Works by Zainul Abedin, Chittaprosad
Bhattacharya, and Somnath Hore.

This site is best viewed on a PC.

In the canon of world history, famine memorialization has taken form in several fashions, whether it be led by government efforts or through locally-led art and literature. The degree of famine memorialization, however, varies from location to location. For example, in Ireland, the Great Hunger, which saw the death of 1 million people and the immigration of over 1.5 million people from Ireland, has museums dedicated to the Great Hunger, a national day of commemoration, and several other monuments to the event, some of which extend outside of Ireland and into the United States. Among these institutionally-supported initiatives, there also exists an established sense of both chronistic and contemporary visual culture surrounding the famine; objects like sculptures and plaques are embedded into Ireland’s cityscape, acting as visual cues of remembrance to reinforce a sense of “cultural memory” among the Irish people. The regions of Bangladesh and West Bengal, in contrast, do not preserve or showcase similar methods of institutionally-supported memorialization for the Bengal Famine of 1943, an event which claimed 3 million lives. Unlike Ireland, efforts like a day of remembrance, commemorative museums, or a public visual culture to maintain the Bengali people’s “cultural memory” of the famine do not exist in these regions, especially in modern-day Bangladesh, which this analysis focuses on.This paper seeks to analyze the memorialization efforts of the Bengal Famine of 1943, to visit the art and literature that has been produced as a result of the famine, and to understand how artists’ work — namely that of Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, Zainul Abedin, and Somnath Hore — shape the Bengali memory of the famine, particularly in Bangladesh’s modern memory. In particular, this paper will also bring forth the question of why the Bengal Famine of 1943 has not been afforded the same amount of attention as famines like the Great Hunger of Ireland. It will also explore how the reaction to the Bengal Famine of 1943 has impacted the Bengali people’s post-famine reactionary behaviors to similar types of politically-charged events in Bangladesh’s history.To read this paper in full-length, click here.

BACKGROUND

• CULTURAL MEMORY
• THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE
• THE BENGAL FAMINE
• BENGALI ARTISTIC CULTURE & THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA

ABOUT THE FAMINE ARTISTS

• CHITTAPROSAD BHATTACHARYA
• ZAINUL ABEDIN
• SOMNATH HORE

Work by Zainul Abedin

Scholar Jan Assmann defines “cultural memory” as the overall summation of meaning between three key actors in memorialization:
• “mimetic” memory, or that of action;
• the memory of tangible objects; and
• communicative memory, which involves the language used to discuss certain events.When discussing the Great Hunger of Ireland and the Bengal Famine of 1943, both famines involve all three facets, especially through the vessels of art and literature. Through such channels, both famines are understood to be a type of “mass-atrocity” because they harmed people to such a major extent; therefore, the affected peoples’ memories are sustained by a collective group of individuals, and are grieved in a crowd-like manner. The memory of these famines can then be used as a tool for the political unification of said affected peoples, as the process of memory-making grants people the “power” of honor and remembrance in a larger narrative. Both famines also contribute to the broader theory of “memory culture,” where social groups base the group’s identity and image around a universal understanding of certain memories.Cultural memory is something both Ireland and Bangladesh grapple with, as both suffered loss under the British government. However, while Ireland’s cultural memory is platformed and regarded as an upkeep of tradition, so as not to forget the famine, Bangladesh’s cultural memory is discounted or largely ignored by global powers in the “center” as a method to actively marginalize the country and its people. One could also argue that, with the precedent of the British Raj — where the Bengal region had to financially depend on Britain from 1858 to 1947 — the lack of famine memorialization occurred as a method of keeping the country “in line” with its historical dependency on the west. In recent times, Bangladesh’s economic capital has improved, with its per capita income increasing beyond that of India’s as of October 2020, so one could pose the argument that as Bangladesh’s dependency on the west weans, Bangladesh’s independence — both financial and cultural — could grant the country with the (cultural) authority to pursue memorialization efforts.

Ireland has sculptures, plaques, a national day of commemoration, and museums like the National Famine Museum and Ireland's Great Hunger Museum of Fairfield. You can view some of the Great Irish Hunger's commemorative sculptures here.Modern-day Bangladesh currently lacks this type of commemorative infrastructure, with no government or major institution leading any efforts to visually remember the famine. Work from key artists like Zainul Abedin, Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, and Somnath Hore prove that there were active members of society documenting the famine, which begs the question: why wasn't the Bengal Famine of 1943 afforded the same amount of attention as the Great Irish Hunger?In the essay "Remembering/Forgetting Hunger: Towards an Understanding of Famine Memorialisation," Camilla Orjuela poses several theories:
• Culpability shapes how individuals/states (fail to) address the famine and its victims, to where forgetting is a form of humiliated silence.
• Mass-starvation can be one of many traumas endured by a society, leading to an "entanglement" of traumas.
• Memories of other traumas can sometimes inspire and impede upon famine memorialization.
• Initiatives “from below” can affect methods of famine memorialization, in that many societies see “the erosion of the central authorities’ dominant position in constructing commemorative practices.”

Work by Zainul Abedin

Left: Boston Irish Memorial, The Historical Marker Database
Middle: Irish Hunger Memorial in New York, Wikipedia
Right: Irish Memorial in Philadelphia, Association for Public Art

Left: Map depicting contemporary borders of West Bengal and Bangladesh, courtesy of Reece Jones.
Right: Map depicting 12 (of 25) major famines during British rule, courtesy of Purkait et al.

BENGAL

As a region, “Bengal” is located in the northeastern portion of the Indian subcontinent. Although there was a first partitioning of Bengal in 1905 into East Bengal (for Muslims to inhabit) and West Bengal (for Hindus to inhabit) in 1905, historically speaking, the 1947 partition of India allowed the two regions to devolve into the state of West Bengal (which became part of India) and Pakistan (which was divided into East and West Pakistan). After the Liberation War of 1971, East Pakistan became modern-day Bangladesh. The use of the term “Bengal” in this paper refers to the states of West Bengal and modern-day Bangladesh, including Calcutta (now Kolkata, today’s capital of West Bengal).Famines frequently occurred throughout South Asia, but Bengal specifically was often affected most severely by famines, with common causes among early famines including droughts, failure of crops, cyclonic weather, and British policy failures surrounding grain exports. Until the establishment of colonial censuses in the 1860s, demographic characteristics in the pre-colonial period could not be accurately analyzed due to low literacy rates, lack of censuses, and a lack of modern record-keeping systems (although, according to scholar Senjuti Mallik, approximately 25 major famines occurred under the British Raj).

BENGAL & THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

After having to implement such drastic policies in a region with less-than-favorable environmental conditions, one may question why the British decided to concentrate on an area like Bengal (or the Indian subcontinent).To situate the British’s arrival within the region, the British’s motivations were primarily economic.
• The East India Company’s royal charter was granted by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, granting the EIC the exclusive right to trade with India.
• The company’s first trading post was then set up in the western port of Surat in 1607, allowing the EIC to participate in “triangular trade,” where precious metals were exchanged for Indian goods (like fine textiles); said Indian goods were then sold in the East Indies in exchange for spices, which were shipped back to London in order to make a profit on the original investment on the precious metals.
• After the Battle of Buxar in 1764-65, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II also granted the EIC the right to collect land revenue in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, making regions like Bengal specifically favorable as a port of operations for the company.Collecting land revenue from Bengal would further allow the EIC to expand both economically and politically, with the EIC becoming a channel of imperial operation for the British in India, For example, in 1760, the EIC had 6,680 troops; by 1823, this number would expand to 129,473, with the majority of troops being recruited from Indian peasantry.Although the company was eventually dissolved in 1874, the decline of the company essentially catalyzed the formation of the British Raj, or the period of direct British rule over the Indian subcontinent. As events like the 1857-58 Sepoy Mutiny (or the First Indian War of Independence) were suppressed by the British Crown, the Crown seized the EIC’s territories in 1858 and continued to extract resources from the subcontinent until 1947.

"East Indiamen in a Gale" by Charles Brooking (ca. 1759)

BENGALI ARTISTIC CULTURE

If the Great Hunger of Ireland is worthy of such memorialization, we must then consider how the Bengal Famine is remembered, both by the cultural group preserving the memory of the famine — in this case, the Bengali people — and by the broader institution(s) enacting memorialization efforts for the famine.In Bengali tradition, the famine has been memorialized through a wide variety of mediums, including theater, literature, and art. With a rich history of political awareness and resistance to colonial rule among contemporary creatives, the Bengal Famine inspired creators of the 1920s and 1930s to shift towards realism, taking up sociopolitical and economic exploitation as themes for their creations.In the realm of literature and theater, the Progressive Writers’ Association and Indian People’s Theater Association were respectively founded in 1936 and 1943 as strong Communist instruments of protest against colonial rule. Specifically, these groups formed to condemn the rise of fascism in Japan and Europe, especially after the August 1942 resolution of the “Quit India” movement, which demanded the end of British colonial occupation. Plays like Bijon Bhattacharya’s “Nabanna” (1944) were influential in drawing attention to the rural-urban divide created as a result of the famine, where middle and upper-class Bengali were greatly detached from the turmoil created by the famine.Novels and short stories also sought to highlight the shortcomings and misery of rural Bengal during the famine as a means of social justice. Namely, works like Freda Bedi’s Bengal Lamenting (1944) and Ela Sen’s Darkening Days (1944) served as documentation of living conditions, often dramatizing the individual’s experience with the famine. Freda’s work is a first-hand account of the famine, while Sen’s work is a half-fictionalized account that particularly surrounds the narrative of female victims and sex workers, though one chapter also focuses on “Facts and Figures” surrounding the famine. Upon release, Sen’s book was banned for a year, then published with heavy censorship in 1945.

Dedication from "Darkening Days" by Ela Sen (1944)

Work by Chittaprosad Bhattacharya

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA

During this time, the Communist Party of India dominated major spheres of Bengali-led cultural and social discussion, especially of those surrounding the famine.The party was officially founded in 1925. Prior to the famine, the party, with an audience mainly consisting of the urban working class, focused on acts of social justice like disengaging India’s developing civil disobedience movements from 1930-31 and 1932-34, denouncing them as “bourgeoisie, reactionary, and calculated to distract the Indian masses from the real struggle, presumably led by the Communists themselves.”Politically, the party was also active in organizing the masses against Nazi Germany and Japanese fascist sentiments during World War 2, supporting the Allied Powers’ war efforts, and maintaining a general anti-colonial stance.In general, however, the party’s activity was met with hostility from the British and Indian governments — the Meerut Conspiracy Case of 1929-1933 led to the arrests of almost all of the prominent Communists at the time, and by 1934, the Government of India banned the Communist Party on the basis that the party and its branches “interfered with the administration of law and constituted a danger to public peace.”

Page from the only surviving copy of the self-published "Hungry Bengal," ink on paper, 1945. (Reproduced in facsimile by DAG Modern, New Delhi, 2011. Image taken from “So Many Hungers.”)

In viewing the sketch above, the sketch above uses a contour-heavy style to presumably depict an adult and a child, possibly father and child, in blank space, emphasizing their lack of worldly property and their focus on survival. The adult figure assumes a sitting position, hands clasped in beggar formation (or potentially in prayer, to plead with a higher being and ask for help) with a stern, broken expression on his face. The child, whose gaze is similarly jaded, is swallowed whole by cloth that surrounds them, further emphasizing the child’s poor health and stature. This sketch also includes text that reads, “HUMANITY DEHUMANISED: He has lost his land and his wife has left him. There is very little that he could call his own in the world.” The narrative depicted in these realist, black-and-white sketches are ones of desolation and loss; they are intended to alert viewers to typical famine scenes that would play out on streets and on land, as if to question the viewer’s own humanity and challenge the middle-class Bengali’s “repressive erasure” of the famine.

Page from the only surviving copy of the self-published "Hungry Bengal," ink on paper, 1945. (Reproduced in facsimile by DAG Modern, New Delhi, 2011. Image taken from “So Many Hungers.”)

Similarly, Bhattacharya equips fluid ink-strokes in an expressionist-like style to depict an emaciated, struggling-yet-persisting body in transit and a sparse environment in profile view. In the foreground, coveted crops and a skull are visible. It could be argued that the inkwork in profile view is intended to anonymize the struggling subject, though snippets of text alongside the image contextualize the scene at hand. For example, the text reads, “GODS CHANGE HANDS: When the land is gone, cattle could not be spared, and the helpless kisan [agricultural peasant] takes his only bit of property to the ‘hat’ for sale.” Scholar Nikhil Sarkar notes that having faces and bodies turn away from the canvas risks erasing the identities and agency of the represented subjects, but the written component of Bhattacharya’s travel report allows him to document sights, smells, and inconveniences of the famine that cannot be documented through sight alone, grounding the experiences of the figures being captured on paper.

Various pre-famine works, watercolor and oil paint, ca. 1930s. (Courtesy of The Bengal Foundation.)

Various famine sketches, ink on paper, ca. 1943. (Courtesy of The Bengal Foundation.)

Details from "Nabanna," wax, black ink and watercolor, 1970 (Courtesy of Bangladesh National Museum, Dhaka. Image taken from “Shadow-Lines: Zainul Abedin
and the Afterlives of the Bengal Famine of 1943.”)

Painted in February of 1970, Nabanna, Bangla for “festival of new harvest,” is a 65-inch long scroll that was painted to commemorate the annual harvest festival set up by Abedin at the Dhaka Art Institute. The work is also based on a play of the same name written by Bijon Bhattacharya during the famine years, which depicts a starving Bengali peasant, who, like many others during the famine, had to uproot their life and migrate to urban Calcutta. Nabanna is composed in chapter-like panels in three key segments, with the first depicting villagers trudging through an emaciated landscape, the second showing a return (often being called “Life in Bangladesh” or “Bride Returning to Her Parent’s Home”), and the third showing the collective tilling of earth amid a bountiful harvest.In Nabanna, Abedin uses a cycle of “life” — struggle, labor, and reclamation — to situate the common Bengali experience within multiple political happenings, bridging together multiple lines of cultural memories. Considering this work was also made in 1970, thirty years after the famine, this work is meant to consolidate the trauma felt during events like the famine and the 1947 partition. This work also serves as a prelude to Bangladesh’s independence, as it was created before the bloody Liberation War and genocide in 1971. With this in mind, scholar Sanjukta Sunderason posits the idea that Nabanna serves as a metaphor for a “metaphoric harvesting of struggle,” as if to say that after suffering such hardship and loss, the Bengali people’s efforts to survive and resist suppression have finally been recognized; it is a reinforcement of the Bengali people’s cultural memory.Monpura’70, another scrollwork produced by Abedin (after a coastal storm off the island of Monpur killed thousands of people in November of 1970), is another example of how, as Sunderason argues, Abedin revisualizes trauma in such a way that is “an act of resistance” and “an act of collective struggle.”

"Monpura’70," ink on paper, 1970. (Courtesy of Bangladesh National Museum, Dhaka.
Image from Prothom Alo.)

"Wound 4," pulp print, 1970.(Courtesy of Akar Prakar Gallery.)

Wound 4 is an example of how trauma from events like the famine can mold one’s ability to process their famine (and post-famine) memories. The power of this piece comes from its physicality, where the texture of the work summons the imagery of the artist digging at the surface of the canvas with their bare hands, creating a sense of tension and suggesting the impression that some sort of physical struggle between the artist and artwork has occurred. By using clay and wax to create jagged imperfections onto an otherwise-pristine surface, Hore uses the metaphor of a scar on the canvas to create a dialogue about how long-term memory can be marred from devastating events like the famine.It is also important to note that this work was not made until 1970, nearly thirty years after the famine — as if Hore is claiming that thirty years after the famine, his memory of the famine evokes nothing but agony.Works like Wound 4 also operate in the same manner as works like Abedin’s sketches, in the sense that they are both documentative pieces. However, while Abedin’s pieces document visual sights, Hore’s work captures the tangible aspects of cultural memory, and could also be a testament to how general trauma can impact a social group’s cultural memory. When considering a memory, the blemishes that remain are what shape the interpretations of the memory, and may work to emphasize certain hardships felt during an event. Similarly, for the Bengali people, the long-lasting devastation that directly impacted Bengali communities is what shapes the discussion and language surrounding the famine and post-famine events — an emphasis will naturally be placed on pain, creating a common vocabulary for the Bengali people to use as other cultural memories are forged from “future” traumatic happenings (like the 1947 partition of India and the 1971 Liberation War).

Somnath Hore’s various works. (Courtesy of DAG Modern and Artamour.)Top left: Riots, bronze sculpture
Middle left: Untitled, bronze sculpture
Bottom left: Mother and Child, bronze sculpture
Top right: Wounds 37, pulp print, 1977
Bottom right: Wounds 54, pulp print, 1983