Word: bengals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This collaborative childhood autobiography evokes dreamy days in a sprawling house in East Bengal, where the Goddens' father was a steamship agent, and where, as petted and pampered little memsahibs, they had syces to care for their pony, dirzees to whip them up frilly frocks, ayahs and bearers to care for them. But the sisters were perceptive little girls, and if life was mostly a carefree and sheltered idyll, there was also an awareness of spuming life outside their garden wall. They recall with remarkable clarity the sights and sounds of the bazaars, of steamer trips through the river...
...communal rioting was of deep concern to Indira Gandhi, who only the week before had returned from an inspection trip of other trouble spots: West Bengal, where food riots had raged for three weeks, and Assam, where the 260,000 Mizo hill people staged a bitter, bloody "war of independence" before Indian troops moved in to put down their revolt. The spate of domestic troubles complicated preparations for her trip to Washington next week. There she would have long discussions with Lyndon Johnson, and en route she would stop in Paris for talks with French officials...
...three weeks in protest, and last week the rioting spread to other rice-short parts of India. A 15-year-old student died of gunshot wounds after police fired on a mob attacking a police station near Calcutta to protest food shortages. Not far away, in the West Bengal town of Baduria, police fired on a stone-throwing mob of 3,000 rioters who were demanding the release of rice supplies; one rioter was reported killed, and five rioters and several policemen were hurt...
Physicist and Amateur Historian Harvey Einbinder declared in 1963 that it was just a gory story to frighten voters with, an atrocity invented by the British to justify their conquest of Bengal. The British bristled, and this brief but masterly report by a correspondent for the London Daily Mail assures any doubters that the atrocity actually occurred. It occurred, in fact, at the anticlimax of a comedy of horrors scarcely paralleled in British history...
...horrors began early in June 1756, when the Nawab of Bengal, taking umbrage at the swaggering economic imperialism of the British, marched on Fort William, the East India Company's stronghold in the brawling boom town of Calcutta. There were 50,000 regulars in the Nawab's army, and in the fort only 515 Europeans able to bear arms -such arms as were available. Thanks to Governor Roger Drake, a 34-year-old ineffectual, fifty cannon were rusted useless, and almost all the powder was too damp to burn...