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

The Bengal Famine of 1943 remains one of the most callous yet underrepresented effects of the Second World War, devastating rural society in then undivided Bengal and resulting in more than three million deaths by starvation – a staggering toll when compared to the more direct military casualties of the war, which have consistently received greater attention in international media. For a long time, the standard Western response focused on natural disasters and other economic factors behind the famine, while completely denying or downplaying the British imperialist policies implemented to secure victory in the war, even at the expense of millions of Indians. However, recent historical analyses by authors such as Amartya Sen, Madhushree Mukherjee, and Janam Mukherjee have denounced this glossing over of the Empire’s war effort and exposed the truth behind the Bengal famine. This 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). It shows how the realistic filmmaking approach employed in Baishe Shravanaand Ashani Sanket is critiqued by the later film Akaler Sandhane, which is formatted as a metanarrative acting as a commentary on the impossibility of adequately representing great tragedies through art. Through the analysis of these films, the article also explores recent works of historical and political studies that analyse the nexus between the war, the British government, and the war-profiteering local industry, which played a crucial role in creating this man-made disaster. In particularly Madhushree Mukherjee’s book on the famine, titled Churchill’s Secret War, holds significant importance for this study which aims to examine the tragedy of the 1943 famine as a collateral of World War II.