“When Churchill’s Empire failed Bengal, Batanagar fed the hungry”, First Post, Aug 13, 2026.
“There was a time when a shoe for us meant Bata — just as Colgate was synonymous with a toothpaste.
It was less a brand than a part of growing up. It belonged to the same mental landscape as Rangoli on Sunday mornings, Chitrahaar on Wednesday and Friday evenings, the Murphy radio in the drawing room and the Ambassador car on the road. These were years of scarcity, but they did not quite feel empty. We possessed less, and yet enjoyed the precious little things in life.
So, when Paramita Sen’s new book, Batanagar: A Personal History of India’s Forgotten Company Town, landed on my table this week, my mind floated back to that fast vanishing world. Sen describes Bata evocatively as “a foreign brand that became quintessentially India”. The description is apt. What began with Tomáš Baťa in the small Czech town of Zlín grew into a global shoe empire and eventually created something extraordinary on the outskirts of Kolkata: Batanagar, a company town that became woven into the social fabric of Bengal.
There is, however, another story buried in this history of shoes, factories and industrial modernity — and it deserves to be remembered. In 1943, while Bengal starved, Batanagar fed the hungry.
Bengal was then in the grip of a catastrophic famine that was greatly exacerbated by British wartime policies and, in particular, the Churchill government’s response to the crisis. In Churchill’s Secret War, author Madhusree Mukerjee argues that a series of decisions taken under Churchill “directly and inevitably led to the deaths of some three million Indians”. Her account should disturb anyone accustomed to the sanitised portrait of Churchill as the cigar-smoking saviour of democracy. “The streets of eastern Indian cities were lined with corpses, yet instead of sending emergency food shipments, Churchill used the wheat and ships at his disposal to build stockpiles for feeding post-War Britain and Europe,” she writes……………………”
Read the full article at First Post.
