Untitled

Volunteering for the Communist Party of India’s relief efforts, the prominent left-wing artist Chittaprosad extensively toured rural Bengal to document the devastation wreaked by the man-made Famine of 1943. As an extension of this documentation project, Chittaprosad travelled through parts of East Bengal in 1944—Cox’s bazaar, Munshiganj and Chittagong, and visited relief hospitals overflowing with hungry and diseased bodies. Thick, black lines crowd this lino print of starving children from Cox’s Bazaar (in present day Bangladesh). All three figures bear signs of extreme malnutrition—the boy appears to be showing early signs of elephantiasis on his lower legs, and a cut on his right calf seems to be shoddily bandaged. Their eyes would have haunted thousands of readers, who encountered narratives of the famine in cheaply printed Communist newspapers.