When War Came to Calcutta

After a long absence of over a decade and a half punctuated by short visits, today's Kolkata sometimes feels emotionally distant. I will always cherish my memory of the city I left in 2006, but so much has changed since then that now I cannot help but feel a little out of sync with it - a little out of place in it. That was precisely why, for our visit to Kolkata in September/October 2023, I wanted to revive my love for the city and renew my allegiance. The first step towards that goal was a walking tour with Immersive Trails.

We booked a private Calcutta in World War II walking tour for Rs. 2,000 per adult - so Rs. 4,000 for me and Rakesh. Being a minor, ShNaajh would join for free.

We arrive at Lindsay Street Bata at 6:30 am, half an hour before the scheduled meeting with Chelsea, our guide and the co-founder of Immersive Trails. We utilise this window to test the gimbal - this is our first time using it - by videoing (, and photographing of course) the Hogg Market complex, which is just across the street and unmissable. The 150-year-old red colonial building and its 31-foot clock tower are juxtaposed with cultural, political and social depictions of Renaissance Bengal.

Chelsea arrives a few minutes before 7:00 and after a quick confirmation of who and how many we are, she takes us to 1942, in the middle of an air raid!

As the siren wailed and aeroplanes marked with the Swastika circled the sky, terrified vendors, shoppers and pedestrians rushed to the basement of the Hogg Market or jumped into the trenches outside. After about 20 minutes, the drone of the aeroplanes faded away. Everyone came out, relieved that the city hadn't been bombed, and confused as to why the city hadn't been bombed! Soon after, the Viceroy announced on the radio that a few training planes were painted in Nazi colours and flown over the city to put the fear of air raids in people because, frankly, the government was sick of their laissez-faire attitude towards air raid drills. The government even built a miniature city in Maidan and destroyed it with low-impact bombs to demonstrate how much damage modern weaponry could do. All this was because Calcutta was quite defenceless at that point. Why? Here's what Chelsea explains.

With the Soviet Union as Hitler's ally at the start of the Second World War, the risk of an attack on India through Russia was thought to be so high that all the troops and weapons were sent to the northwest of India, where the border of Pakistan now lies. The real threat, however, was brewing at the other end of the country. Within four months of the attack on Pearl Harbour, Japan had assumed control of all of Southeast Asia and advanced to Burma, today's Myanmar. It was obvious that after Rangoon, the next target would be Calcutta, the city with zero infrastructure to defend itself. Urgent correspondence was sent to the US to request the deployment of American soldiers in Calcutta to protect the city. It was sheer luck that Japan took a hiatus after conquering Rangoon, but the American troops were already in Calcutta and opened a new theatre of war called China-Burma-India or CBI Theatre (- a theatre here means an area or place where important military events take place).

But let's leave the Americans alone for a while and turn to the dark cloud that loomed over the trail. 'It was the Denial Policy of Britain', Chelsea tells us. The colonial government discovered that the Japanese could move so fast because instead of carrying supplies, they relied on local resources - they took whatever food they found on the lands they invaded. This frightened the British. They did not want Japan to get its hands on the agricultural riches of Bengal in the event of an invasion. Their solution was the Denial Policy.

The Viceroy's former assistant L. G. Pinnell was tasked with calculating the surplus food in the market, which, rather foolishly, he based solely on urban eating habits. The amount of rice eaten in urban areas was three times less than what would normally be eaten in villages. Villagers would eat large servings of rice with limited varieties and amounts of curries or dals. As a result, what was forcibly taken from every rice-growing district of Bengal was a far cry from 'surplus' - it was snatched from hungry mouths all over Bengal.

Rice was not the only sustenance Bengal was denied. Paranoid that the Japanese could invade through the waterways of the riverine state, thousands of boats, which were used for fishing across the area, were sunk, depriving the locals of another staple - fish. Rural Bengal started on a long road of starvation as the military brought truckloads of grain to Calcutta, the capital of Bengal.

By now we've walked a couple of hundred metres to a small concrete yard outside a crumbling building. The smell is a telltale sign that we're standing outside a fish market - it's the New Market fish market. The hall is lit with yellow lightbulbs at different stages of their life span, offering varied degrees of brightness. Chelsea points at the shed with a triangular roof. This was one of the silos where the looted grain was stored. Powerful locals aided the forced removal of grain from rural households and even sold some of it on the black market.

This Kathhi Roll was photographed (and eaten) on a different day!

We leave behind a murder of crows fighting over fish scraps and two black kites menacingly circling the sky and follow Chelsea on, what she calls, The Food Trail. We walk past Nizam's. Unverified sources claim that this is where India's first takeaway food was invented - kebab was wrapped in 'parota' or 'parathha' (tortilla-like fried Indian flatbread) to make Kathhi Rolls (like burritos) for American soldiers. No, we are not picking up the Americans' trail yet.

Across the street from Nizam's is the central office of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. It's hard to imagine the streets lined with starving families who packed up what they had and followed the grain-laden trucks from rural Bengal to Calcutta in desperate hope for food. But it happened. As did mass shootings by an elected Municipal Corporation formed of Indian political parties like the Muslim League and Congress.

Local students gathered outside this beautiful Victorian building to appeal to the municipal government against the Denial Policy. They thought the Indian Councillors would have some sympathy for the locals. Even if they did, they had no real power over the policy. As expected, the protests ruffled a few colonial feathers. The student protesters were called rioters and accused of impeding war efforts to justify the mass shootings and cavalry charges that followed.

Chelsea poses a rhetorical question at this juncture: who can clear out of charging cavalry quickly enough? Active and angry protesters or starving and malnourished families?

The blood had to be washed off the streets.

Many online references can be found to the Calcutta Killings of 1946, but no sources mention this bloodbath.

We continue to Chowringhee Place and stand in front of the Roxy Cinema. This used to be a paper factory and operated round-the-clock to keep up with the demand for paper created by the war. But when the bombing started, the workers quit - they thought returning to their villages would be safer. The factory, desperate for labourers, started employing starving men from the streets in exchange for food to take back to their families after their eight-hour shifts. We smile - it sounds as happy as an ending can be under the circumstances!

But neither was it the end, nor was it happy. The government was paranoid that the workers might sell the food on the black market or hoard it only to hand it over to the Japanese. Consequently, they decided to pay the workers in cooked food, which they would need to consume inside the factory. 'What did the fathers of starving children do?', we ponder, 'Carry on working or go on strike?' They went on strike. Strikes at factories, like the student protests, were also labelled as riots and met with the might of the fiercest regiment of the British Indian Army. There were more mass shootings.

It starts drizzling. We walk quietly to the next stop - Oberoi Grand, or The Grand Hotel as it was called back then. The footpath looks asleep without the hustle and bustle of sellers and shoppers. We stand amidst rows of giant nylon bags and wonder if they contain the wares of the vendors who set up their stalls here, or just neatly folded tarpaulin to cover the flimsy metal or bamboo frames of the makeshift shops.

The walk has brought us under the lobby of this magnificent building because Chelsea has a story - a story of espionage in Calcutta. It's also time to pick up the trail of the US soldiers deployed in Calcutta.

At the request of the British government, high-ranking American soldiers arrived in India. They stayed at The Grand Hotel, which then became an espionage hot spot. On the one hand were Japanese spies, who pretended to be Chinese, worked as waiters and listened in on the conversations of the patrons. On the other hand were German spies who grew up in the US, spoke perfect English with an American accent and were there to fight for the Vaterland. As soon as the army figured this out, they moved the American soldiers into housing around the city and used the hotel to throw parties and feed false information to the Japanese and German spies!

The drizzle continues. We walk under cover (pun intended!) where possible to our next stop.

A few steps from the Grand Hotel, and we are looking at another magnificent white structure - the Metropolitan Building, one of India's first departmental stores. It was built in 1905. The Americans discovered from a fallen aircraft that Japan was looking for prominent landmarks in Calcutta to navigate their bombing. The Metropolitan Building was one such landmark; another was the Victoria Memorial Hall. The Americans realised quickly that these two buildings would have to be disguised if Japan's plans had to be thwarted. They built thick scaffolding around the Metropolitan Building to make it look like it was under construction and placed a spotter in one of the towers to watch for incoming planes.

This photo of the Victoria Memorial Hall was taken on a different day.

'What do you think they did to the Victoria Memorial?', Chelsea asks. Our responses range from covering it up to painting it to flying the Nazi flag on it, but the building was actually camouflaged with mud from the Ganges mixed with cow dung. The mud pack was applied to the massive building every three days under the supervision of the US Army engineers.

We knew nothing about the American soldiers stationed in Calcutta (or India, for that matter) during the Second World War. Chelsea tells us about them as we stand in front of the Metro Cinema, one of Calcutta's first Art Deco buildings. Calcutta was where the American soldiers relaxed between jobs - when they weren't busy building infrastructures such as airbases and oil pipelines across Bengal or India. To help these soldiers feel 'at home' in Calcutta, the US Army offered them three things: three movie tickets to the Metro Cinema each week (, two of which the soldiers would end up selling to Bengali film enthusiasts on the black market because the single-screen cinema would play the same movie throughout the week); one pass for ice cream; and another pass for Coca-Cola. The US Army even set up ice cream and Coca-Cola plants in Calcutta to cater to the American palate.

But that wasn't all. Upon arrival, each American soldier was given a booklet called The Calcutta Key, a survival guide to prepare them for their stay in the city. It was said to have a whole page dedicated to the art of bargaining at the New Market! As impressive as it is, what we hear next leaves us spellbound! The book told the American soldiers in no uncertain terms that India would be independent after the war and America would like to be her ally. It was therefore in the interest of the American soldiers to be on their best behaviour at all times!

Our next stop is the Statesman House. As we stand in front of the stately building now under renovation and partially covered with scaffolding and torn curtains of green fabric, Chelsea tells us about the role of The Statesman, one of India's oldest English dailies, during World War II. To save paper, newspapers owned by Indians at the time were allowed to print only four pages per day. They also had to have their stories reviewed by the Press Advisory Committee so that anything that could potentially jeopardise the war efforts never made it to print. Only two newspapers in India, both British-owned, were exempt from these conditions: The Statesman and The Times of India. Their allowance was six pages per day and no review by the Advisory Committee was necessary. While The Times of India complied with the government's narrative - for example, the defeat of the British in Singapore in 1942 was apparently called 'a strategic retreat' - The Statesman, under the stewardship of editor Ian Stephens, was an emblem of journalistic ethics. When newspapers were prohibited from printing a single word about the Bengal famine, Stephens found a way. He printed pictures of the famine. Each picture was worth a thousand words.

We arrive at Mangoe Lane, our final stop. Chelsea points at possibly the only surviving building in the city that is still scarred from the Japanese bombing of 1942. It housed a Chinese club and was hosting a Christmas party when the Japanese bomb intended for the Great Eastern Hotel landed here, destroying half of the building and killing about 50 people.

It starts drizzling again. The Calcutta walk woven with the dark history and horror of the Second World War ends. We feel countless knots in our hearts thinking about the pain inflicted by the British on the people of Calcutta and Bengal during the war. The least they can do today is apologise for their inhumanity.

Much of the history of Kolkata during the Second World War, now declassified, is freely accessible through the archive of the China-Burma-India Theatre, Why should you still join the 'Calcutta in World War II' walk by Immersive Trails? Because they have done the 'legwork' for you, which, thankfully, did not cost them £100 for each page of historical records! Yes, that's probably how much the Imperial War Museum London would've charged them!

So, walk with Immersive Trails. And fall in love with Kolkata again.