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Skeletons of War: Representation of the Second World War and 1943 Famine in Bengali Cinema

Squelettes de guerre : la Seconde Guerre mondiale et la Famine du Bengal dans le cinéma bengali
Bhasha Mandal

Résumés

La famine du Bengale de 1943 reste l'un des événements les plus tragiques et pourtant largement méconnu de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Cette catastrophe a dévasté la société rurale du Bengale et a entrainé plus de trois millions de morts, un bilan stupéfiant comparé aux pertes militaires plus directes de la guerre, qui ont toujours bénéficié d'une plus grande attention dans les médias internationaux. Pendant longtemps, le discours occidental prédominant a invoqué les catastrophes naturelles et d'autres facteurs économiques comme étant à l'origine de la famine, niant complètement ou minimisant les politiques impérialistes britanniques mises en œuvre pour remporter la guerre, parfois aux dépens de millions d'Indiens. Cependant, des études historiques récentes menées par des auteurs tels qu'Amartya Sen, Madhushree Mukherjee et Janam Mukherjee ont dénoncé cette interprétation occultant la part jouée par l’effort de guerre de l’empire dans la famine du Bengale. Cet article se concentre sur trois films majeurs qui traitent de cet événement : Baishe Shravana (1960) et Akaler Sandhane (1980) de Mrinal Sen et Ashani Sanket (1973) de Satyajit Ray. Il montre comment l'approche d’un réalisme social employée dans Baishe Shravana et Ashani Sanket est critiquée par le film plus tardif Akaler Sandhane, lequel est conçu comme un métarécit offrant un commentaire sur l'impossibilité de représenter de façon adéquate les grandes tragédies par l’entremise de l’art. À travers l'analyse de ces films, l'article explore également des travaux récents en histoire et histoire politique qui analysent les liens entre la guerre, le gouvernement britannique et les industries locales profitant de la guerre, qui ont joué un rôle crucial dans l’avènement de ce désastre provoqué par l'homme. En particulier, le livre de Madhushree Mukherjee intitulé Churchill's Secret War a été déterminant pour cette étude qui vise à examiner la tragédie de la famine de 1943 en tant que dommage collatéral de la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

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Introduction

  • 1 The statistics are taken from the web article “Research Starters: Worldwide Deaths (...)
  • 2 Madhusree Mukherjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India d (...)

1My great grandfather was a doctor in the British army during the Second World War. An apparently innocuous piece of family history most probably shared by thousands of people all over the world. However, an Indian participant in the Second World War and his British counterpart not only had vastly different stories to tell during the war itself, but have been remembered and in the case of the Indian, often forgotten as a result of mainstream history’s propensity for neglecting the perspective of the non-European, even when they are involved in a global historical event. The number of Indian volunteer soldiers killed in action amounted almost to a staggering 87,000, and even more shocking remains the fact that far from mainland Europe, three million civilians in India starved and died in their secluded villages in Bengal as a direct and disastrous consequence of the war, in the Bengal Famine of 1943, also known in Bengali as Panchasher Mannwantar. On the other hand, the 450,900 Britishers1 who laid down their lives in the war have been extensively memorialised – by political institutions, mainstream historiography as well as art – where as the 3 million Bengalis who perished as mere collaterals of a war without any direct relevance to their national ethos have been largely forgotten by history, or worse, their participation reduced to that of secondary support and at times a hindrance of their white counterparts. Winston Churchill famously wrote that “No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the people of Hindustan… they were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small island”.2 This had the possibility of becoming the sustained grand narrative about the war, which promoted the idea of weak Indians protected from a horrific Japanese invasion by the paternalistic colonial government. Such outright dismissal of a human tragedy on a massive scale shows exactly how the narrative around wars is constructed –the power-knowledge nexus allows the victorious to construct a suitable story and, in this case, for the British Empire, the millions of dead Indians are not even spared an afterthought. An entire generation is killed twice over – once by depriving them of food and once again by depriving them of their rightful place in history.

  • 3 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Clarendon Press, (...)

2In recent times, many scholars have used the term “the forgotten holocaust” to refer to this unprecedented loss of life – a term that highlights the element of human responsibility in a historical event that was originally advertised as merely another natural disaster. Madhusree Mukherjee’s Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II (2010) and Janam Mukherjee’s Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (2015)have been some of the most radical scholarships pertaining to this field as they advocate a new way of looking back at the 1943 famine by emphasising the responsibility of the British war effort as well as the military and political strategies employed by both the colonial authorities as well as the Indian governing bodies. Even as early as the 1980s, Amartya Sen had already put forward his counter-thesis to the erstwhile colonial explanation that the famine occurred due to a “serious shortage in the total supply of rice available for consumption in Bengal”3 and instead identified an amalgamation of causes where the natural disasters were much less actively responsible than the war. Sen theorized that the primary causes of the famine were the war and its associated military strategies, including policies of denial and brutal colonial tactics such as the burning of boats and other transportation by the British government. He also pointed to the rerouting of essential rice reserves from rural Bengal to the British military, the scorched earth policies implemented by the British army, as well as the rampant black market hoarding and war profiteering that exacerbated the crisis. In his 1981 book Poverty and Famine, Sen writes:

  • 4 Ibid.,78.

Bengal was producing the largest rice crop in history in 1943. The war disrupted the economic system of Bengal and Burma in many ways, including its concentration of a privileged workforce in Calcutta and other cities. The network of supply and demand collapsed under the impetus of the profit motive. Free enterprise, in the form of speculation unchecked by a corrupt state government divided against itself and an indifferent British Raj, was the main cause of the Famine.4

3Economic and historical analyses like these have helped to develop an alternative history of the famine, beyond the casual dismissal and denial of responsibility which had characterised the Empire’s version of the event in official enquiry reports as well as the writings of high Government officials. Though the famine was once described as an “Act of God” by Lord Amery, Secretary of State of India, recent scholarships have proven that it is sheer human arrogance that was behind it.

4This article focuses on three landmark films based on this event: Mrinal Sen’s Baishe Shravana (1960) and Akaler Sandhane (1980), and Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket (1973). Through a close analysis of these films, this article tracks the evolution of the filmmaker's craft and their political engagement, tracing the changing patterns in their storytelling techniques and thematic focus. It demonstrates how the realistic filmmaking approach of Baishe Shravana and Ashani Sanket is critiqued in Akaler Sandhane, which shifts to a metanarrative format, positioning itself as a commentary on the impossibility of fully capturing the scale of such great tragedies through art. By delving into the historical and political context, drawing from recent studies that examine the interplay between the war and the British government as well as the political legacy left by such a massive man-made catastrophic event, this article not only traces the formal aspects of the filmmakers’ evolving styles but also highlights how their work reflects a broader political critique, positioning the films as both artistic and ideological responses to the shifting historical landscape.

The Indian “New Wave”: Artistic vision and social responsibility

5The Second World War then had two sides in India, one of which primarily involved the urban middle classes who had knowledge about the larger socio-political scenario and who often volunteered in the war effort as well. However, even the military side of the war has not been widely depicted in Bengali cinema. One of the only important Bengali commercial films that has depicted the war with considerable importance is the iconic Romantic film Saptapadi (1961), though there the war is merely a plot device to initiate a setting for the reconciliation of an estranged inter-religious couple. The war does not create any creeping sense of dread in the background, rather acts as almost a helpful plot device that allows the lovers to find their happily ever after. In spite of the extremely sugar-coated handling of such an important historical event, even Saptapadi recognises the transformative power of war, how it not only changes people, often exaggerating already latent qualities but also how it destroys the traditional social fabric and creates a completely new system of personal relationships. In Saptapadi the military barracks and hospital serve as a site of romance which can flourish only when the orthodox social system crumbles away, and thus war brings with it not only connotations of death and destruction but also those of modernity, necessary social change and freedom. However, such associations are in complete opposition with the cultural depictions of the other side of the War, the famine which had creeped stealthily into the millions of homes of rural Bengal, far from the frontline or the barracks.

  • 5 Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films, Hyperion, 1994, 90-91.
  • 6 Satyajit Ray, Deep Focus, Harper Collins India, 2017, 26.
  • 7 Ibid., 38.

6As the famine wreaked havoc and completely destroyed Bengali rural society, it left no scope for any kind of romanticized depiction of the transformative effects of war and long before the creation of a formal theoretical discourse around it, the first chroniclers of the famine were the artists, novelists, and painters of Bengal. Painters like Zainul Abedin and Somenath Hore have left invaluable contributions through their documentation of the ravages of the famine and most contemporary Bengali authors writing during that time dedicated a huge part of their creative output in portraying the famine through the lens of realism. Bhabani Bhattacharya, Manik Bandopadhyay and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay were at the forefront of this class of writers, though for this article, the focus is not on novels but rather on Bengali cinema as it gradually became one of the most widely accessible cultural pillars of modern India. Bengali Parallel Cinema especially became a particularly important cultural tool in the left-leaning progressive political climate in post-independence Bengal. It brought a certain political and ethical commitment to filmmaking – a new kind of socially conscious cinema that focused on narrative linearity, causality as well as temporal and spatial cohesiveness. Satyajit Ray in his book Our Films, Their Films refers to this new kind of non-mainstream Indian cinema as a kind of emerging Indian New Wave which went against the usual song and dance, romantic woes and conspiring villains that were a staple of both Bollywood and commercial regional films.5 Ray considered the film director as not merely a craftsman but also someone with social responsibility, “who is also aware of its social implication, of his responsibility as a possible influence on a very large and often a very naïve mass of impressionable, film-hungry individuals, who is also able to inspire and channel a diversity of talents into the best interests of work that must in the end bear the impress of his own dominating personality”.6 Ray’s credo of filmmaking had at its core the artistic vision of the director and he has written while dealing with the ever-challenging question of realistic representation in cinema that “The sharpest revelations of the truth in cinema come from the details perceived through the eyes of artists. It is the sensitive artist’s subjective approach to reality that ultimately matters, and this is true as much of documentaries as of fiction films.”7 Mrinal Sen as another pioneer of this “Indian New Wave” is even more explicitly political. His films are less about the world filtered through the director’s vision but rather about documenting the darkest recesses of society while attempting to be a kind of social conscience of the world around, which is why many of his films employ the use of documentary materials, from newspaper cuttings to photographs in order to deal with the impossibility of depicting certain aspects of reality. All the films discussed here, i.e. Mrinal Sen’s Baishey Shravana (1960) and Akaler Sandhane (1982) and Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket (1973), fall under this socially responsible approach of film making though there are visible points of departures among them as well.

Mrinal Sen’s Baishey Shravana

7Chronologically, Baishey Shravana is the first of these films and one of Sen’s early works. It is a tragic yet poignant tale about the domestic life of an ordinary couple in a Bengali village whose entire life is overturned by the famine of 1943. Interestingly, the greater part of the film is focused on “creation” rather than “death” – as the central couple played by Gyanesh Mukherji and Madhabi Mukherjee build their small domestic haven in a solitary village far away from any influences of the outside world. It is only through the title, referring to the day Tagore died in 1941, that the audience is made aware of the timeline of the film. Otherwise, the fact that there is an ongoing global conflict does not have any visible impact on the lives of these people in the village for the entire first half of the film. The calm of an isolated Bengali village during the war further highlights the ordinary Indian’s distance from the war, both in terms of experience and knowledge. In the absence of any kind of news broadcast available in the villages, the information about the war available to the average rural Indian was negligible and the horrors that would befall these same people would not have any grand ethical significance of active ideological involvement in the war effort. Instead, they would fall victim to a war they did not know or care about only because the British government weighed their lives against the cost of winning and decided to categorise them as expendable.

8Both the war and the famine intrude into the smooth life of the village insidiously about halfway into the movie. It starts with a villager talking about the rising price of rice, oil and other essentials, ending with an ominous proclamation: “famine has truly arrived this time”. The specter of the war-profiteering rice trader looms like a shadow over almost all literary and cinematic representations of the famine – possibly because he is the most tangible and easily accessible collaborator of the war effort. The simple wife of the protagonist Priyonath only knows that his maternal uncle has a thriving rice business in the city, without any inkling about the exploitative origins of his prosperity. Still ignorant of the large-scale rice hoarding by government officials and war profiteers happening in the cities which are directly responsible for their impending starvation, the villagers’ understanding of the situation remains fragmentary. However, Sen shows how their gradual ability to grasp the bigger picture changes as starvation becomes more imminent. The tangible threat of the war arrives at the village accompanied by the sound of fighter jets flying overhead, but they remain invisible as the camera pans to the face of the protagonist rather than on the planes, bringing out the unbridgeable gap between the oversea war effort and its clueless victims, and for once foregrounding the helpless, nameless millions of Indians rather than the aggressive military preening of the West. Roaring military convoys which had penetrated the quietness of the village are blamed by the people for being responsible for their near starvation as one character clearly says: “now you're feeding our rice to the military?” Sen’s apparently politically unaware characters point at one of the central conspiracies behind the famine – the maldistribution of rice, which would only be theorised much later. Madhusree Mukherjee has elaborated on the government’s clear prioritization of military victory over the lives of the poor “natives”:

  • 8 Madhusree Mukherjee, Churchill’s Secret War, op. cit., 134.

Each link in the command chain – Churchill-Amery-Linlithgow-Herbert – was welded to the others by a grim resolve: “the war has to be won and the Congress rebellion kept under,” as Herbert had put it. The care and feeding of the populace were not a priority. “The authorities worried only about how to keep the soldiers and war workers safe, didn’t think about keeping the people safe,” related social worker Ashoka Gupta. “Fish, eggs, fruit, everything was being collected and fed to the army. Big rice banks were formed. They told everyone, give us your rice, we’ll give it back to you when you need it, but they didn’t give any, even after people started dying.8

  • 9 Ibid., 162.

9The WWII’s British soldiers who had become the symbols of democracy and freedom for the rest of the world were not seen as saviours but usurpers in Bengal, unfairly seizing food from the mouths of millions. Though the colonial attitude reflected in the famine inquiry commission put most of the blame on the panic hoarding and maldistribution of rice, later scholars like Mukherjee have given astonishing figures: “Between January and July of 1943, even as famine set in, India exported 71000 tons of rice, an unknown fraction of it through Calcutta's port.”9 This clearly points to not a lack of food but rather an intentional and planned policy of rice denial to the local population carried out by the government.

10Baishey Shravana ends with death and destitution. The protagonist Priyonath’s sensitive wife succumbs in the face of abject moral disintegration happening in front of her and the final shot of the film shows starving skeletal people leaving the village for the city in staggering mechanised movement – an image that would later be intimately associated with the refugee crisis of the partition and which implicitly alludes to the millions of refugee victims of wars all over the globe. The image of mass exodus is recognized globally as one of the most emblematic visuals of any large-scale human tragedy – wars and natural disasters alike. But in this case, these people are fighting a losing war in their homeland, against both the enemies on the outside and the enemies within.

Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket

11Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder) (1973) is possibly the most widely circulated cinematic representation of the Bengal famine. Based on a serialised novel by the Bengali author Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Ashani Sanket as a film has often been criticised for its bright and colourful depiction of rural Bengal. Pauline Kael in her book When the Lights Go Down writes:

  • 10 Pauline Kael, When the Lights Go Down, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980, (...)

During the early stages, the light is so soft, and the lily pads, the flying insects, the bathing women are so tranquil, that even when the women are hungry and picking snails out of the mud or digging for wild potatoes, the images are still harmonious. The film is delicately, ambiguously beautiful; the shadowing comes from our knowledge – and Gangacharan’s knowledge – that the people we're looking at are endangered.10

12The opening shots of the movie show the vision of vibrant crops, greenery touching the horizons, lotus flowers blooming on ponds, rivers, trees, and storm clouds darkening the horizon —possibly signaling the torrential cyclone that ravaged some districts of Bengal but also a foreshadowing of the coming horrors of war and famine. It is a picture of plentitude and peace right before starvation and death shake the social as well as moral foundations of rural Bengal. However, in a 1982 interview with Udayan Gupta, Ray himself said that the entire point of photographing Ashani Sanketin colour was to highlight the contrast between the ugliness of the man-made famine with the beauty of bountiful nature:

  • 11 Udayan Gupta, “The Politics of Humanism: An Interview with Satyajit Ray,” in Satyajit R (...)

It was only after everyone started coming into the cities that it became clear that people could die of hunger even when there had been a good harvest. That was the point of that particular famine. As for my use of color, it came straight from the author's description — that nature was very lush, that everything was physically beautiful, and yet, people were dying of hunger.11

13War creeps onto the screen silently and with deceptive beauty as the protagonist Gangacharan’s (Soumitra Chatterjee) wife Ananga Bou (Babita) looks up at a squadron of military aircraft flying overhead. Her naive comparison of the planes to a flock of birds directly counteracts the accepted significance of the planes as harbingers of death and destruction. Military technology mercilessly imposing itself onto rural nature recurs in Ray’s film with almost the same connotations as in Sen’s – indicating the close links between the military intrusion, the planned redistribution of crops to the war effort, and its inevitable effect on the quotidian lives of the villagers. Ananga Bou’s unawareness of the real danger associated with the military aircraft is mirrored in all other discussions about the war within the film. The protagonist Gangacharan is a poor Brahmin who prides himself on being the only educated man in his village Notun Gaon which is primarily inhabited by low-caste people at the bottom of the socio-economic structure —sharecroppers and landless laborers— who would become the most affected section during the famine. The first throwaway mention of the war in the film is incidentally between Gangacharan and another Brahmin and the other conversation about war takes place between a group of men where only Gangacharan and Mr. Biswas, who is a relatively wealthy trader, can participate in the discussion with some authority. The villagers’ discussion about the war goes like this:

- Now, when will this war end Mr. Biswas?

Can anyone predict? This is about the big kings and we are just uneducated village fools.

I have heard that the Germans have gained control over some particular district or something.

Yes, Singapore.

What pore?

Not Germans, the Japanese.

Which district is it priest?

District? Medinipur

So, is it close to Puri?

No, not too close. To the west.

Is that where the war is going on? So is it because of that the price of rice is going up?

Yes, that is obvious

  • 12 Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder) 1973, dir. Satyajit Ray, DVD from 0:32:29.

Yes, but let me tell you something. Although the price of rice is increasing, we wouldn't have a problem. I have a warehouse full of rice. There would not be a lack of rice."12

  • 13 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, op. cit., 1.

14Gangacharan and Biswas possess the privilege of knowledge which automatically comes with their higher class and caste positions, and some notion about the larger political picture, no matter how misleading or fragmentary. This short and darkly humorous scene further demonstrates the level of ignorance about this war on the part of the villagers – a war in which soldiers from their subjugated poverty-stricken country are unwilling participants and civilian lives have been reduced to expendable resources to be sacrificed for the “greater good”. The point raised by the rice hoarder Mr. Biswas, that there would be no dearth of rice is particularly ironic as later in the film it is the same man who is accused by the villagers of hiding and secretly transporting his stored rice to the city. This anticipates the theory of entitlement which would be propounded later by Amartya Sen in his 1981 book Poverty and Famine where he defined the condition of starvation as “the characteristics of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes.”13 Bandyopadhyay (the author of the original novel published in the immediate aftermath of the famine) and Ray used their respective mediums of choice to focus on the significance of these “some people” who are the worst affected and the “the other possible causes”, especially the role of the British war effort, in exaggerating the perennial food crisis in Bengal.

15The naïve belief that the war, along with its associated turmoil, will be over soon is echoed by many characters, including Gangacharan who is celebrated for his wisdom in his community. However, his personal knowledge system is so vastly different from the formulation of modern warfare that his only reference point remains the mythical war of Kurukshetra mentioned in the Mahabharata. He believes Kurukshetra was the greatest war ever fought and since that only lasted for 18 days, how long and how devastating can this new war fought by mere mortals? Right after this declaration of Gangacharan, the camera cuts to a scene of people scrambling for rice with zoomed-in enlarged prints of contemporary newspapers showing the rapid hikes in the price of rice. The documentary-style incorporation of real historical documentation of the time had become a commonly used formal technique seen in the social realist cinema of that era, creating a sense of verisimilitude as well as acting as a kind of authorial intervention which showed the “objective” real-time events happening at that specific historical moment. Ray employs these kinds of scenes intercut with the rising panic and food crisis where people discard all conventions of societal norms in their struggle for survival. Such scenes act as a kind of ironic commentary on the unbridgeable gap between the somewhat naïve, untouched by history, personal and local belief systems of these people and the horrifying reality playing out on the grand stage of history.

  • 14 Madhusree Mukherjee, Churchill’s Secret War, op. cit., 85.
  • 15 Ibid., 96.
  • 16 Yasmin Khan, The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War, London: Bodl (...)

16Another important reference to the colonial web of import and export which was impacted by the war and largely ignored by most reports on the part of the authority was the result of the Japanese aggression in the East as well as its invasion of Burma – an event which is given its due credit by the poor brahmin Bhattacharya in Ashani Sanket when he analyses the internal workings of the war economy and mentions that it is not just the German occupation of Singapore but rather the Japanese occupation of Burma which was responsible for the blockade of all import of cheap and coarse rice from Burma to India. As Madhusree Mukherjee writes, “By the time World War II hit, India was importing between 1 and 2 million tons of rice a year from Burma and Thailand. That lifeline would be cut by the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia – just when India had again become an exporter of grain, this time for the war effort.”14 She mentions the "denial policy" employed by the British government in coastal Bengal to stop any invasions from the east. However, the destruction of boats (one of the most important means of transportation of both people and products in Bengal) as well as the acquisition of other transports for military purposes left the people in the villages in a state of complete economic breakdown. Mukherjee also analyses a more sinister reason behind such a laissez-faire attitude on the part of the British government, which was a fear of the anti-British sentiment in the colonies turning the people into Japanese sympathisers.15 A not completely unfounded fear as many Bengalis involved in the Independence movement did consider the possibility of a Japanese invasion as beneficial for the Anti-British movement. Yasmin Khan in her book The Raj at War aptly describes the almost no-win scenario of Bengal at this point as “To many in Bengal it appeared that war was bringing devastation with or without a new foreign occupier, and that the incursion of an occupying force could not be more destructive than the defensive actions already being taken.”16

17Interestingly, the final shots of the film echo the ending of Baishey Shravana, once again focusing on the shadowy silhouettes of starving people, embarking on a hopeless exodus to the city. Historically, it was the arrival of the thousands of destitute people which for the first time brought the lived reality of these famine victims from the ignored peripheries to one of the centres of colonial administration – Calcutta, which had previously experienced the effects of the war only in the form of inflation, blackouts, and bombings. The visible reality of such massive suffering happening in the backyard of the mighty British Empire put the spotlight on the Empire and the collaborative Indian government's darker face as an aggressive force against its own subjects. The reality of the famine could no longer be ignored or denied and the city-based intellectuals felt a sense of implicit guilt in light of their previous passive complacency, which resulted in their creative agendas. Ray himself had been a city-bred young boy and his exposure as well as reaction to the war had not only been limited but in retrospect must have seemed quite insensitive. In his posthumously published book My Years with Apu, his mentions of the Japanese bombings of Kolkata are interspersed with musings about Japanese Calligraphic brushes and the easy availability of foreign films. He writes

  • 17 Satyajit Ray, My Years with Apu, London: Faber and Faber, 1997, 8.

The day I arrived in Calcutta, the Japanese bombed the city for the second time. I felt I was back where the action was. Calcutta was now a transformed city, chock-a-block with khaki-clad GIs, half the local population having left in a panic. For a film buff, it was a great time, because the cinemas showed the latest Hollywood films simultaneously with their release in the States. I lapped up the films, though at the back of my mind was the thought that the time had come to look for a job.17

18Even a cursory reading of the passage shows exactly how sheltered Ray’s life had been till then. The horrific present of his country had no place in his thoughts which were primarily concerned only with a “respectable” job and the world of cinema. For him, the khaki clad soldiers stomping into the city were not a threat but a novelty that brought along an access to the enchanting new market of Hollywood cinema. His exposure to the famine was only as a distant spectator who watched on as throngs of starving people thronged the city streets. He later said in a 1989 interview:

  • 18 Bert Cardullo, “Master of Art: An Interview with Satyajit Ray,” in Satyajit Ray Intervi (...)

At the time of the famine, 1943, I had just got my new job as an advertising designer, and I was living in Calcutta. Hundreds and thousands of people, from the villages, were streaming into Calcutta. I remember the railway stations were just jam-packed with refugees. People were at the point of death, or they would have died in a few days' time at the most. We would come out of the house on our way to work and step across dead bodies, just lying all over the place.18

  • 19 Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, University of California Press, 1989, 221.

19Andrew Robinson in his biography of the director titled The Inner Eye has also extensively written about how Ray’s privileged position in the city had protected him from experiencing any direct horrors of the famine, a position which had left the director infused with a sense of guilt as well as a moral responsibility that became the impetus behind the making of Ashani Sanket.19 And maybe that is why Ray’s political position in the film is not quite as bleak as Sen’s in Baishey Shravana which showed a total erosion of human values in the face of catastrophe. Instead, through Gangacharan's final act of performing the funeral rites of the low caste moti-muchini – he showcases the resilience and triumph of the inherent humanity of the people – no matter their long-entrenched ignorance and superstitions. Is such a traditionally humanist approach representative of the reality of that time? As Bhaskar Sarkar has pointed out,

  • 20 Bhaskar Sarkar, “The Inward Look: The Politics and Practice of Cinematic Re (...)

The representation of famine we find in Distant Thunder is true to Ray’s conception of that famine, filtered through cognitive categories that constitute the consciousness of the urban, educated middle classes of Calcutta. Yet, such films tend to pass as “true” representations of rural life and history by virtue of their ideological posturing and the proven integrity of their auteurs.20

  • 21 Bijon Bhattacharya, Nabanna: Of Famine and Resilience: A Play, originally published in Be (...)
  • 22 Madhusree Mukherjee, Churchill’s Secret War, op. cit.,196.

20In Marxist author Bijon Bhattacharya’s play Nabanna, which remains one of the most iconic contemporary fictional documentation of the famine, the unfed people from the villages throng the city streets and are reduced to a state of fighting with dogs for scraps of food.21 Such a depiction of famine stands in stark contrast with Ray’s optimistic vision, which in spite of all ends with a celebration of the perseverance of humanity and the bond of community. Such a creative decision may even be critiqued for an apparent liberal disengagement with ground level material reality of the specific historical. However, in this context it is also necessary to look at the other end of the “hunger” spectrum. An observation by Madhushree Mukherjee may be useful in this context where she writes, “Almost everywhere in the world, famished people have resorted to eating human flesh. Amazingly not a single case of cannibalism was reported during the Bengal famine of 1943, although tens of millions of villagers suffered from acute hunger.”22 Though refraining from anthropophagy cannot be held as the standard of human behaviour, considering the circumstances, such data can help to understand Ray's decision to end the film with a hopeful vision of collaborative and empathetic humanity even though it arrives only on the heels of death. As Andrew Robinson writes in his biography of the director:

  • 23 Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, op. cit., 230.

Satyajit Ray was ambivalent in his feelings for this old world, which was part of the reason for his indifference to the Famine victims in 1943… On top of being overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, as we know he was, Ray also felt a certain lack of sympathy with the world from which the victims came, with their caste-based mentality, that led both to their emotional blackmail of city-dwellers and to their fatalistic attitudes… Satyajit felt their suffering and their misery, but he also believed that the old, irrational system of values that had helped to create it, must pass. At heart he was a revolutionary: it was more vital to him that Gangacharan should, of his own volition, begin to reject caste, despite the shattering crisis required to bring this about, than that the status quo should be maintained in all its benighted sterility. Gangacharan’s decision to cremate the girl’s corpse was regarded by Ray as a big step forward, an enormously progressive gesture.23

Two contrasting visions

21It is precisely in how the two directors approach the climax of the films that their ideologies are reflected. Ashani Sanket ends on a note of rebirth and hope as Gangacharan and Ananga do not lose their humanity amidst the horror but are actually welcoming of the arrival of the other famine victims into their circle, thereby showing even in the middle of complete social breakdown, the age-old Indian tradition of regarding guests as a manifestation of God still remains strong. But Baishey Shravana ends with the protagonist shunning all society, even pushing away his wife’s companion and her baby who had become the only consolation to her. Instead of any sign of hope of a community trying to rebuild itself from a tragedy, Sen’s study of the tragedy of this one small family has no place for redemption.

22Both Baishey Shravanaand Ashani Sanket are rooted strictly within the realist method of filmmaking. Moreover, Ashani Sanket is based on a novel – the most prolific cultural product of the realist tradition in the arts in Bengal. Both take the presumed settled dynamics between the subject and the object; the audience's gaze aligned with that of the characters within the film who are bound by the directorial vision and an emphasis on the ability of art to give a "true" representation of reality. However, realism as a narrative technique was employed by the growing Parallel Cinema movement in India at that time as an inherent part of any socially conscious form of art. Such films had a straightforward objective, to educate as well as to affect. Both Ashani Sanket and Baishey Shravana emphasise a linear method of storytelling that delineates the immediate as well as long-standing historical causality behind the famine while attempting a kind of cathartic closure by focusing on the personal tragedies which were largely ignored by the official documentation of the event.

23The historical context behind the development of the two films are then crucial in understanding the difference in their approaches. Sen’s film was released in 1960, it was his third feature film, made just about fifteen years after the famine and Sen himself writes of his memory of the famine with anger and desire for accountability:

  • 24 Mrinal Sen, “Baishey Shravana and the Great Famine of 1943,” in Views on Ci (...)

In 1943 I was in Calcutta. Those were terrible days. The famished people from the interiors of the agricultural belts rushed to the city, begged for the left-overs and dropped dead. There would be seen corpses on the pavements, in the parks and all over the city and also in the outskirts before they would enter the city. There was stink in the air but not much anger. The war raged in Europe and five. million people died in united Bengal in West and East just out of starvation. It was a famine made by men who, as they served the colonial bosses in their war efforts, cared only for profiteering and black marketing.24

  • 25 In West Bengal, the খাদ্য আন্দোলন (Khadyo Andolon) literally translated to Food Movement (...)
  • 26 Moinak Biswas, “Vision of a land: Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay's Bengal in Satyajit Ray's c (...)

24Ray’s decision to make Ashani Sanket came much later, was influenced greatly because of his interest for the source material, and the production only became successful after significant delays and interruptions. His was a directorial perspective smoothed over by not only time but its literary source, which was also much removed from his personal impressions of the event. Ray’s film told a story about the perseverance of humanity whereas Sen’s focused more on the indignity of the sufferers. It is also interesting to note that in the 1960s and 1970s the food movement in Bengal25 was slowly gaining momentum and according to Moinak Biswas, even Ray, who was generally aloof from mainstream politics, had participated in a march against the arrest of food movement demonstrators in 1966. 26

25Thus, it is possible to infer that both Baishey Shravana and Ashani Sanket were attempts by two filmmakers of the realist style to act as their ideas of social commentaries of an event which had affected and been affected by not only their individual memory and politics but as well as by the political climate of the time.

26The question remains whether it is at all possible to represent any disaster or catastrophe through conventional cultural mediums. Does a transformative experience also not demand a completely new form of expression? Even beyond the aesthetic questions, how does one represent the final extremes of horror whose witnesses cannot possibly represent themselves? That space beyond the formal boundaries of representation is where silence lies.

Inheritance of Hunger: Sen’s self-reflexive turn and the legacy of the famine

27While discussing Ray’s motivations for making Ashani Sanket, Robinson writes:

  • 27 Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, op.cit., 221.

If he had felt unable to place himself truthfully in the situation of the famine victims he would not have made a film at all. To have looked at them through the eyes of an outsider would have been obscene, somehow, however interesting a story it might have made.27

  • 28 Bhaskar Sarkar, “The Inward Look: The Politics and Practice of Cinematic Representa (...)
  • 29 Pather Panchali is Satyajit Ray’s directorial debut.

28It is from this debatable point that Mrinal Sen’s 1983 film Akaler Sandhane departs both structurally and ideologically, though there are some superficial similarities between them, as Akaler Sandhane is also based on a novel. Written by Amalendu Chakrabarty, the original text was initially drafted as a screenplay at the behest of Sen himself. The script and the film employed the metafictional technique of situating a film within the film. The frame story focuses on a group of Kolkata actors (played by then-famous actors like Smita Patil, Dipankar De, etc.) led by their unnamed director (played by Dhritiman Chatterjee) who travels to a village to shoot a social-realist film about the famine. The film's narrative plays out like a Chinese box, with layers upon layers along with the added intertextual element of Sen intentionally turning a critical lens on his art and ethics of two decades back when he had himself shot Baishey Shravana. As Bhaskar Sarkar has written, “Between 1981 and 1984, Mrinal Sen directed four films which focus on the process of aesthetic representation, addressing the formal, ethical and political dimensions. Together, they constitute a self-reflexive tum in Sen’s oeuvre: in one way or another, the director seems to be interrogating his own position as an auteur and the very conditions that make his career as an intellectual filmmaker possible. This is particularly true of Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine, 1980), which is about the process of filmmaking.”28 In this context it is important to note that by this time The Indian New Wave that had burst into the scene with Pather Panchali (1955)29 was more than two decades old. What had once been a fresh vision of the Indian director to find a cinematic language rooted in the tradition and culture of his country had become a kind of urban middle class intellectual’s fetishization of the rural “Other” from whose everyday lives he was far removed but whose lives and struggles he felt needed to be represented to show to the world the “reality” of India. A “reality” which was also very much not the reality of the intended consumers of this type of “socially conscious” films. To what extent this was a direct influence of the growing left leaning progressive politics among the educated intellectual Bengali and how much of it stems instead from some desire to assuage one’s own complicity in the nexus of power and privilege that had created such a huge socio-economic division in the country is interrogated by Sen in Akaler Sandhane.

29Unlike Ray who intentionally chose a form of filmmaking to encourage maximum identification with the audience, Sen's approach is to highlight the inevitable disconnect between the urban elite who by this point have become both producers and consumers of a narrativised version of the famine, and the villagers, some of whose forefathers had been directly affected by the disaster, creating a newer generation who have in many ways inherited their legacy of hunger. Sourit Bhattacharya in his book Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism has considered famine “to be simultaneously spectacular and attritional”:

  • 30 Sourit Bhattacharya, “Disaster and Realism: Novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine,” (...)

The spectacular dimension of the event appears in its immediacy of devastation (starvation, everyday suffering, dying on the streets) while the attritional or slow one is understood in its temporal breadth, the slow genesis, and the accumulated nature of its formation.30

30That the reality of famine did not end in 1944, which was considered as the official end of the famine situation, is explicit from the first spoken dialogue in the film – an old man watches the big van carrying the film crew and speaks in a monotone: “City people are here to film the famine. Famine! It's written all over us.”

31However, the politically literate film crew allows for a kind of sardonic authorial analysis of the famine to play out within the film itself – both through the fictional filmmaker's directorial vision as well as the many discussions surrounding the famine which are primarily carried out by the film crew. Interestingly, most of the villagers are silent on this matter. In fact, at around 11:30 minutes into the film, the director's voice-over comes, educating his actors and crew: “1943. World War was on. And in our country, in Bengal? Not a bullet was fired, not a bomb fell, but in one year, 5 million died of starvation. They just starved and dropped dead.” This comment is a direct attack on the role of the colonial government’s military ambition and is the result of the newly emerging interest of a few western educated, ideologically Marxist people in this particular aspect of Bengal's history. The emphasis on the paradox of “not a bullet was fired but 5 million died” further strengthens the gradually growing scholarship on the issue which directly blamed the war efforts for the unprecedented toll of the famine.

  • 31 Hugh Gray, “Interview with Satyajit Ray,” in Satyajit Ray Interviews, Bert Cardullo (...)

32The Kolkata-based film crew is intent on portraying the most “authentic” image of the famine, possibly inspired by the style of Italian neorealist cinema – another cheeky nod to Sen’s own as well as Ray’s initial fascination with this artistic movement (Ray had often mentioned the influence that Bicycle Thieves had on his filmmaking choices of using non-actors and shooting on location).31 The director is almost obsessive in his pursuit of the perfect lighting and the most appropriate physical characteristics from his actors, reducing a female actor to tears for daring to groom her eyebrows. His quest for “realism” takes him on swift car journeys to new locations and to a demand for a larger number of “appropriately malnourished extras” for a shot of the famine-stricken exodus. The inherent paradox between his artistic identity as a connoisseur of realism and his political identity as vocal defender of the artist’s need for empathising with the suffering of those being portrayed on screen are laid bare when the director does not bat an eye at the ready availability of malnourished people – they are merely cheap resources to him, just as they were for the Empire during the war. The ethical pitfalls of using hungry bodies of the present to represent the historical truth of starvation appear to have completely eluded the film crew.

33Beyond the ethical questions, even the formal choices of the director echo the well-known, much-circulated symbols and imageries already used in celebrated realist depictions of the famine. Military convoys arriving in the village, the roar of fighter planes in the sky, the presence of a leering war contractor who not only secretly smuggles rice but also exploits the vulnerability of the village women for sexual favors – all of these images have become synonymous with the cultural production of a realist version of the war effects and the famine in the popular consciousness, thereby giving rise to the question, exactly how far is the realist genre able to address an event of such unimaginable horror without consistently resorting to its limited arsenal of easily identifiable visual signifiers.

34Sen, in an interview with Cineaste said:

  • 32 Udayan Gupta, Mrinal Sen, Girish Karnad, Ketan Mehta, “New Visions in Indian Ci (...)

The film tries to work on many levels. It tries to suggest that the famine of 1943, which killed five million people in one year, continues. But something else happens when the filmmaker walks into the village attempting to recreate the past. He is not prepared for the manner in which the past becomes the present… at the moment the past becomes the contemporary reality, he tries to run away.32

35One of the most interesting aspects of Akaler Sandhaneis precisely this blurring between the past and the present. War as a major cause of not only the 1943 famine but food scarcities on a global scale is contextualised in a historically fluid movement in three specific instances. At around 10 minutes into the film, the production manager of the crew mentions the hike in oil prices because of the Iran-Iraq War – a devastating political situation that has become just a distant newspaper headline, and a minor inconvenience because it limits the generator usage for the film crew. It serves as a reminder of the disparity of different populations’ experience of one single historical event – and echoes the conditions during the 1943 famine.

36At 1:12:15 minutes into the film, the same production manager is seen discussing the rising price of food items in the village with a villager. The villager blames it on the export of most produce to the cities and the rest being usurped by the film crew who are invested in maintaining a semblance of the comfortable living they are used to in the city. The spectral old man with the prophetic words from the first portion of the film intrudes in this conversation saying: “The city people have caused a famine by coming to film one.” This is another instance where the exploitative British policies of 1943 blurs with the privileged disregard of the urban elite of the 1980s Bengal in a legacy of exploitation.

37The third sequence occurs when, at 18:56 minutes in the film, a village announcer goes about on his cycle van advertising a screening of the classic Hollywood war film The Guns of Navarone, touting it as “the greatest of all great films”. Since The Guns of Navarone is widely considered a celebration of military muscle and of the legendary bravery of the Allied powers during WWII, the fact that it is being celebrated in a poor Bengali village indicates the unreliability of knowledge production and consumption of a historical event. The same war had been one of the major causes behind the famine that would have catastrophic effects in the lives of the people of this tiny Bengali village. But in the current cultural scenario the mainstream Western vision of the war moulds popular consciousness by successfully propagating a glorifying version of it even to the people whose forefathers had been killed by the ramifications of that same war.

38One of the most memorable and hard-hitting sequences from the film happens about 50 minutes in when the film crew sits together and plays a rather morbid version of guessing game. Smita Patil's character holds up photographs of emaciated bodies, clearly taken during the famine, and asks the others to guess the year. Though most of the guesses turn to 1943, it is revealed that mixed with them are photographs from the “mini famine” of 1959 and the 1971 famine in Bangladesh – which, according to a New York Times article from May 12, 1971, was a time when

  • 33 New York Times May 12, 1971.

Fat vultures brood over the ravaged towns of East Pakistan, grim testimony to the slaughter which took place during the Pakistan army's savage crackdown on Bengali separatists. The fighting had died down for the time being, with the Bengali resistance largely routed, but what may become known as the year of the vulture in East Pakistan is not ended. Famine now stalks this tragic land of chronic disaster.33

  • 34 United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, “Conflict and Violence (...)

39This is a stark reminder that images of famine and violence remain consistent across changing times and places, representative of suffering on a global scale. According to a March 2023 report of the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, “Seventy percent of the world’s hungry people were living in areas afflicted by war and violence. Conflicts caused food shortages and the severe disruption of economic activities, which threatened the means of survival of entire populations around the world.”34 The interchangeable faces of famine in the photographs connect the ghosts of the past to their present legacy of global hunger.

40Akaler Sandhane does not end like Baishey Shravana – with an intensely personal tragedy – or like Ashani Sanket, which retains hope for human struggle against insurmountable odds. The “real” film must end at one point and it does, but the film within the film is never completed. The director and the crew run into conflicts with the villagers over irreconcilable differences in class and value systems which breed resentment on the part of the villagers as much as it powers the condescension of the film crew. They wrap up their shoot and leave the town but the final shot is not of them leaving but a series of gradual close-ups of Durga – a low caste woman of the village whose abject poverty most visibly still resembles the condition during the famine. As the voiceover narration says “A few days after this Durga's son died. Her husband is missing for three days. Durga is all alone.”, Durga’s face slowly grows smaller and smaller on a black screen until vanishing altogether. This quiet ending is possibly Sen’s loudest indictment of the limits of realistic filmmaking techniques as it foregrounds the unsaid and the invisible – the stories of those who are left behind and in turn remain forgotten by history.

The Feminization of famine?

  • 35 Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine, Cork University Press, 1997, 7.

41In his early career, Satyajit Ray had been all about using non actors, limited equipment and crew and shooting on location – believing these to be the tools to capture authenticity on celluloid. This new style, which had found resounding success with the global critical appreciation of Pather Panchali, had influenced many young directors of the time, including Mrinal Sen. In Akaler Sandhane, the filmmaker who is a stand-in of this kind of directors, tries to follow this school of filmmaking but returns home with a half-finished film and leaves behind the crucial non-actor of their set – Durga – in her own misery which is actually in some senses amplified by the interference of the film crew. The film crew’s insistence on having her play the role of a woman who has to exchange sexual favours for survival puts her in a difficult position in the orthodox male-dominated social milieu of the village. She is ostracized for giving up her symbolic status of purity associated with womanhood and the apparently dynamic and modern outsiders who have almost forced this social change upon her leave her to her own devices as they pack up and leave the village. As a woman, she is once again doubly victimised by patriarchy. In the film Durga watches the shooting of the film and the cry of despair from the woman within the film played by Smita Patil merges with Durga’s own shriek – and this disruptive cry may possibly be the only way whereby a woman like Durga can transgress the formal structures and borders of not only a patriarchal society but the invading and domineering medium of cinematic representation as well. The search for authentic storytelling amounts to an imperialist’s agenda, using and exploiting all the resources. Here Durga is nothing more than such an expendable resource, though a failed one in this case as her labour is not financially or artistically rewarded. She remains stuck in poverty and the film remains stranded in the production stage. We may conjecture that, had the film within the film been a success and sent off to various film festivals and won a plethora of awards, nothing would still change for Durga, other than a distant possibility of her performance, being praised as the raw “authentic” portrayal of victimhood in distant lands. And it is in this context of representing the famine, that women become sites where the horrors play out most strikingly. Women figure as a prominent center of the narratives in all the films discussed in this article, who are almost always unaware of the political realities of their time and epitomise ideal Indian womanhood. They are still positioned as the victims, but the female body is used for more than mere realist representative purposes, it becomes a symbolic substitute of famine itself. Nature and sustenance have traditionally been portrayed as feminine and the famine plays out as an attack on the female body. In her book The Feminization of Famine, Margaret Kelleher has written that “images of women are useful to figure moments of breakdown or crisis – in the social body, in political authority, or in representation itself.”35In both Ashani Sanket and Akaler Sandhane, women are doubly victimised – falling prey to physical starvation and sexual hunger. In Ashani Sanket, Chhutki (Sandhya Roy) grows desperate because of hunger and exchanges sexual favours with a contractor in an int-bhata (masonry) in exchange for some rice. In Akaler Sandhane, the film within the film tells the story of two women, Malati and Savitri who turn to prostitution in a last bid of saving their family from hunger. The wealthy war contractor in the village literally ‘buys’ them in exchange of a small amount of food and this reflects how in times of great socio-political upheaval, sexual exploitation of women increase drastically.

  • 36 Mrinal Sen, “Baishey Shravana and the Great Famine of 1943,” in Views on Cinema. Is (...)

42Both Ray and Sen attempt to show the desperation of these women without resorting to easy value judgment at a time when the Indian audience was largely conservative and the idea of Indian womanhood had been successfully constructed as a repository of national cultural and moral values. Instead of using the trope of prostitution in times of crisis to induce easy sympathy, both directors focus on the agency of the women, even when they have reached the limits of their desperation. Though Chhutki could refuse the brickmaker, which she had done previously, finally she chooses to go away to the city with him in a final attempt at survival. Savitri in Akaler Sandhane goes to the war contractor with the sole objective of saving her child. Both of these characters refuse to be bound by their social roles delineated by the patriarchal society, trying to become providers at a time when the traditional social and domestic structures have disintegrated. Instead of wasting away while upholding their pure symbolic existence, they strive for earthly survival. In contrast to these two portrayals, Sen’s Baishey Shravana shows a much darker defeat of grace in the face of unsurmountable adversity, as the protagonist’s wife makes no effort to resist the horrors engulfing her. Her final and only act of resistance, if it can even be called that, is merely succumbing to the inevitability of it all. The ending is possibly the harshest look at the effects of a larger historical event on the microcosm of a family. As Sen himself has written: “There is nothing to salvage them, to pull them out of this filth and this is what the film captures. At the end the woman hangs herself. The man was no villain, the woman was all grace. It was a cruel time. I wanted to make a cruel film and Baishey Shravana is one such.”36

43However, the two directors’ attempt at representing the women characters not as stereotypical victims does not always translate successfully. Even among critics, the directorial agenda is problematised by taking into account the cultural desire to always see women as passive objects, objects of lust, of hunger, objects on which the artist or the director imposes his vision. The famous American film critic Pauline Kael’s 1975 review of Ashani Sanket was published with the telling title “A Dream of Women” where she had written:

  • 37 Pauline Kael, “A Dream of Women,” in When the Lights Go Down, New York: Holt, Rinehart an (...)

His seeing the beauty in the Indian past almost completely in the women. The men in this village are ignorant and obsequious, and physically very unprepossessing; the rich ones hoard and profiteer, the poor panic, become violent, riot. But the women are conceived of as in a dream of the past-they might be iridescent figures on a vase. These women are uneducated and superstitious, they know nothing of the world outside; yet they're tender and infinitely graceful. Moving in their thin, clinging saris, they create sensuous waves of color in the steamy air. Gangacharan's bride, Ananga, is innocently childlike, undulant, luscious, with a pouty ripe-pink underlip; the brilliant orange-red spot in the middle of her forehead is like a cosmic beauty mark.37

  • 38 Susan Sontag, On Photography, Penguin Books, 1979, 15.

44This review when read alongside the director in Akaler Sandhane’s insistence on the “natural look” of one of the female actors of the film crew shows a strange doublethink when it comes to representation of both the horrors of suffering and the suffering of women. Yes, Ananga Bou is definitely Madonnafied by Ray, especially with her final pregnancy, as if she is carrying hope itself in her womb. However, Kael’s review and its excessive focus on the physicality of the women, which reads their simple white saree and vermillion on the forehead (signs of matrimony in Bengali culture) with an almost erotic undertone goes to show the exact fallacies of realistic representation. Babita, the actor of the role is described as having “almost pornographic charm” and “the one who plays Moti, the Untouchable, and another who plays a woman who gives Gangacharan food to take home to his wife. They, too, are gentle and undemanding ideal traditional women”. But in Akaler Sandhane, exactly the opposite situation appears to take place. Durga is used to represent hunger and poverty in its most authentic form, a realist version which cannot be critiqued by the educated global audience or the critic as idealized or eroticized. However, the search for this kind of authenticity lays waste in its wake, doubly depriving the woman in question. Women, inside the film and outside, during the war or in the aftermath, remain in the same space, gazed at and rarely gazing back. Susan Sontag in her seminal work On Photography has written “There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”38 – the inherent predatory aspect of the camera when combined with the already precarious objectification of these women in their social world become a repeated attack on their subjective selves and annihilates any possibility of political or aesthetic representation where the woman retains any agency.

Conclusion

45Who has the ethical right of telling the story of the famine? Those who experienced the horrors are long gone, and even if they had been alive, the field of art and culture has always been worlds away from them. In the tightly structured and undeniably privileged world of filmmaking, the real victims of the famine and even their descendants can never sit on the director's chair. The most they can hope for is to become an emaciated extra in the background or a sympathetic director’s vision of their lived reality. However, the crisis of representation does not invalidate the necessity of it. Historically accurate stories of the famine focusing on its underlying causes are important as an attempt to formulate a counter-narrative of the Empire and its role in the war, which was not all in the name of moral victory. The stories, however difficult, need to be told to inform, educate and in turn become lasting documents of suffering and resistance. To fulfil its social and political purposes, such narratives do not need to be historically “true” – real tales of real people from that time. Realism does not attempt to tell the “truth” and fictionalisation of history is not always an exercise in erasure. Rather, it allows a space for the unspeakable once it is farther removed from tangible experiences. Realistic cinema, as seen from the previous discussion on the films, depends upon the audience’s accepted notions of film language and even on their readiness to immerse themselves in fiction. This allows for an almost cathartic relief, though in the case of the Bengal famine, the two social realist films put in contrast with the more critical and self-reflexive Akaler Sandhane, bring up another fundamental question about who exactly is the target audience of these films, and whether these “human documents” at all help those it claims to represent or remain a kind of self-aggrandising exercise to absolve a particular class of people from their collective guilt. 

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Bibliographie

Filmography

Akaler Sandhane (In Search of a Famine), 1980, dir. Mrinal Sen, D. K Films, DVD.

Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder), 1973, dir. Satyajit Ray, Balaka Movies, DVD.

Baishey Shravana, 1960, dir. Mrinal Sen, DVD.

Bibliography

BHATTACHARYA Bijon, Nabanna: Of Famine and Resilience: A Play (originally published in Bengali in 1944), translated by Arjun Ghosh, Rupa Publication, 2018.

BHATTACHARYA Jigisha, “The 1943 Bengal Famine and the Re-Enactment of Memory: A Study of Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973) and Akaler Sandhane (In Search of a Famine, 1980),” Humanities Diliman19:1, January-June 2022, 58-77.

BHATTACHARYA Sourit, “Disaster and Realism: Novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine,” Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 41-95.

BISWAS Moinak, Historical Realism: Modes of Modernity in Indian Cinema 1940-60, Doctoral Thesis Visual Culture School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies Monash University, 2002.

BISWAS Moinak, “Vision of a land: Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay's Bengal in Satyajit Ray's cinema,” Frontline Magazine, October 17, 2021.

BOSE Sugata and Ayesha JALAL, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy [1997], Delhi: Routledge, 2011.

CARDULLO Bert (ed.), Satyajit Ray Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, 2007.

COLLINGHAM Lizzie, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food, London: Allen Lane, 2011.

DAS GUPTA Amlan, “The Economy of Hunger: Representing the Bengal Famine of 1943,” in A Cultural History of Famine, Ayesha Mukherjee (ed.), Routledge, 2019, 167-84.

FAMINE INQUIRY COMMISSION, Report on Bengal, 1944, reprint Usha Publications, New Delhi, 1984.

GUPTA Udayan, Mrinal SEN, Girish KARNAD, Ketan MEHTA, “New Visions in Indian Cinema: Interviews with Mrinal Sen, Girish Karnad and Ketan Mehta,” Cinéaste, Vol. 11, No. 4, Cineaste Publishers, Inc. Stable,1982, 18-24, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41686086

GUPTA Diya, “Bodies in hunger: Literary representations of the Indian home-front during the Second World War,” Journal of War & Culture Studies, 2019,https://doi.org/10.1080/17526272.2019.1644274,

KAEL Pauline, When the Lights Go Down, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980.

KELLEHER Margaret, The Feminization of Famine, Cork University Press, 1997.

KHAN Yasmin, The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War, London: Bodley Head, 2015.

MUKHERJEE Madhusree, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, Basic Books, 2010.

MUKHERJEE Janam, Hungry Bengal, Oxford UP, 2015.

The NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM – NEW ORLEANS, “Research Starters: Worldwide Deaths in World War II: The National WWII Museum: New Orleans.” https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war

NEW YORK TIMES, “The Vultures of Bengal,” 12 May 1971, 42.RAY Satyajit, Our Films, Their Films, Hyperion, 1994.

RAY Satyajit, Deep Focus, Harper Collins India, 2017.

RAY Satyajit, My Years with Apu, London: Faber and Faber, 1997.

ROBINSON Andrew, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, University of California Press, 1989.

SARKAR Bhaskar, “The Inward Look: The Politics and Practice of Cinematic Representation,” in The Enemy Within: The Films of Mrinal Sen, edited by Sumita S. Chakravarty, Flicks Books, 2000, 98-130.

SEN Amartya, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Clarendon Press, 1981.

SEN Mrinal, Views on Cinema, Ishan Publication, 1977.

SENGOOPTA Chandak, “The fruits of independence’: Satyajit Ray, Indian nationhood and the spectre of empire,” South Asian History and Culture 2/3, 2011, 374-396.

SONTAG Susan, On Photography, Penguin Books, 1979.

TAUGER Mark B., “The Indian Famine Crises of World War II, British Scholar,” 1(2), 2009, 166-196.

UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS OFFICE OF THE HIGH COMMISSIONER, “Conflict and Violence are the primary causes of Hunger and Famine, Special rapporteur on the Right to Food Tells the Human Rights Council,” 9 March 2023,https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2023/03/conflict-and-violence-are-primary-causes-hunger-and-famine-special-rapporteur-right

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Notes

1 The statistics are taken from the web article “Research Starters: Worldwide Deaths in World War II: The National WWII Museum: New Orleans.” The National WWII Museum | New Orleans, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war

2 Madhusree Mukherjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, Basic Books, 2010, 1.

3 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Clarendon Press, 1981, 77.

For more information see the report of the Famine Inquiry Commission, India, 1945.

4 Ibid.,78.

5 Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films, Hyperion, 1994, 90-91.

6 Satyajit Ray, Deep Focus, Harper Collins India, 2017, 26.

7 Ibid., 38.

8 Madhusree Mukherjee, Churchill’s Secret War, op. cit., 134.

9 Ibid., 162.

10 Pauline Kael, When the Lights Go Down, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980, 69.

11 Udayan Gupta, “The Politics of Humanism: An Interview with Satyajit Ray,” in Satyajit Ray Interviews, Bert Cardullo (ed.), University Press of Mississippi, 2007, 131.

12 Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder) 1973, dir. Satyajit Ray, DVD from 0:32:29.

13 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, op. cit., 1.

14 Madhusree Mukherjee, Churchill’s Secret War, op. cit., 85.

15 Ibid., 96.

16 Yasmin Khan, The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War, London: Bodley Head, 2015, 112.

17 Satyajit Ray, My Years with Apu, London: Faber and Faber, 1997, 8.

18 Bert Cardullo, “Master of Art: An Interview with Satyajit Ray,” in Satyajit Ray Interviews, Bert Cardullo (ed.), University Press of Mississippi, 2007, 168.

19 Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, University of California Press, 1989, 221.

20 Bhaskar Sarkar, “The Inward Look: The Politics and Practice of Cinematic Representation,” in The Enemy Within: The Films of Mrinal Sen, Sumita S Chakravarty (ed.), Flicks Books, 2000, 100.

21 Bijon Bhattacharya, Nabanna: Of Famine and Resilience: A Play, originally published in Bengali in 1944, translated by Arjun Ghosh, Rupa Publication, 2018, Act 2, Scene 3, 46.

22 Madhusree Mukherjee, Churchill’s Secret War, op. cit.,196.

23 Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, op. cit., 230.

24 Mrinal Sen, “Baishey Shravana and the Great Famine of 1943,” in Views on Cinema, Ishan Publication, 1977, 136.

25 In West Bengal, the খাদ্য আন্দোলন (Khadyo Andolon) literally translated to Food Movement was a series of protests organized in 1959 by the 1959 Price Increase and Famine Resistance Committee (PI&FRC) as a key response to rising food prices and widespread poverty. The movement was closely aligned with left-wing political groups, particularly the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) and consisted of organized protests, strikes, and rallies to demand government intervention, including price controls and subsidized rations.

26 Moinak Biswas, “Vision of a land: Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay's Bengal in Satyajit Ray's cinema,” Frontline Magazine, October 17, 2021

27 Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, op.cit., 221.

28 Bhaskar Sarkar, “The Inward Look: The Politics and Practice of Cinematic Representation,” op.cit., 98.

29 Pather Panchali is Satyajit Ray’s directorial debut.

30 Sourit Bhattacharya, “Disaster and Realism: Novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine,” Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 41-95.

31 Hugh Gray, “Interview with Satyajit Ray,” in Satyajit Ray Interviews, Bert Cardullo (ed.), University Press of Mississippi, 2007, 5.

32 Udayan Gupta, Mrinal Sen, Girish Karnad, Ketan Mehta, “New Visions in Indian Cinema: Interviews with Mrinal Sen, Girish Karnad and Ketan Mehta,” Cinéaste, Vol. 11, No. 4, Cineaste Publishers, Inc. Stable,1982, 18-24, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41686086

33 New York Times May 12, 1971.

34 United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, “Conflict and Violence are the primary causes of Hunger and Famine, Special rapporteur on the Right to Food Tells the Human Rights Council,” 9 March 2023, https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2023/03/conflict-and-violence-are-primary-causes-hunger-and-famine-special-rapporteur-right.

35 Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine, Cork University Press, 1997, 7.

36 Mrinal Sen, “Baishey Shravana and the Great Famine of 1943,” in Views on Cinema. Ishan Publication, 1977. 136.

37 Pauline Kael, “A Dream of Women,” in When the Lights Go Down, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980, 72.

38 Susan Sontag, On Photography, Penguin Books, 1979, 15.

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Bhasha Mandal, « Skeletons of War: Representation of the Second World War and 1943 Famine in Bengali Cinema »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], vol.23-n°59 | 2025, mis en ligne le 12 mai 2025, consulté le 12 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/16857

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Bhasha Mandal



Bhasha Mandal is a PhD scholar at the Department of English at Visva Bharati University after completing her graduation and post-graduation from Jadavpur University. Her academic areas of interest include children’s literature, Indian English literature, Bengali literature, queer literature, fantasy, popular culture, and cinema. She has presented the paper “Troublemakers of Bengali Children’s Literature: Resistance to Punishment from Protest to Parody” at the 2022 conference Narratives of Criminality, Punishment & Social Justice in Children’s and Young Adult Literature.

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