More than 71 years ago millions of souls in Bengal were starved to death, past skin and bones. I do not believe that we collectively know and honour their humiliation and suffering in our spiritual, educational, creative and political lives.
Racist colonial indifference and impoverishment of our ancestor's lives from the British Occupation, pettier power games, commercial interests and ecological issues collided to produce the greatest regional loss of life in considerable time. Many of the powerful structures and patterns at work during that Bengal Famine live on - the utter disregard for our people's lives displayed by government machines, corporate profiteering and the fear and close memory of destitution that have shaped features in our upbringings.
As the coronavirus threatens the lives of elders with closer personal access to those times, political despair grows deeper and the threats of human accelerated Climate destabilisation continue to manifest, the golden thread of our transformative process must be to build new and productive learning capacities and dispositions.
White British Remembrances of war dead perform a role in the reproduction of a certain self image. My reflection isn't to call for the inclusion of colonially indentured fighters in that self-image but to address the wounds and scar tissues of colonial savagery, always.
So, at every staging ground on our journey, of formal education or otherwise, let us open our books and hearts at the Bengal Famine page of 1943
