An excerpt from Chittaprosad’s Hungry Bengal

A painter, illustrator, and writer, Paritosh Sen (1918 – 2008) was part of the world of Indian art for over five decades. He grew up in Calcutta in 1930s and ‘40s belonging to a generation of artists who witnessed the suffering the city was put through during independence struggle and the Bengal famine of 1943. The figure in the drawing appears to be dazed from hunger—devoid of strength, he seems unable to even hold himself straight. Cats, crows and vultures populate the backdrop— scavenger animals which patiently await the death of the figure and others like him.

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.

Artists Chittaprosad and Zainul Abedin extensively documented the inhuman conditions of suffering in Bengal in the early 1940s, the adversity of its people gravely increased by the 1943 manmade Great Bengal Famine. In Abedin’s prints, such as the one on display, we are shown the miserable suffering of a starving people with no help, or hope, in sight. A figure—sitting hunched over with his head resting on his knees—is steeped in pathos and misery.

The desolation caused by the famine was not only physical sickness and death, but exhaustive psychological trauma amongst the survivors. Purna Shashi, sitting hunched over and bearing visible markers of starvation, portrays the suffering in her solemn, almost hazed expression. Dated mid-1944, this picture is from a period when the food shortage had ended, but diseases such as malaria continued to thrive in the sickly condition.

One by One paints a ghastly picture—surviving through the sufferance and death of your children—a lived reality for many survivors of the 1943 famine. Four figures of various ages are seen under a tree, while the dead body of the fifth, the youngest, lies motionless next to the mother. The title of the work hints at more deaths in the family’s future, where, one by one they succumb to hunger and sickness. Unlike the idealised shoshya shyamala (fertile green) depiction of Bengal, Ash’s famine paintings show a sickly ochre-tint.

An iconoclast who defied the artistic norms of Santiniketan, Baij created his art spontaneously, driven by intuition and energy and disregarding the norms and artistic standards accepted by the institution. Ramkinkar Baij (1906-80) paints a gruesome image of human suffering in this Untitled painting. Three vultures surround the carcass of a deceased person—shrivelled with skin sunken into bones, the corpse bears the signs of famine-affected undernourishment. Painted in grey with a splattering of red, the image evokes bleakness of the human condition. Not only is death a constant of the time, the horrifying visual on display symbolises a grotesque norm where dead are left on the streets to scavengers.

Chittaprosad’s sketches of the reality of the famine frequently appeared in newspapers run by the Communist Party of India (CPI) such as Janayuddha and People’s War (like this image). Images such as these played a crucial role in making visible the continued effects of the famine which included widespread diseases like malaria and pox even after the food shortage had begun to wane.

Twenty of Chittaprosad’s eyewitness sketches of the famine on scenes across the Midnapore district as well as the streets of Kolkata, were compiled as a book ‘Hungry Bengal’. Done in the mode of social realism, these sketches capture not only the physical effects of the famine but also provide a sense of the immense psychological trauma wreaked upon the population