The vexed question of peasant passivity

There were few food riots during the Bengal famine of 1943; the reason for this passivity has often been the subject of scholarly debate, and is the central dilemma in many literary representations of the famine. Despite the radical sensibility of many of the writers of the Progressive Writers’ Association, their representation of peasant resistance is ambivalent, and muted by the competing allegiances within nationalist discourse at the time. At a time of explosive radical protest, which might have mobilized against an “artificial famine” in which millions starved to death, attention was focused, instead, on anti-colonial critique. The famine was held up as one more instance of British colonial misrule, rather than as an event that exposed inequitable fault lines within class, caste, gender and metropolitan or rural locations. Indeed, Bengal famine texts gesture towards a utopian post-independence horizon, where hunger and social injustice will not exist

Art · BENGAL · Caste · Colonialism · Development economics · Dilemma · Famine · Injustice · Literature · Nationalism · Peasant · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sensibility · Sociology · Tamil · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · South Asian Studies and Diaspora · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

• Negotiating caste-subaltern imaginations of the 1943 Bengal famine

  Open Access•Ram Krishna Ranjan•Third World Quarterly•2024

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