Decolonising Starvation in Postmodern Famine: A Re-reading of Bengal Famine of 1943 from Cinematic Lens

Abstract

Famines were a part of Indian colonial history. It is a condition of paramount shortage of food, or want of food, hunger and starvation in a defined area or part of a country. A famine can be an economic and social phenomenon characterised by the widespread unavailability of food resources which in the absence of external aid leads to the demise of those affected. Famine scholarship has taken a conceptual shift from pre-modern to post-modern famine with Stephen Devereux's(2007) publication of The New Famine. The Bengal famine of 1943 is one among innumerable post-modern famines that made its occurrence. It is estimated to have engulfed the lives of millions of people under colonial patronage. The famine unveiled the discriminatory politics, profit driven principles of East India Company (hereafter, EIC). The chapter aims to explore how the EIC systematically destroyed the Indian agricultural system, fuelling deindustrialization in the country and ultimately making the region vulnerable to famine. In doing so, the paper shall focus on parallel cinema or new indian cinema, a movement that originated specifically in Bengal around the 1950s. Against the understanding of parallel cinema, the paper attempts to decode the politics of representation that continuously engages in redefining famine, through cinematographic art forms, such as - Mrinal Sen’s Baishey Sravana (The Wedding Day) 1960, Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine) 1980 and Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder)1973. The paper proceeds through four thematically entwined arguments. Firstly, to trace the Bengal famine of 1943 as a new famine. Secondly, to unearth the strategies of weaponisation of hunger and gradual rise of faminogenic practices in British colonial India. Thirdly, to grasp the progress of counter-cultural cinematic representation of the Bengal famine through selected films. And finally, through the meditative reading of the films, the paper tries to understand the films as an anti-imperialist force of artistic production. In doing so, the paper remains qualitative in nature, substantiated with scholarship provided by Marxist Film Theory, is employed to establish a theoretical framework. The paper therefore is divided into six interconnected sections, commencing with an introduction to famine studies and selected films and culminating with a suitable summation to support relevant claims.