A Refugee Camp in South Calcutta

Calcutta in the 1940s was flooded with people from rural Bengal, whose numbers grew exponentially following the Great Bengal Famine, and the country’s Partition. Families such as those in this work, A Refugee Camp in South Calcutta, would arrive in the city, which, however, had little to offer them. A majority of them were forced to beg on the streets, and ended up in refugee camps, which were squalid spaces with hardly any resource, a reality described in Sinha’s painting. People sleep or rest, barring a young nursing mother, surrounded by all the worldly possessions they are left with.