their history, not from the viewpoint of the conquerors but the conquered. As the African proverb goes, "Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter."

The events surrounding the systemic state-sponsored persecution and mass murder are constantly reminded to the world. The word 'Holocaust' is almost synonymous with the killing of six million Jews by Nazis during WW2. The world has not been fed about the repeated famine-related deaths that the Jewel in the Crown of the British Raj had to endure to enrich its colonial masters and his countrymen were well fed.

In 1950, Winston Churchill embarked on a journey to write the history of the perilous times of the 20th century. He wanted to ink his legacy of how he defended his tiny island nation and shouldered the burden of her mighty empire. His six-volume just conveniently forgot to mention Bengal's 1943 famine which engulfed nearly 700,000 lives by modest colonial estimates and up to 5 million, according to village scribes and academics.

It was a heartless inhumane strategy to sacrifice the perceived lesser human race to safeguard and feed the Europeans. When Churchill was repeatedly told about Bengal's humanitarian crises, he blamed the malady squarely on the Indians for breeding like rabbits. 

In reality, it was the British's elaborate plan to impoverish and weaken the Indians. It constituted part of its strategy to defeat the enemies of the Allied Forces. Just as there was the threat of the Japanese from India's eastern borders, the British scorched all the rice fields. The produce, however, was shipped off to feed the Allied soldiers. Then there was the subsequent smuggling, hoarding and spiralling of food prices. Farmers who fed the nation instead died of hunger. There was no plan whatsoever on the part of the British to rectify this. In fact, the efforts by the local British representatives were thwarted by Churchill. To Churchill, it was imperative to feed hungry Europeans than some brown people. In Churchill, rationing of food to the British was unthinkable. At no time during WW2 did the UK have any food shortage. Famine was endemic in India all through the British Raj rule. Approximately 15 million died from 1850 to 1899 in 24 major famines.

Mother Nature had not been to the Bengal region. Before this famine, there was a devastating monsoon. Then there was the heavy taxation. And the British scorched the fields to prevent the Japanese from getting their food supply. Shipments of food supply from the US, Canada and Australia scheduled to arrive in India never made it.

"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits." -Winston Churchill

Churchill always tries to put the narrative that Hindus are an uncouth race. The enlightened followers of the Abrahamic faith stand to be oppressed in an Independent India if India was a free nation. With the increasing debt accumulated because of WW2 and lopsided trade practices that impoverished the Empire, Britain had let go of its colonies. The India that Britain encountered 200 years previously was submissive and easily conquerable. It was like that no more. Initially, Gandhi and his passive resistance to demanding self-rule worked just fine. It was India's death wish, and the British easily thumped their boots on the resisting freedom fighters. The coup de grâce came as a mutiny of the British Indian Navy after the trial of captured Indian National Army prisoners of war in Delhi.

Jinnah and his band of born-again Muslims decided to play their victim card that people of the Muslim-dominated areas in India would be treated as second-class citizens in an independent India. They started demanding a piece of land to be carved out of India to call their own, a new true blue Islamic country named Pakistan. The British thought it was a jolly good idea too. The rest is history.

This book results from years of meticulous research into many de-classified British documents. It concentrates mainly on Churchill's mishandling of the 1943 Bengal famine and eventual Partition. The author's point is that he intensely disliked the non-white race. His actions indicate that he was stuck in his Victorian mindset. He felt that the white race was superior and it was the white man's burden to civilise and govern over the rest. Churchill's handling of the famine can border on negligence or criminal by today's standard. Despite all these, the world puts Churchill on a pedestal, hailing him as a true statesman and a great leader.  

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About Bengal famine.

Churchill's Secret War (2010)
Author: Madhusree Mukerjee

Besides participating in the Boer War and WW1 personally, as a Prime Minister, he spearheaded the Allied Forces in World War 2; Winston Churchill made it his life ambition to destroy India. His handling of the 1943 Bengal famine is equal to genocide. Instead of being responsible colonial masters taking care of their colonies that helped to propel their economies, he chose to blame the shortage solely as the natives' fault for choosing to breed like a rabbit. In his same tone of contempt, he verbalised, "Why isn't Gandhi dead yet?"

At the heights of the Second World War, the British had its hands tied all over the place. It was trying to act as the biggest superpower. In reality, it was bleeding. India was supplying all its credit needs. In essence, on paper, the British bought India's produce with a promise to pay later. And later was after WW2 when Britain was in dire straits and had to let them go.

Britain was also not self-sufficient as far as its food supply was concerned. Churchill had to feed his people throughout the war. He was dependent on the colonies for that - from Australia and the Americas too. The war made it difficult to move the food supply around. The U-boats were supposedly terrorising the Atlantic. In reality, however, there was only one such attack on commercial ships. There was a fear that the Japanese may enter India via Burma, made worse by the support by Bose's Indian National Army.

To deprive the invading foes of food supply, stockpiles were moved and even burnt. Restrictions were imposed on the transportation of rice. On top of that, the agricultural yield in 1943 was dismal after a typhoon. Massive famine ensued. Instead of moving grains from other parts of India to fill in for the need, Churchill did just the opposite. Produce from the Punjab region were siphoned to feed the war troops in the Mediterranean. In Churchill's eyes, feeding Indians serving the British army was equivalent to providing for the whole of India. Imports from Australia were detoured to Ceylon. Despite being advised of the situation on the ground, the one-tracked hotheaded imperialist Churchill gave two hoots to the misery of the Bengalis. He kept dragging his feet to send aid. Contribution from American civil societies also did not make it to India.

The final outcome is a devastating famine in the Bengal region estimated to have reached 3 million by some studies. It became a testbed for what deprivation of food could do to Man. It brought out the best and worst of mankind. Mothers killed their children to ease their suffering. Lactating mothers were seen feeding their already dead babies. The mothers themselves were skin and bones. Some families had to sell their teenage girls to brothels to feed the rest. Many young brides kept themselves alive by marrying old widowers for food. It was common for British officers in India to give their supplies to the pleading and dying locals, but this was supposedly illegal. Eyewitnesses of the devastation at the ground are described in gruesome details in this book.

It is ironic that despite all the miseries that were taking, business in Sonaganj, a brothel village established around the time the British established Calcutta as their administrative capital, prospered with many few intakes! Sonaganj laboured through these hard times and remain the biggest brothel complex in the world.

Churchill's subsequent election loss spurred him to write history to put his perspective history as the correct one, one where he would not be painted as the villain. His statement before the House of Common in 1948 summed it all, "For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself."

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