Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

On 2nd July, 1943, John Herbert, the Governor of Bengal, India, wrote to Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy of India, “I am sorry to have to trouble you with so dismal a picture” but “Bengal is rapidly approaching starvation.” In the margin of the letter, Linlithgow scribbled his scepticism, “I wonder how far he is right …” The degree of Linlithgow’s ignorance or indifference is staggering, for by December 1941, the price of rice in Bengal had risen 71%. By the end of July 1943, less than a month after Herbert’s letter, the poor in Bengal were in desperate search of food. By November, the Bengal countryside was utterly devastated. It is generally accepted now that 3.5 million people had starved to death. How was this catastrophe represented at the time? What were aesthetic consequences of the moral outrage of artists? In this paper I analyze the deployment of a revitalized realism to capture the unfolding catastrophe of the Bengal famine. By analyzing fictional and artistic representations of the disaster, I will further argue that in facing the unimaginable–the death of millions–artists had to repurpose and revolutionize the very modes of representation available to them in order both to accurately record the disaster and to communicate their outrage. This dual responsibility in art and in literary expression necessitated a radical break from the prevailing aesthetic forms. The burden of my argument is to show the inextricability of politics and aesthetics in the memorialization of this particular catastrophe.