Regardless of the city’s commercial effectiveness and the area’s famous fecundity, there was metropolitan poverty and large areas of Bengal’s peasantry were having a hard time under iniquitous conditions developed by the zamindari system and the complicit British Raj that arched over that system.
The war that ravaged so much of the northern hemisphere never ever rather reached Calcutta in its typical form: there was no combating around the city or anywhere in Bengal– the nearby battles took location on the Burmese border, 750 kilometres away. The air bombing that ravaged other places hardly touched Bengal– Japanese airplanes sporadically bombed Calcutta in between December 1942 and January 1943, but these caused only token damage.
