Negotiating caste-subaltern imaginations of the 1943 Bengal famine: methodological underpinnings of a creative-collaborative practice

Abstract

The Bengal famine of 1943 is one of the most catastrophic and violent outcomes of British colonial rule in India. Recently, there has been a surge in understanding the famine from an anti-colonial perspective. However, the relation between the impact of the famine and caste-based subalternities has not received adequate attention. The immediate concerns that arise with the task of filling this gap are ethical-methodological and narrative: even from the lens of caste-subaltern consciousness, how does one arrive at and share stories of the famine, and can they ever be ‘recovered’ and ‘represented’? This paper narrates the story of fieldwork-filming, carried out as part of ongoing research in artistic practice, which attempts to understand and engage with caste-subaltern (especially Dalit) experiences of the Bengal famine of 1943 and to explore methodologically how these experiences can be creatively and collaboratively imagined and negotiated. The paper proposes that there is a need to shift away from ‘recovery’ and ‘representation’ of the ‘authentic’ caste-subaltern experiences of the famine and towards negotiated imagination. To illustrate and make a case for this shift, this paper provides a detailed description and analysis of methodological processes and their implications that emerged during the fieldwork-filming.

Keywords:

• Famine
• caste-subalterns
• dalits
• Bengal
• film
• artistic practice

Introduction

The connection between existing inequalities and adverse effects of any crisis or calamity seems obvious, and yet this aspect is remarkably little studied. The Bengal famine of 1943, in which close to three million people died,¹ is not an exception in that regard. Scholarly work has been carried out on peasant movements and struggles during the famine years (Greenough 1980; Bose 1990; Chatterjee 1986; Dutta 2021), but the question of caste-subalterns, especially that of Dalits,² is largely unaddressed. Whatever limited attention the connection between caste and the impact of famine has received is mainly in the realm of the analysis of relief work and literary representation.³ While there exists work on the famine from the perspective of class, it is difficult to find academic literature that directly engages with the social, political and economic aspects of caste and its bearing on the differentiated outcomes of famine. Foregrounding the relation between the impact of the famine and caste-based subalternities thus becomes an important and urgent task. However, this task has an ethical-methodological and narrative concern: even through the lens of ­caste-subaltern consciousness, how does one arrive at and share stories of the famine, and can they ever be ‘recovered’ and ‘represented’? This paper has emerged from ongoing research in artistic practice that centres creative-collaborative practice as an ethical-methodological mode. Moreover, it engages with caste-subalterns, specifically Dalits, and their experiences of the Bengal famine of 1943, and how that can be creatively imagined and negotiated with the community. While acknowledging that Indigenous communities and other marginalised groups were also disproportionately affected, based on gender, sexuality, disability, age, etc., all of which remain understudied, this paper limits its scope primarily to caste-subalterns’, specifically Dalits’, experiences of the famine.

I draw, in particular, from the fieldwork-filming I conducted in the West Midnapore district in the year 2019. Two local practitioners of Patchitra tradition (scroll paintings accompanied with songs), Manu Chitrakar and Sonali Chitrakar, were my creative collaborators during the fieldwork-filming. I argue for the need to foreground caste-subaltern experiences of the famine but concomitantly propose that there is a need to shift away from ‘recovery’ and ‘representation’ of subalterns’ ‘authentic’ experiences of the famine and towards ‘negotiated imagination’. Furthermore, I propose that creative-collaborative practices, as a methodological approach, have much to offer to famine studies.

The Bengal famine of 1943: causality and artistic responses

In recent years, many scholars have turned their focus to understanding the role of the colonial state, and especially British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in engendering the famine (see Mukerjee 2010; Islam and Zisan 2021; Tharoor 2017). Recording how colonial policies and negligence and, more importantly, Churchill’s racial worldview and Malthusian ideas caused the Bengal famine, is an important addition to the famine scholarship. However, according to Janam Mukherjee (2016), focusing solely on this kind of nationalist historiography can elide certain complexities of the Bengal famine. He claims that

‘[the Bengal famine] is not simply the story of one bigoted and arrogant colonial potentate starving a population of rustic brown folks into submission. It is rather a deep historical story involving complex chronologies of inequality, power and impunity’.

It is in this context that he proposes four axes – colonialism, war, capitalist profiteering and existing inequalities – by which to study the Bengal famine. Since the thrust of this paper is to foreground caste-subalterns’ experiences of the famine, it is worthwhile to explore the fourth axis – existing inequalities.

Sen (1981) demonstrated that famine stems not from agrarian crises but rather economic, social and political crises. ‘Entitlement relations’, according to Sen, should be the central consideration in studying the reasons behind why any particular group or individual suffers from starvation or not. There are reports of acute hardship and even starvation in rural areas since 1934, and this primarily had to do with entitlement relations. The conditions of sharecroppers and landless labourers were worsening because, by the end of the 1940s, many small tenants had lost their lands to Bengali moneylenders (Mukherjee 2016). To meet basic needs and to buy essential supplies for farming, people on the lowest rung of the society would often take loans from informal credit markets. In the absence of any protection by law and custom, peasants with small land holdings and landless labourers were then forced to forfeit their assets to wealthy Bengalis when they could not repay their loans. The pauperisation of peasants and landless labourers, and rigid structures of caste and class in rural Bengal that preceded the famine, meant that some people were more vulnerable than others because of their social, economic and political standing in society. Those with the least endowments suffered the most. The famine brutally exposed the fault lines of caste, class and gender in Bengal, but neither the ‘bhadralok’ (Bengali elite) nor the leaders of the nationalist movement paid enough attention to these fault lines (Kaur 2014).

The famine and the crisis-ridden years of the 1940s gave rise to a vast amount of compelling art in Bengal. Visual artists, such as Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915–1978), Zainul Abedin (1917–1976), Govardhan Ash (1907–1996), Somnath Hore (1921–2006), Sunil Janah (1918–2012) and Gopal Ghose (1930–1980), are known for their visual representations of the appalling ground-reality of Bengal in the wake of the famine. Influenced by Marxist-communist ideology, these visual artists were interested in generating socially responsive content. Some of these artists were directly or indirectly involved with the Communist Party; moreover, they published sketches and photographs regularly in the Communist Party’s periodicals, Janayuddha and People’s War (Majumdar n.d.).

These artists departed from the nationalist fervour and Bengal School Gharana (tradition), which were more interested in the project of revitalisation of Indian cultural history and spirituality. Moreover, in the Bengal School, the protest against colonialism, if it was present at all, had more of an academic and aesthetic nature than a political one.⁴ Contrary to the Bengal School, artists like Chittoprasad, Zainul and Somnath privileged the ‘socially concerned and politically charged ‘documenting’ function of art over […] Bengal School gharana’. Their artistic practice was rooted in the desire to record the working-class Bengali’s suffering; for them, the function of art was to capture the exploitation and coercions by both the colonial state and the elite Bengalis (Majumdar n.d.). Hungry Bengal written as a textual and visual record of Chittoprasad’s travel through the famine-stricken district of Midnapore, captures this sentiment quite well.

Together with Chittoprasad, Zainul Abedin also invoked critical realism in his sketches. Majumdar (n.d.) writes: ‘Zainul Abedin in his harsh images of the urban destitute visualized in the most rudimentary starkness of black ink employed by dry-brush technique successfully did away with tonal softness usually associated with romantic view of life’. Zainul’s series of drawings depicting what he witnessed on the streets of Calcutta still serve as an archive of the event; moreover, they are evidence of an artist’s attempt to document the horrors of the famine in a way that expunged art of its mythic, classicised and lyrical qualities (Malik 2011). Along with Zainul and Chittoprasad, Sunil Janah’s photographic work on the famine also provides detailed studies on dislocated and suffering families. Several communist newspapers across the world republished his photographs, which informed the rest of the world about the true scale of the famine.

Contrary to works in literature which were either motivated by the exigencies of the nationalist politics of the time or, in some cases, ambivalent about choosing between peasant suffering and resistance and nationalist discourse (Kaur 2014), left-leaning visual artists like Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, Zainul Abedin and Sunil Janah were producing a different kind of artistic mode, which was foregrounding the sufferings of the people on the margins. These artists saw their art as resistance to the existing structures of inequality and deprivation, irrespective of their source – colonial or domestic (Majumdar n.d.). However praiseworthy their efforts were, the question of caste does not find space in their work. While there are overlaps between caste and class, the two cannot be equated. The division of labour resulting from the ‘caste system’ is not based on economic divisions. Rather, it is a rigid hierarchy based on the dogma of predestination and is rooted in Hinduism.⁵ My other concern regarding the responses of these artists has to do with the methodological question. These artists responded based on what they witnessed and their interpretation of the events; the process was non-dialogical. I do not argue for all artistic work to be community-based and dialogical. However, a case can be made that if they had been caste-subaltern artists or if the process had been dialogical, the caste question would have featured more prominently in their work.

Situating fieldwork-filming: Midnapore, West Bengal as place

The paradox that defines West Bengal is that it is one of the few states in India where leftist political parties, led primarily by the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPM), formed the government for seven consecutive terms (1977–2011). Furthermore, the state has also produced many prominent subaltern scholars yet, despite this, it has seen a virtual absence of caste-based subaltern politics. Guha (2017, 27–28) argues that

under the impact of an exceptionally long Left regime, the field of political contestation was structured and configured in a manner that the dominant paradigm of class suppressed all community affiliations, giving the appearance that the caste question had already been resolved in post-colonial West Bengal.

Bandyopadhyay (2014) argues that under the Left regime, caste was subsumed by class because of the twin success, however limited, of land reforms and implementing local governance in West Bengal. Despite the party line of the Left regime on the matter of caste, many studies have shown that there is an overrepresentation of Dalits as landless farmers, and that the caste-based division of labour and discrimination persists (Roy 2012).

My decision to carry out my fieldwork in the Pingla Block of West Midnapore district in West Bengal was a function of my familiarity with the language, area and local people who could help me in my research. It also had to do with the fact that West Midnapore was one of the most affected areas during the famine years. Moreover, the district has a long history of oral tradition in the form of Patchitra and Patua songs. The word ‘Pat’ means cloth, and ‘Chitra’ refers to painting. The Patchitra tradition is carried forth by Chitrakars, also known as Patuas. Hindu mythological stories and folklore from the region are painted on long scrolls, and the performance involves the simultaneous singing/recitation and scrolling of the images to narrate a story. The songs that accompany these scrolls are called Pater Gaan, and they are generally passed down orally to subsequent generations. Practising Chitrakars is perceived to be somewhere between religions (Hauser 2002). On the one hand, they depict Hindu mythological and religious stories in their paintings and performances, celebrate Hindu festivities, and on occasions also worship some Hindu gods. On the other hand, they believe in Islam and identify themselves as Muslims. It is also common for these Chitrakars to have Hindu names; in the same family, people can have Hindu or Muslim names. In some districts they are recognised as Dalits, and in others they are considered people belonging to Muslim OBCs (Other Backward Classes).⁶ In my interactions with Chitrakars in Naya Gaon (a village comprising mostly Chitrakars, in the Pingla block of West Midnapore district), some indicated that their ancestors had converted to Islam four or five centuries back to escape the atrocities of the caste system. Islam does not recognise castes, but it has been observed and discussed by scholars that concepts of purity, pollution and segregation, integral to the logic of the Hindu caste system, do exist among Muslim groups (Mines 1972; Ahmad and Chakravarti 1981). It is in this context that some state governments in India have started categorising Muslims along caste lines. Unlike some other places where Chitrakars or Patuas are considered Dalits, Chitrakars in Naya Gaon are categorised as OBC Muslims by the state government.

Methodology in the fieldwork filming

The double gesture of collaborative-action research leading to transformative change – for instance, the production of co-generative knowledge – is central to subaltern methodologies, and I drew heavily from this formulation in my fieldwork-filming. Ó Laoire (2014, 738) writes that

rather than being the passive collaborator in action research, the participant as social actor can appropriate the research agenda, steer it in novel and unforeseen directions and demonstrate agency and ownership. A careful consideration of subalternity in action research, therefore, has the potential to ensure a more dialectic, truthful, and transformative process of interaction and exchange between researcher(s) and participant(s).

There are inherent contradictions, incommensurabilities and dilemmas involved in an approach like this, which I discuss later in this paper, but its strengths lie in the fact that it calls for a creation of sites, even if it is contestatory, where subaltern agency is acknowledged and acted upon to co-construct subjective truths. The method adopted in the fieldwork-filming reflected this approach.⁷ Working closely with Manu and Sonali Chitrakar, practitioners of the Patchitra tradition, and the community during the fieldwork-filming was my way of staging an attempt to collaborate and co-create. My initial impulse was to cover as many Dalit villages as possible to collect oral history narratives on the famine. After a few visits to Dalit villages in the surrounding area and in my discussions with Manu Chitrakar and Sonali Chitrakar, it became clear that it was better to focus on two Dalit villages. They suggested the names of two Dalit villages based on their familiarity with people inhabiting these villages and geographical proximity to Naya Gaon. Considering that my research is motivated more by artistic and methodological explorations, as opposed to being an expansive oral history project, the decision to focus on just two villages afforded me with the opportunity to have a careful and nuanced engagement with the communities, Chitrakars and methodologies. Below is a step-by-step description of the process that was followed during the fieldwork-filming.

The first step was visits by me and one Chitrakar to a Dalit village to have unstructured conversations on, amongst many other topics, the famine and its memories, their worldviews, Dalit politics and mobilisations, and how they assess their past, present and future in relation to the experience of either the famine of 1943 or other famine-like situations that have occurred in the region post-independence. After this, there were discussions between me and the Chitrakar, with a focus on sharing our notes from the visits and our interpretations of the conversations that unfolded during our visits, negotiating and arriving at a storyline to be sketched (10–12 frames) by the Chitrakar. This was followed by going back to the village with the Chitrakar, where we showed the sketches to the villagers and sought their feedback. After returning from the villages, the next task was to incorporate the suggestions given by the community members, colour the sketches and write an accompanying song (finalising them as Patchitra) by the Chitrakar. The final step involved going back to the village, where the Chitrakar performed.

All three occasions (the collection of stories, seeking feedback on sketches and the final performance) extended beyond their intended purpose, in the sense that they almost became prompts for multi-directional conversations between the Chitrakars, the community members and me. With regard to engagement with the community members, the focus was not on gathering individual life histories. Creating collective moments, in the form of unstructured group conversations, on all three occasions was one way of managing the time constraints (of both the researchers and the community members). But more than that, it allowed multiple registers of Dalit experiences of both the famine and their current predicaments to emerge.

I also did life history interviews with both Manu Chitrakar and Sonali Chitrakar. In these interviews, I focused on how they see their practice; how they view their own subalternity in general and also in relation to Dalits; what they think of the research I am undertaking; and how they perceive their role in this research. Life story interviews with both Chitrakars enabled meditation on questions of subalternity, co-generative knowledge production, artistic negotiation and questions of representation.

Working closely with Manu Chitrakar and Sonali Chitrakar and a particular insistence on storytelling and its processes was, to a degree, inspired by Sium and Ritskes’ (2013) idea that storytelling, if conceived as agentic and participatory, has immense subversive potential. They argue that storytellers, especially in Indigenous communities, have always been a resisting and subversive force against colonial violence and that they have maintained and sustained their ways of being and knowing through participatory mediums. They write that ‘the role of the storyteller is central to the exercise of agency and renewal. Stories are not only agentic and individual, but they are communal sharings that bind communities together spiritually and relationally’ (Sium and Ritskes 2013, v). I also had to pay special attention to visuals in my fieldwork-filming, given their importance in the Patchitra tradition and my broader research.

There are several examples of methodological innovations and imaginaries in the fields of ethnography and anthropology that mobilise images and image-making practices, as a method and a prompt, to understand and explore ideas, culture, phenomena, events, etc. (Marlow and Dunlop 2021; Walter and Albrecht 2019). However, there are few examples of visual collaborative methods in the study of disasters. Drawing on some examples of how collaborative visual methodologies (photo-elicitation, graphic novels, films) have been used in the study of disasters, Jauhola (2022) argues that when the visual is seen not merely as a product but also as a knowledge process, it can foreground different ontologies, ways of knowing and theorising. Furthermore, she argues that focusing on the process enables the emergence of multiple narratives and an ethos of active and continuous negotiation with those narratives. The approach I adopted in my fieldwork-filming reflects this thinking.

Scenes from fieldwork-filming

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. (Sontag 2013, 21)

As alluded to earlier, more than the recuperative caste-subaltern history undertaking, this project is essentially about methodological explorations of knowing that history. Here I present some scenes from fieldwork-filming that I think illustrate, or at least give a sense of, the processes, the nature of conversations and the creative-collaborative negotiations that took place. As much as these scenes illustrate the methodological processes and negotiation, and inherent complexities and contradictions within them, they also contain narratives about the famine. I also make a conscious choice not to engage in systematic narrative analysis (thematic coding, interpreting and analysing the narratives). I take cognisance of the fact that narrative analysis is a very useful method for understanding subjective constructions of identities, memory, oral history, and past, present and future. However, in keeping with the aim and limitations of the paper, I present some selected scenes ‘as they are’ to illustrate the methodological processes. Later, I offer a consolidated analysis of the methodological implications. To invoke Sontag, I allow the scenes to work for themselves.

We must tread carefully

During my fieldwork-filming, I stayed in the same village where Manu Chitrakar (M.C.) and Sonali Chitrakar (S.C.) live. Here is a glimpse of our conversation, where we are discussing how to conduct the fieldwork-filming:

Me: My idea was for the three of us to visit some Dalit villages together. We can talk to the people there about the famine, and it is possible that this leads us into some other topics as well. If we conduct these conversations together … and we listen to their stories … then maybe we can work on those stories once we come back. Is this something you have done before, or would be interested in doing?

M.C. and S.C.: I have never really composed a scroll on the Bengal famine. But I did compose one on the starvation deaths in Kalahandi in Odisha. I have done other social scrolls too. If we find some stories from the elderly people of the villages, then I will add my own imagination to those stories and create a narrative. Then we can compose a song out of it and divide it into scenes which will be drawn as the scroll. So, it can be done.

Me: There is one thing that I have had on my mind …. The research we are doing is about the Dalit experience of the famine. But I am not Dalit myself. I am from the OBCs. I don’t know about you …

M.C. and S.C.: We are also from the OBCs.

Me: Do you think we will be able to do justice to their stories? I do hesitate … because I don’t have that lived experience. I have other experiences, but not the same as them. So, I feel that we need to be careful. What do you feel about this?

M.C. and S.C.: Yes, that’s definitely something we have to bear in mind. Since we are OBCs and not Dalits, we have not lived the same life. To do something like this, we must tread carefully. That’s why we need to return to them with our scrolls. Once we have heard their stories, we must take them back to them.

The story that we heard from you will be turned into a scroll

I had gone with Manu Chitrakar to Hari Para, a Dalit village, to have unstructured conversations with community members. Here is an excerpt of Manu Chitrakar (M.C.)’s conversation with Kusum Ari (K.A.) and Gautam Ghorai (G.G.), who are residents of the village:

M.C.: Since you didn’t have any land, where did you get food from?

K.A.: We worked for the landowners and the rich folks. We worked hard in their houses. That’s how we got our food. We would eat rice and vegetables [points to wild plants nearby].

Other community members: It’s these vegetables she’s speaking of … which grow in the wild. The ones that you see growing there. They ate this part of the root here.

K.A.: We would clean these and boil these.

M.C.: How long do you think your community can sustain a famine-like situation if it were to happen now?

G.G: When it comes to people like us … let’s say I have 10 Katha [7200 square feet] land, three separate crops grow there. All three crops combined, roughly 12 quintals of paddy would grow there. That is all we have as earning for the whole family, for the whole year. But the landlord community has 5–10 Bigha [72,000–144,000 square feet] of land owned by their families. Similarly, they have stock as well. If they don’t grow anything in the next five years, they can manage; if there is a calamity like a drought or flood, it wouldn’t matter to them. Or at least, they have jobs, so they can always have a steady flow of cash. So, they can manage.

M.C.: Is there an awareness of Dalit as a term of self-assertion and political mobilisation?

G.G.: There were no TVs before. But now there are, and we are able to see the news. There seems to be an assault on our caste. We have come to know of caste-based violence … I am not naming any political parties … but in Mumbai, there was an attack on Dalits … we are also Dalits. Many of our own kids don’t know this vocabulary of ‘Dalits’. We know of it because we are part of an organisation.

M.C.: So, not everyone in the community is aware of this?

G.G.: No, they don’t know this vocabulary of ‘Dalit’. But there is an assault on the community. When it happened in Mumbai, Maharashtra [2018], there was nobody to stand in protest. The only people who protested were the Left Front. They organised a march from Delhi to Mumbai. To stage a protest. These days, there is so much talk of cow protection. For me, this is a caste issue. I should be the one to decide what I will eat. It should be up to my taste. But there are some people who want to use the law to ban my food habits. They want to dictate what I can eat and how I practise my religion. My caste is ‘hari’. My job is to dispose of carcasses. This is what my parents do. Your caste is ‘chitrakar’, so it is your job to make scrolls. Others might be Muslim, and they need to live by their own religion. In today’s political climate, there is an attempt to divide us based on communities.

Here is an excerpt from Sonali Chitrakar (S.C.)’s conversation with Durga Ghorai (D.G.), a resident of the Dalit village Chakdosam:

D.G.: I’ve heard from my father that he saw a lot of hardship in his life. He is no more. He would tell us that he had many difficulties in running the household. I have heard about a cyclone that came in 1985. I heard it from him; I have no memory of that time. The houses were all destroyed. There was nothing to eat.

S.C.: Do you know of anyone who passed away then?

D.G.: No, not personally.

S.C.: What else have you heard?

D.G.: That my father’s house was destroyed. We were very little then. They carried us in their arms and went to the houses that had survived the storm. They banged on doors, but nobody responded. They felt that the rain would make the house collapse, so they gathered the kids and ran for refuge. Those who had stronger houses did not respond. They were better off; they were landowners, and they were proud. They did not open their doors.

S.C.: The story that we heard from you will be turned into a scroll. I will put it to a rhythm. Perhaps not all of it, but some of it for sure. I will draw the frames and come back to you in a couple of days. If you want us to add something to the scroll, then you can tell us then. I will draw them based on what you have told me. But you can rectify my mistakes and give suggestions for improvement.

D.G.: Sure, we will.

They claim that they know all about it

After returning from Hari Para, Manu Chitrakar and I reflected on what happened and what stories to focus on for the sketching:

M.C.: The elderly woman we met knew a bit about it. But she was only five, so she didn’t remember much. The others who were younger did not have any direct experience. But they said they had heard all about it. They claim they know all about it. But they haven’t experienced what actually happened. They mentioned some events that took place in the 1960s. I know something like this happened in 1977 or may be 1972. I was also very young then, but that was when I came to know about what had happened. Even in my village, the patuas … would grow this long grass which bore these tiny fruits. They would collect those and extract the fruits and eat that in place of rice. Even I have done that, along with my mother and sisters. That is what I remember, and they were speaking of the same period. They don’t remember what happened in 1943, but they have heard about it.

Me: How do you generally convert a story into a scroll?

M.C.: When we work with a new historical story, we have to think of the narrative first. Like in the movies, we think of positive and negative characters. They all come together to make a good scroll. We make them integral to the narrative by adding stories about them. These we think of on our own. And the stories we hear from people, we set them into a narrative format.

Sonali Chitrakar had drawn some sketches based on the stories we heard in Chakdosam village. She showed me the sketches:

S.C.: First, I started with the setting – the buildings and the famine. Then, we come to the starvation. Then comes the old lady we met, along with her parents. Then we see her daughter-in-law. How many did that make? We have … one, two, three, … four frames already. We need one more. You will be the last frame.

Me: What about us?

S.C.: They had forgotten their suffering. Everything that happened in 1943 or 1985. They had no memory of it. But you came and reminded them and created new memories. That is what the frame will show. That you went with your cameras.

She’s asking me to go now because she can’t see

We returned to Hari Para with the sketches. Manu Chitrakar was showing the sketches to Gautam Ghorai to get his feedback. In the earlier meeting, Gautam Ghorai had shown a card that was given to him by a Dalit association. The card has a small picture of B.R. Ambedkar. Manu Chitrakar had included that card in one of the sketches but had not included the picture of B.R. Ambedkar.

M.C.: The card is too small. I don’t think we can make it that detailed. But I think in this one, not inside the card, but next to it … over here … I can place it as a sign …

Yes, that can be done …

G.G.: It will signal that Ambedkar is our guy …

For the people of our community, if we ever fall into trouble … if people from the elite castes attack us … we can use this card to fight back. We can take them to court.

Sonali Chitrakar and I returned to Chakdosam village with sketches. When we came here earlier, we spoke to Bindu Ghorai (B.G.). Here is an excerpt of the conversation between Sonali Chitrakar and Bindu Ghorai:

S.C.: These are the parents who could not feed their children. And here, we have a doctor who has come to see the people who are dying of disease. [The old lady points that she can’t see very well and that she is unwell.]

She’s asking me to go now because she can’t see ….

She is not able to see very well … what can she do … she’s asking me to go now …

What is wrong? Are you ill? Running a fever?

B.G.: Yes, I have a fever and a headache.

S.C.: Have you taken any medicines?

B.G.: No, it just started last night. When you came to call me, I wasn’t feeling very well. But I wanted to see your drawings.

S.C.: You didn’t take medicines then? Let me check if you still have a fever … it seems it is gone.

B.G.: This is how it is with old people.

S.C: Yes, it goes up and down.

B.G: Soon god will take me. I’ve already lost vision in this eye.

Hear the story

Sonali Chitrakar and I came to Chakdosam village with the scroll and accompanying song. She had written the song based on the stories she heard from the community members in this village. She sang while unfolding the scroll – frame by frame. Here is the shorter version of the song:

S.C.:

Hear the story of 1943

Hear the story of 1985

Aging parents to care for

No clothes to wear

Bodies covered in boils

Our hearts cannot bear

The stories of 1943

Hear the story of 1943

Upon us was a great famine

Not a single grain of food

People were left destitute

Foraged plants and husks of wheat

But not enough for all to eat

Such was 1943 … such was 1985

Burning hunger and disease to fight

They died of sheer neglect

For the doctors who needed to act

Refused to touch their body

Such was the story of 1943 …

Later when the cyclone struck

People ran amok

In search of shelter, they would knock

On the big doors

But no answers were received

Hear the story of 1943 …

Manu Chitrakar, his friend Raheem Chitrakar, and I visited Hari Para village with the scroll and accompanying song. He had written the song based on the stories he heard from the community members in this village. He sang while his friend Raheem Chitrakar unfolded the scroll, frame by frame. Here is the shorter version of the song:

M.C.:

In the year 1943

There came a famine

To hear the stories

Of those left behind

We took a trip …

In the year 1943

There came a famine

Among them was one person

Who spoke for all with compassion

Even though they weren’t born

At the time of the famine

In the year 1943 …

From an elderly grandmother

We hear the story of suffering

Boiled mash of foraged plants

Was all she had to eat

There came a great famine

In 1943 …

After Manu Chitrakar’s performance, people had gathered around him. They were closely examining the scroll. Most of them seemed appreciative of the scroll and the song. Lakshman Patra (L.P.), one of the villagers, offered his take on the scroll:

L.P.: The drawings are good. A couple of additions would make them better.

M.C.: Yes, please tell us …

L.P.: The threshing of the crop and the foraging of the kochu plants. Both should be represented.

M.C.: We do have a bit of both … here, we have the grandma with the plants … and here we have, not the threshing per se … but a small patch of land being farmed by all …

L.P.: The kochu plant should be prominent …

M.C.: Yes, they are in the song lyrics …

L.P.: This lady with the basket … she should be more frail …

M.C.: See, here are the rice farms and here are the wild plant that poor people had to eat …. We have tried to represent everything from the memories conveyed to us.

Methodological implications: shifting away from ‘recovery and representation’ and towards ‘negotiated imagination’

The very emergence of subaltern historiography testifies to the need for the history from below.⁸ However, the problem arises when we ask ourselves how we ‘recover’ that history. Quite early in the fieldwork-filming, I was talking to Manu Chitrakar one evening over tea and he remarked – ‘…how would you capture the Dalit experiences of the famine…I don’t think you will find any Dalit person who is that old…Dalits don’t live that long…’.

This remark sums up the difficulty in ‘recovering’ the Dalits’ experiences of the famine; effectively, there are no official archives to tap into, and most people who experienced the famine have already passed away. What we are left with is individual and collective memories and stories.⁹ Therefore, it is not so much about ‘recovering’ the ‘authentic history’ as it is about memories and stories – how do they remember; how do they construct their sense of the past, present and future; how do they articulate it, and how do they see themselves in relation to these memories and stories? The other important consideration is that of representation – how do we, as outside researchers, foreground and negotiate those memories and stories? Spivak (2013) drew attention to the inevitability of subaltern voices always being mediated by dominant systems of representation. Spivak’s cautionary approach, according to Ilan Kapoor (2014, 736), has three implications for researchers:

‘we have no unmediated access to subalternity’; ‘we cannot claim neutrality or objectivity in our research on or encounters with the subaltern’ and ‘to the extent that our representations of the subaltern say more about us than about the subaltern, we produce the subaltern, and in fact, we may well end up reinforcing their subalternity’.

Taking cognisance of and engaging with these complexities had a profound impact on the fieldwork-filming. Problems associated with the ‘recovery’ and ‘representation’ of the experiences of subalterns meant staging, in however limited a way, an ethical-methodological mode that strives for negotiated imagination. By negotiated imagination, I mean a continuous effort towards non-appropriative encounters with the community; storytelling in collaboration with the community, as opposed to ‘recovery’ and ‘representation’ of a ‘historical reality’; foregrounding the difficulties and contradictions in these endeavours and being truthful about the weaknesses of a project like this. This notion of negotiated imagination was premised on two fundamental approaches.

Firstly, my move to West Midnapore to carry out this project was not a result of an invitation from the people inhabiting in the area. I invited myself. What motivates and sustains a move like this – a deep-rooted ethnographic desire to discover and understand difference, and in turn, reproduce that difference; an ethical-moral-subaltern imperative to excavate ‘an-other’ history, which stands in opposition to its dominant counterpart; an archival fever disguised as memory work; a fetish to document; an obsession to chronicle times – changed, unchanged, or in flux; or an artistic itch that must be attended to? These might come across as rhetorical questions, but they shaped my thinking about the field and fieldwork. A field is not there to be recovered or discovered; contains difference but can be more than observer-observed and, most importantly, can be a site of creation and negotiation. And with regard to the fieldwork, it can be conceived as an action – initiating, facilitating, practising, and rehearsing acts of co-creating and storytelling. In other words, fieldwork can be a test of a method; a method that aims to already put in practice what is imagined. This notion of field and fieldwork necessitates a clear and constant articulation of the process, without which subaltern is a metaphor – a metaphor that is in service of the dominant. It is in the methods and the articulations of the methods that we open up ways to go beyond tokenism of ‘inclusion of subaltern history’. Mere inclusion of subaltern stories does not say much about the conditions under which stories have been ‘gathered’ and ‘included’. Moreover – inclusion to what end and who does it serve? Inclusion does not necessarily dissolve the ‘discoverer/observer’ and ‘source community/observed’ binary. For the meaning of inclusion to alter, the agency of storytelling needs to shift.

Storytelling, if conceived as agentic and participatory, is the second fundamental principle behind my idea of negotiated imagination. Stories and storytelling are not about validating or ascertaining historical truths. Stories and storytelling, according to Wilson (2017), are a process of making sense of our experiences and our interactions with each other and formulating our beliefs, identities and values. Practices of storytelling require both listening and telling. It is in this context that Wilson writes

we become listeners as well as tellers of tales, we reformulate and retell our own stories with fresh nuance and new understanding in the light of those stories heard. And so, the cycle continues. This is storytelling as a process, as a way of thinking about the world, as a tool for navigating our personal and collective journeys. (ibid., 128)

In this sense, stories are never fully individual or collective. They always emerge in negotiations. Moreover, there is always an element of imagination involved in storytelling, and by imagination, I mean never fully separable from ‘real’ nor fully confluent with ‘made up’. This is exactly the quality that is ascribed to storytelling, namely the potential to construct and traverse complex temporal narratives and structures. Furthermore, storytelling is knowledge work and, as a practice, is available to all; it foregrounds subaltern ways of knowing and gives form to that knowing. This is where I found the artistic research that centred the creative-collaborative practice as an ethical-methodological mode to be very productive as it allowed for and encouraged initiating, facilitating, practising and rehearsing acts of co-creating and storytelling. Moreover, even if subalterns are seen as active political subjects by the researcher, without facilitating creative acts and their active involvement in the process, there is an inherent risk that either resurrects the subalterns as revolutionary figures or writes them as the dormant other. A move towards testing a method where subalterns are not accorded the status of creative subjects towards the end of the project, upon discovery, but rather from the very beginning, is a humble move away from representation and towards negotiated imagination. However limited, complex and incommensurable, this process-driven move opens the door for a different kind of methodological imaginary.

Concluding discussion

With regard to research on famines, especially from a subaltern framework, the methodological approach that was used in this project can be of some relevance. Because subaltern experiences have not found adequate space or attention in famine scholarship, it is crucial that attempts are made to fill this gap. But the problem is that even through a lens of subaltern consciousness, there is no ‘authentic’ and ‘true’ history of the famine to be ‘recovered’ and ‘represented’. Additionally, as outside researchers, we have no unmediated access to subalternity. Often, the very act of conducting research can produce subalternity. It is in this context that I have alluded a sense of impossibility runs concomitantly with the urgency of foregrounding subaltern experiences of the famine. The task, then, is not to be frozen by these seemingly irreconcilable pulls. Artistic practices with creative-collaborative methodological impetuses have a generative potential, in the sense that they not only produce a critique of the dominant methodologies but also propose alternate models for consideration. Artistic practices are uniquely positioned to be mobilised in famine studies, as they can be touched by possibilities and impossibilities of oral historiography, ethnography, archives and memory work, but they are not constituted entirely by one or all of them. This fluidity is more than a naïve desire to be disloyal to these established ways of thinking and doing research. It creates elbow room to test and practise imaginaries that exceed the project of inserting particular voices or narratives, which have been erased or occluded, back into the construction of the historical event – but largely still within the dominant modes of epistemic (including representational) framework. It fosters a dialogue between subaltern methodologies and methodologies of the subaltern. In other words, my attempt to do the oral-historical work, which is an activity within subaltern methodologies, is in constant negotiation with Patchitra, a methodology of subalterns. Yet any attempt to bring the two together to grasp how subaltern methodologies and epistemologies change the rendition of the famine narratives runs into an ethical dilemma, and it is possible to overstate this dilemma. As an outside researcher, am I not bringing subaltern ways of knowing and giving form to that knowledge to bear on dominant historiographies? Since I am not producing from within, how is it not ‘representing’? These questions can be posed as a failure to dismantle the dominant historiography or as a crucial but necessary partial de-centring of that historiography. I would argue that if we have to avoid these seemingly irreconcilable ethical dead-ends and find ways to do the critical work while addressing the problems involved, we have to favour the process over the outcome. Creative-collaborative practice with Chitrakars and community members was invested more in the process than the outcome.

Although we did end up with the two songs and two scrolls, a particular incident served as a reminder of how any act of ‘recovery’ and ‘representation’ is necessarily and always inadequate and insufficient. After Manu Chitrakar’s performance of the scroll, Lakshman Patra remarked how the kochu plant and the old lady were not represented well and that the scroll needs improvement. I see this remark not as an invalidation of the project but rather a reaffirmation of the idea that we need to move away from ‘recovery’ and ‘representation’ and towards negotiated imagination. In this endeavour, storytelling through a creative-collaborative practice becomes crucial as it is a process of negotiating subjective experiences, truths and imaginations, navigating and making sense of complex temporal narratives and structures. Moreover, a particular insistence on the processes of storytelling through a creative-collaborative practice allows heterogeneity of caste-subalterns’ experiences of the famine and competing ways of making sense of the event.

Acknowledgements

This article draws on fieldwork-filming in Midnapore, West Bengal. The author is indebted to all the collaborators and participants for their time and generosity. The author is also thankful to the editors of this special issue, Camilla Orjuela and Swati Parashar, for their comments and feedback. Special gratitude is also due to Daniel Jewesbury, Jyoti Mistry and the anonymous referees for their input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg.

Notes on contributors

Ram Krishna Ranjan

Ram Krishna Ranjan is a practice-based researcher and visual artist and is currently doing his PhD in Artistic Research at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. He works at the intersections of research, pedagogy and film practice.

Notes

1 There are several estimates of the number of people who died in the Bengal famine of 1943–1944. These range from one million to five million. However, most scholars put the number at three million (see Islam 2007; Mukerjee 2010; Sinha 2009).

2 While ‘caste system’ is always qualified by context, it is broadly characterised by social stratification based on endogamy, hereditary status, hierarchy, graded occupation, and purity and pollution. The ‘caste system’ in India comprises four Varnas in the following hierarchy – Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. This is followed by a group considered to be so ‘low’ that they are outside of the Varna system. Dalits and Adivasis are part of this group. Literally ‘ground down’ or ‘oppressed’; the term Dalit was popularised by Dr B. R. Ambedkar, architect of the Indian constitution and a prominent Dalit thinker. In contemporary India, it refers to the preferred political self-identification of social groups belonging to ‘ex-untouchable castes’. Dalits are listed as ‘Scheduled Castes (SCs)’ in the Indian constitution. Ambedkar saw the ‘caste system’ as graded inequality, having a control on resources and the idea of purity and pollution as its organising principles. Whether we take Gramscian’s (1934) notion of a subaltern social group as ‘on the margins of history’ or Ranjit Guha’s (1988, 35) definition of subalterns as ‘a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society where this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way’, Dalits fit the category of subalterns in the South Asian context. However, using ‘subaltern’ as an umbrella term to denote caste-based dominations, subordinations and experiences along economic, political and social lines comes with several theoretical and ethical-political challenges. The risk of heterogeneity and context specificities being subsumed within this generalised and very broad conception is real. While there are similarities and overlaps between the terms – ‘caste’ and ‘subaltern’ – they are not interchangeable in all contexts. I am using the term ‘caste-subaltern’ to both mark the specificities of subalternities caused by caste and to indicate an incomplete synonymity between the two terms (For more on this, see Pankaj and Pandey 2019, 8–9).

3 Some works that stands out are: Sarkar (2020) who examines the caste and class bias in private relief, especially by Hindu Mahasabha; Biswas (2021), who in her analysis of Manik Bandyopadhay’s short stories of the Bengal famine of 1943 argues how the left political and cultural movement reduced intricacies of caste subjugation and struggle into class conflicts; and Sinha’s (2020, 69) study of Bhabani Bhattacharya’s work In He Who Rides a Tiger, which shows how the author ­explores ‘the system of signification that transformed people of low caste into non-persons vulnerable to death by starvation in an expression of biopower’ and how the author ‘shifts the protagonist from an experience of caste as marked on the body to a performative notion of caste identity and finally to an engagement in anti-imperial nationalism’.

4 For more on Bengal School, see Virtual Galleries – Bengal School, http://ngmaindia.gov.in/sh-bengal.asp, (accessed on 19 September 2019).

5 For more on this, see Bhattacharjee (2012), and web posts on Ambedkar’s Speech, edited by Prof. F. W. Pritchett, Columbia University, available at http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/section_4.html

6 Other Backward Classes (OBCs) is a collective term used by the state to categorise social groups that are educationally or socially disadvantaged but are not listed as ‘Scheduled Castes’ (SCs) or ‘Scheduled Tribes’(STs). This group is constituted mostly by castes belonging to the lowest of the four varnas (Shudras). Instead of ‘castes’, the term ‘classes’ is used to incorporate ‘backward’ groups from religious minorities.

7 The research adheres to the ethics rules and guidelines of my institution, including when it comes to informed consent of the participants.

8 A few parts of this section draw from and build on my previously published entry ‘Negotiated Imagination’ on the online platform Glossary of Common Knowledge (see Ranjan 2021).

9 Memory studies, especially the analytical category ‘post-memory’, has much to offer in studying how people who have not experienced an event directly inherit and receive memories through the stories or silence that the community and family conveys. They are often conveyed and circulated through family archives, oral histories, myths, legends, allegories, folklores, etc. (see Hirsch 2008; Eaglestone 2004).