https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.042
“Feminisation of Famine”: Unearthing the Invisibility of Women in the 1943 Bengal Famine through Ela Sen’s The Darkening Days
NILANJANA BISWAS
Senior Research Fellow
Department of English, Central University of Pondicherry
ORCID: 0009-0003-1873-0482
Abstract: Indian colonial history was primarily faminogenic. The Bengal famine of 1943 is one of the innumerable famines that made its occurrence under the British colonial rule. The long accepted understanding that the famine of 1943 Bengal was a man-made one is common knowledge. However, contextualising the importance of looking into the gendered aspect of the Bengal famine is much needed, for unearthing the responsibility of the man or men who “made” the famine. Having said that, the paper shall culminate in an attempt to look at all the aspects of a feminogenic dysfunctional patriarchal society with its resource-controlling males such as- policy makers, colonial officials, landlords, cultivators, and heads of the domestic households who deliberately failed to, or declared their inability to feed those whose responsibility they have greedily taken. Therefore, the paper aims to look into the gendered experience of the 1943 Bengal famine with a specific focus on female solidarity and their collective resistance through the close reading of Ela Sen’s collection of short stories The Darkening Days (1944). Set against the backdrop of famine-ravaged colonial capital – Calcutta, the fictional narratives portrays the gendered horror of the famine. The scholarship provided by postcolonial feminist theory shall be employed to establish a theoretical framework, specifically focusing on the concept of Margaret Keller’s ‘feminisation of famine’, will be utilised to analyse the selected chapters. The paper shall be divided into seven interconnected sections, commencing with an introduction, followed by the analysis of five prose narratives and culminating with a suitable summation to support relevant claims.
Keywords: Hunger, Starvation,Female Solidarity, Famine Text, Motherhood, Sex Work and Female Resistance
Read Full Manuscript PDF