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Abstract

In this article, I interrogate the representation of bodies on the Indian home-front in 1943, the year of the Bengal Famine. I begin by examining letters Indian soldiers wrote to their families from Middle Eastern battlefronts, and analyse the empathic role of soldiers’ bodies as they imagined distant hunger. I then move on to study Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Ashani Sanket (Intimations of Thunder, 1944–1946), in which he imagines World War II as a predatory beast, feeding upon the bodies of Bengali villagers. While the first section of this paper focuses on the cultural history of the Bengal Famine recovered through wartime letters, the second section engages with literary criticism, analysing how hunger and its contexts influence form. I argue in this article that letter-writing and literature read alongside each other yield new layers of meaning to the experience of hunger in the homeland.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of War and Culture Studies on 27 Aug 2019, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17526272.2019.1644274.
Publisher Keywords:	Famine, Bengal, hunger, Bibhutibhushan, Churchill, Bengali novel, life-writing, letters
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D839 Post-war History, 1945 on D History General and Old World > DS Asia J Political Science > JA Political science (General) P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs > International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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