The Discursive Formation of the Bengal Famine of 1943: City, Realism, and Representation

Abstract

This paper is an inquiry into the discursive formation of the Bengal Famine of 1943 that killed over three million people when the British government imposed notorious war policies in colonial Bengal during the WWII. It explores how the longue duree crises of hunger in Bengal and its surrounded regions came to be historically and culturally known as the Bengal Famine of 1943. The Famine was a watershed moment for the emergence of left politics and aesthetic practices in direct association with cultural organizations such as the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) and Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). The Famine played a decisive role in defining the Progressive cultural activism of these groups of writer-artist-activists who were already engaged in orchestrating an imagination of social commitment and change through literary and artistic representations from the late 1930s. The trajectory of left cultural activism and practices have been marked in scholarly studies for their radical representation of the Famine through realism that lent heterogenous ways to capture the inapprehensible sight of the hungry. So far, Famine texts have been addressed in these studies to understand how this radical realism captured the inexpressible sight of the Famine, which resulted in their intervention in the existing canon of arts and literature. However, by reading a range of Famine texts of different genres, produced in the 1940s, this paper argues how realism, more than being a mere choice of representational style, was an imminent medium to address the ‘aesthetic challenge’ that the sight of the hungry in the city threw at the urban public. This paper shows that this act of seeing the hungry as an outlier to the city’s social by the urban onlooker created the spectacle that informed the realist intervention and defined the discourse of the Bengal Famine of 1943.