Witnessing the famine: letters and photographs from the Second World War

Abstract

The 1943 Bengal Famine was a product of catastrophic colonial mismanagement during the Second World War, yet remains a largely unknown part of British history and marginalised in South Asian historiography. This paper investigates how hunger can be interpreted as a product of wartime violence. Instead of incendiaries falling on civilians, such as in London during the Blitz or the bombing of Dresden in 1945, this form of violence was slow and creeping, intensely embodied, and physically and emotionally depleting. It was devastating to experience, and utterly traumatic to witness. There were global witnesses to this atrocity as the city of Calcutta took on a truly international character during the Second World War. It was here that soldiers from across the British Empire, along with American troops, were gathering to fight the Japanese in Burma and other parts of Southeast Asia. What did these soldiers make of thousands of villagers, who walked miles from rural heartlands to reach Calcutta in the hope of obtaining food, begging for a little phyan or rice-starch, only to die on the streets? This paper will consider their letters and diaries, both Indian and British, to examine the nature of witnessing this atrocity. I will also consider Second World War photographs and how they can be productively read alongside soldiers’  letters and diaries. Furthermore, I will explore what it means to remember the Bengal Famine in the twenty-first century, and argue that it re-calibrates our current relationship between food and our emotions.