Hunger: Some Representations of the 1943 Bengal Famine

226 The Writer’s Feast HUNGER Supriya Chaudhuri T English word food the famine of 1943, and it signalled a moment when common people suddenly became aware of the difference between food— as a marketable commodity—and rice, as something to be eaten. It seems appropriate to end a volume largely devoted to rich evocations of the presence its absence. Sometimes, as in the recorded accounts of the 1943–44 shops, hoarded in warehouses, but inaccessible to millions of dying people. This essay will look at some literary and cinematic representations of this cruel historical paradox, examining how it breaks open the logic of realist narrative and produces its own insoluble textual tensions. The literature of food is commonly a literature of plenitude, employing markers of excess and satiety to of repletion and plenitude carry within them texts of privation and want. The literature of hunger is the obverse to the literature of food; it speaks of lack rather than plenty, and the representational Hunger 227 burden carried by the artist in such times of crisis places the material world with its naturalised ‘truths’ itself in doubt. ascharjya bhater gandha: ascharjya bhater gandha ratrir akashe kara jeno ajo bhat randhe bhat bade, bhat khay. ar amra shara rat jege achhi ascharjya bhater gandhe prarthanay, shara rat. The strange aroma of rice in the night sky It seems that some still cook rice, Still serve it, eat it. And we are awake, all night With the strange aroma of rice, In supplication, all night.1 In the material world that we inhabit, those who eat and those who starve live in the same moment. The paradox that I shall Chattopadhyay’s poem: the simultaneity of presence and absence, not to be understood as a postmodernist trope, but as a material contradiction between rice and hunger. In the poem, the space of smell of rice, as it rises from the cooking-pot to the night sky, but traditionally described as half the meal (ghranena ardhabhojanam), is ironically evoked in all its richness and reach to become a those who eat and those who do not. The admirable restraint and poet offers a lesson, we may say, in representational technique: it retains the paradox while at the same time breaking it open. 228 The Writer’s Feast This poem was published in 1965, at a time when food shortages led to unrest and street riots in the Calcutta of my own childhood. as well, and it is to one of these that I wish to turn. The 1943 panchasher manvantar in of historical study, literary representation and economic analysis. No writer who lived through that period failed to comment on the devastation of those years—between 1942 and 1945—when around four million men, women and children died of starvation government was busily procuring rice, there was a good harvest in 1942 and a moderate one in 1943. I shall not rehearse the variety of explanations for this calamity—or crime—familiar to us from the work of modern economists and historians including Amartya Sen and Paul Greenough: the effects of wartime hoarding and policies, aimed at preventing the Japanese from securing their advance westwards from Singapore and effectively destroying the spot disease; the cyclone; inequality in income and entitlement; system.2 As contemporary observers and later historians pointed was avoided in administrative correspondence.3 other, more long-term factors lay behind the extreme vulnerability These include an agricultural decline leading to the increasing pauperisation of the peasantry and their growing burden of debt; so delicate was the balance between subsistence and starvation that the slightest imbalance could produce a famine.4 Once Japan enemy advances, thus hindering the movement of supplies, the fear of invasion led to panic-stricken hoarding and massive price rises in early 1943. The weaker sections of the population inevitably suffered most: as Greenough comments, ‘patterns of Hunger 229 abandonment began to emerge, marked by the snapping of moral and economic bonds upon which rural society had hitherto been erected’.5 I would like to look at one or two literary and cinematic representations of this event, each marked by the paradox with which I began. In each, this leads to a tension between what can be represented and what cannot, a hunger which is also a hunger in 1947, ‘Chhiniye khayeni keno?’ [Why didn’t they take the food by force?’]. In the story, Jogi, the bandit-turned-householder who holds forth to the narrator about the famine, comments on the entry of the English word food most people, he suggests, this lexical acquisition indicated the difference between food as a category, a collection of marketable commodities, and the rice and vegetables that people ate, since up the daily meal by the name of its principal ingredient as cooked reach poor people’s mouths, but simply change warehouses for money—that’s what food is’, says Jogi. All that people needed to survive on, he says, was rice: so why didn’t they take it by force? This is the question (chhiniye khayeni keno?) that provides the title the background of perhaps the most decisive event to mould him as a writer—and I do not except the Tebhaga movement, which also cast its literary shadows, for example in Haraner Natjamai and the other stories in Chhoto Bado (1948). ‘Chhiniye khayeni keno?’ was published in 1947, in a collection called Khatiyan had already devoted many of the stories in the preceding year’s collection, Aj Kal Porshur Galpo, including the title narrative, to the famine of 1943. The harsh, sometimes polemical realism of these stories can be seen to evidence a kind of representational anxiety, a response, I would suggest, to the pressure of a real event that exceeds pushes this struggle for representational common sense, as we 230 The Writer’s Feast might describe it, to the edge of a question that is put to history: why do people starve if there is food before them? The 1943 famine is above all the event that has raised this question, asked at the time by Western observers as well as somewhat distanced Indians, and repeated subsequently by sociologists, economists and historians trying to come to terms with the cruelty of the contradiction that history has so faithfully recorded: food in the warehouses, deaths on the streets.6 It was reported at the time that Nehru had asked this question, and the story offers the ex-bandit Jogi’s response, in the form of a rambling monologue framed by the almost silent narrator’s observation of his setting: the hut in which they sit, Jogi’s posture, his wife’s pregnancy, the brief indications of how she survived the famine, her serving the guest and its answer—or what is presented as Jogi’s answer, for as the narrator tells him, ‘I know what the babus say, Jogi, but what do you say?’ THE NATURE OF HUNGER The theory Jogi offers is rooted in the nature of hunger itself: the hungry are weak, their physical enfeeblement makes them passive and unresponsive, unable to seek their own recourse. Jogi considers, and dismisses with sarcastic humour, the various were accustomed to starvation (he asks, were they accustomed to death?); that the common people were fatalists, accepting death as their lot (he asks, did they not try to avert calamity if they could at other times?); that they were law-abiding (he says, if you knew you would be fed in prison, you’d try to go there). Only he knows the true reason why people did not resist, he says, and his explanation makes hunger a self-perpetuating phenomenon, draining the body of its will to life. The hungry body eats itself. The narrative presents him not only as a survivor, but as a curious experimenter with history, restlessly seeking an answer to the mystery that surrounds him, the enigma of a population unresisting of its own end. He even attempts to form a gang that will tour the countryside looting and redistributing grain, but his efforts are unsuccessful; he joins the band of the hungry at a relief Hunger 231 kitchen, hoping to organise them so that they protest against the watering of their gruel and the diversion of provisions meant for them. When he manages to ensure that their supplies are not stolen and they are properly fed for a few days, they speak of a few days before leading a revolt, and soon the supplies dry up, the watery gruel reappears, and the inmates return to a condition of listless passivity. What Jogi observes, what he reports from his experience of the relief camps with their starving men and their women who seek to offer their emaciated bodies in return for food, is like the record of a survivor of the Holocaust, also a strictly contemporary event. And what puzzles him is what might equally puzzle a latter-day student of this other history: the relative passivity, even connivance in their own destruction, of a large populace which submits when resistance could not materially worsen their chances of survival (though, we may note, it might not improve those chances either). government of the time in the deaths of four million people in a man-made famine, to the culpability of Hitler and the Nazis in the murder of six million Jews: indeed there are some parallels, both, we may say, weigh human conscience with the same kind of weight: the insolubility of a moral problem that presents itself as a physical contradiction. Whether or not Jogi’s answer is the correct one, the story offers a corrective to the easy metaphorical equation between hunger and desire, between the physical effects of starvation and disease and its symbolic expressions. In fact there were some incidents of looting and rioting, though limited and unfruitful given the scale of the disaster; the shops were well-guarded, there were troops in abundance, and in the countryside, where the supplysystem had almost completely collapsed, large stocks of grain had disappeared. Jogi does not take recourse to these larger forms desperate form of armed resistance or opportunistic self-help, his explanation, such as it is, is rooted in the material difference of hunger and desire: hunger eats the self, desire eats the other. Life confuses us, for we must ingest the world in order to live in it, and so long as the body is adequately fed, food may seem a pleasurable 232 The Writer’s Feast liminal point where the body crosses into the exhaustion and physical depletion of hunger, the body is its own food, hunger consumes it like another, and in so doing it estranges and alienates the self, so that it appears to have no worldly recourse. Students of Greek mythology may recall how that moment is terrifyingly constructed in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the impious Erysichthon, punished by the visitation of Famine, begins by eating voraciously and even prostituting his daughter to supply his wants (in the aetiological myth, this is the origin of prostitution). Initially food is external to the protagonist, so that Ovid can write, ‘cibus omnis in illo/ causa cibi est, semperque cause of food, and ever does he become empty by eating’); but in the end he is his own food: ‘ipse suos artus lacerans divellere morsu/ coepit et infelix minuendo corpus alebat’ (VIII. 877–8: ‘the wretched man began to tear his limbs and rend them apart with under the sign of myth, Erysichthon is Hunger as much as he earlier devoted to consuming the goods of the world. He is in that he is not them, he is the hunger that eats them up. class and caste boundaries, of sexual morality and of the desolation and madness that attends the breaking up of families and loss of homes and livelihoods. Extraordinary treatments of these themes are to be found in Aj Kal Porshur Galpo and Namuna, and in both, we should note (as in ‘Chhiniye khayeni keno?’) the trade or to re-assimilate the woman whose body has been sold for food; even when society grumbles, individuals recognise the need that impels prostitution, and accept the women when they return. Hunger 233 as I have already suggested, by a hunger for explanation which supply. At a later period, beyond the late ’forties, even the tools social reality. The largely silent presence of the narrator in many of these stories, the insistent questioning of the characters, urged to provide answers from their own experience to the riddles of polemical. In ‘Chhiniye khayeni keno?’ the speaker Jogi is not just a participant in an event he can barely comprehend, he is engaged in a kind of retrospective quarrel with it, a struggle to which the narrator is witness. The ‘real’, then, is not just out there, the simple fact of what happened in history: it is simultaneously what is not out there, what did not happen. The famine of 1943 produced a bitter harvest of responses in literature and art, and inaugurated a distinctive social-realist phase play, Nabanna [‘Harvest’, 1944], novel Manvantar [‘Famine’, 1944], Gopal Haldar’s Terosha Panchas So Many Hungers (1947). Its shadow fell on the modernism of the Calcutta Group of artists, for whom the task of documenting the famine became a central preoccupation. Few will forget the searing images of emaciated human bodies and hungry cattle, constituted by the famine and the events surrounding it (it migrations that accompanied the Partition of India in 1947). These events demanded, for those who lived through them, the sobering, ‘truthful’, witness of social realism: yet at the same time, they lay beyond the reach of realism, beyond the comforting illusion of representational adequacy that the ideology of realism Ashani Sanket by Satyajit Ray, is no more than one instance of a continuing, 234 The Writer’s Feast unresolved engagement with the material facts of recent history 1980]. Akaler Sandhane [‘In Search of Famine’, Ashani Sanket is not simply a novel about the 1943 famine. It superstition and simplicity of lower-caste village folk. At the same time, it offers a symbolic representation of his wife, Ananga, as a type of Lakshmi, the goddess of household prosperity ironically placed against a backdrop of dearth. The novel begins with a wealth of descriptions of food, plentiful in the village to which Gangacharan and his wife have come. Ananga’s delight in this relatively innocent forms of greed: they have experienced much hardship in the past, and the plenty of the present, exploited for all it can yield, results in the kind of complacence that takes Ananga this background that we have the incidents of Gangacharan composite entity pays a second visit to their house, when times are harder, and is again served a meal by Ananga, this time a less in the novel by the meals they eat, though as persons they are thoroughly confused, with a carelessness that is characteristic of Without these images of plenty, the novel would not be, as it is, a novel of dearth: without Ananga as Lakshmi, there could not composition of these elements is unerring: and it is for this reason Hunger 235 novel. It is a reading, moreover, that grounds itself unequivocally in its chosen cinematic medium, in the expressive language of visual image, frame, scene and episode. of women’s saris (especially those of Ananga and Chutki, the the village path to the brick-kiln where Jadu-pora awaits her), and Ashani Sanket was only Kanchenjungha (1962), though the last section of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1968) also features a highly deliberate use of colour. The generally muted, subdued tones of Kanchenjungha, dominated by the grey of the swirling mountain mist, the brown of Ashok’s shabby jacket, and even elegiac study of human relationships. These tones merge E parabashe rabe ke’ [‘Who would remain in exile’] and the elusive mountain, bathed in the red and gold of sunset, is glimpsed at last. THE COLOURS OF LIFE The vivid palette of Ashani Sanket contrasts strikingly with the pleasure in being able to exact payment in kind from the village progresses and times become harder, colour is left stranded on there were of a withered, devastated agricultural landscape, the scene of a natural disaster like a drought or a cyclone, we have the ripeness 236 The Writer’s Feast natural riches (and the material wealth of the grain merchant) with the increasing hardship of the rural poor brings out—as the 1943 famine, a famine caused not by natural catastrophe but by the failure of human agency. Unbearably, the images on the screen remind us that this famine in a sense superimposed dearth upon plenty, that it converted the colours of life to the colours of death, like the earthy hues of the yam Chutki and Ananga dig up, juxtaposed with the red blood of the man who pursues them and blue of the shirt Jadu-pora (Nani Ganguly) wears as he waits by the brick-kiln for Chutki. Within this visual abundance, Ray deliberately introduces the classic famine images of starving women asking for the starchwater (phyan) that is left over after the rice has been cooked, as colour has been bleached out (as in Zainal Abedin’s sketches). The scene at Ananga’s threshold captures—both visually and in terms of sound—the most unforgettable of the memories that haunted at and must ask Kapalibou to interpret), we have the classic ‘ektu phyan dao ma’ [‘Give me a little gruel, mother’] which Ray must have heard himself in Calcutta in 1943, when he was 22 years old. It is an image composed in bloodless, ghostly tones of greyishwhite and black, a proleptic vision of what awaits Ananga as Lakshmi.7 rambling and confused narrative into an inexorable progression going hungry because she has given her own food to the guest. Her hospitality is set against the harsh realities of rural society, realities that demand a precise understanding of caste, work and history. The protagonist Gangacharan is from the start ‘working’ his caste status for all that it will bring. He settles in a low-caste all the traditional activities of the priestly caste—ritual worship, Hunger 237 teaching, curing. For a time he eats well, but history snatches the food away from him, and everything changes. This point more famous work Pather Panchali [‘Song of the Road’, 1928] is also an examination of the decay of traditional professions and livelihoods. Ray subjects Gangacharan’s fate to a searching, though not obtrusive, socialist critique, making him say at one point that it is ‘wrong’ that they eat and do not produce food, while the peasants dead body, ignoring caste prohibitions. This act, traditionally the to savage parody in Sadgati story by Premchand] but here it draws only a profound awareness behind—as it does Harihar in Pather Panchali. The famine of 1943 was above all the event that transformed the caste hierarchies of impoverished village elites, into the city to seek work amidst the faceless urban masses. The loosening of caste and social ties in urban settings, the obliteration even of family structures of domination and control, become natural subjects for modernist Ashani Sanket going to the city. The only person who actually dies of hunger in Ashani Sanket is that of the poor, the oppressed, and women—translates almost immediately into the loss of entitlement to food. Ananga and polarised at opposite ends of the scale of entitlement. Yet if food and famine are the two signs under which the text must be read, the opposition between the two conceals an unstated dependence. In the context of dearth, food for one means starvation for another. The illusion that the earth can feed us all, an illusion that we cling to in times of plenty, has the effect of obscuring the real structures The Writer’s Feast 238 Yet it is not simply social hierarchy that regulates entitlement: hierarchies collapse, social norms dissolve. Chutki saves herself by selling her body, while Ananga and Gangacharan are forced to recognise the irrelevance of their caste status to survival. Ashani Sanket It records, rather, the terrible inevitability of a chain of events that later poem, it rests on a paradox. That paradox is what we might term the impossibility of famine. While the smell of rice rises to the sky, how can human beings go hungry? Poverty and famines had long been known in India: every peasant family was aware of the fragile boundary that distinguished survival from starvation. event that destroyed for ever any belief in economic logic or social law. It seemed to be an event beyond representation, placing an unanswerable question at the heart of history. Were food and famine in fact opposed, contrasted terms, or were they, rather, the same term, understood differently? To ask this question was not simply to draw attention to the logic of scarcity that denied one person food to feed another. It was also to ask how human beings could let this happen to themselves: how human societies could at all tolerate, in large numbers, their own suffering and destruction. the Nazi Holocaust: not because they lacked separate historical explanations, but because, in an important sense, they exceeded explanation, were beyond recourse. This is not to mystify or extenuate the facts of history. It is simply to return, as hunger, injustice and murder make us return, to the material support that our moral sense requires but cannot command. Birendra Samagra [Works], vol.1, ed. Pulak 1 translation. Hunger 2 3 4 5 6 7 239 See Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivations 6 and Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–44 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Sen argued forcefully that the problem was caused not by inadequate harvests but by deliberate withholding of rice from the market and putting it out of the reach of poorer consumers. An early account is to be found in Kali Charan Ghosh, Famines in Bengal, 1770–1943 (Calcutta: Indian Associated Publishing Co., 1944). Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivations W. R. Aykroyd, The Conquest of Famine (London: 1974), p. 78. Famines in India: A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India 1860–1965 2nd Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change behind the phenomenon of a modern famine. Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–44 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 138. Jean Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 48–50, analyse the gender bias in entitlement to food. Power, Protest and Participation: Local Elites and the Politics of Development in India (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 175–76. Two interesting studies of the iconographical association of women The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997), esp. chapter 4 and Parama Roy, ‘Women, Hunger and Famine: Women of India: Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods