Chittaprosad's Hungry Bengal Survives in One Copy, Zainul Abedin's Famine Drawings Reached London in 1948, and Ray's Distant Thunder Won the 1973 Golden Bear

In November 1943 the Communist Party artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya toured the villages of Midnapore district and drew what he found. Twenty-two of his sketches and reports were printed in Bombay as a booklet, Hungry Bengal: A Tour Through Midnapur District in November 1943. The Delhi Art Gallery, which published a facsimile in 2011, says all copies were seized by the British and burned on publication, and that all material at the press was destroyed. One copy survived.

Hungry Bengal was one of several works made while the famine was under way or just after it. Zainul Abedin drew the starving on Calcutta’s pavements, Sunil Janah photographed them, the play Nabanna opened in Calcutta in October 1944, and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay wrote a novel that Satyajit Ray filmed in 1973. Estimates of the death toll differ, and our piece on the official papers sets them out. This one follows the artists and where their work is kept.

Two men on the road for the Communist Party

Chittaprosad was born in 1915 and had no formal art training. The Prinseps research note on him says P. C. Joshi, the party’s general secretary, had discovered his work and that he joined the Communist Party of India in 1940. In 1943 the party sent him to Midnapore, and his drawings and reports appeared in its weekly, People’s War.

Sunil Janah, born in Dibrugarh, Assam, on 17 April 1918, was a student in Calcutta when Joshi persuaded him to leave his studies and travel with Chittaprosad. His photographs ran in People’s War, illustrating a text by Joshi, and were later sold as postcards to raise money, according to Natasha Ginwala’s essay for documenta 14. Janah’s New York Times obituary says they showed what the mainstream press, censored by the British authorities, had barely reported. The critic Vicki Goldberg, reviewing a 1998 show in Manhattan, described “lines of emaciated people waiting for food, groups of skeletons, hungry dogs gnawing at human bones.”

What Hungry Bengal contained

The Delhi Art Gallery’s note says Chittaprosad wrote down the names of the people he drew, what they had eaten, what they were dying of and how many in their families had survived. It adds that he gave names even to the dead being eaten by stray dogs. Ginwala quotes the booklet’s opening: on the way to Midnapore he recalled the five corpses he had counted one morning between Amherst Street and Sealdah station. The epigraph she quotes reads: “Bodies that yesterday fought for our freedom and today are being literally eaten by dogs and vultures.” She writes that the booklet also records the government’s ban on public gatherings about the food crisis and the police tearing down the party’s posters and pamphlets.

In the excerpt the gallery released in 2011, Chittaprosad and two companions, Tarapada and Sripati, find a boy of about six sitting in a cornfield at dusk. His father had died of fever and his mother of cholera, and the household where his ten-year-old brother worked as a servant had driven him out. Chittaprosad calls him “a little black doll made of bones.” One of the party remembered a Congressman who had opened an orphanage in his village, and the boy agreed to go there. His name was Ananta.

Seized, burned and kept

Hyperallergic’s 2018 report on the gallery’s New York retrospective says 5,000 copies were made and all but one were seized and destroyed by the British government. The Prinseps note and the Delhi Art Gallery agree on the seizure and burning, and Ginwala says the British government censored the booklet and seized it from public distribution. None of the sources opened for this article names the order, the officer or the rule under which the police acted.

The sources also differ on the publisher and the year. The gallery says the People’s Publishing House in Bombay brought it out in 1943. Sunderason’s footnotes cite a Bombay edition of 1944. A caption in Ginwala’s essay calls it self-published in Bombay in 1945.

On the surviving copy the accounts differ in detail. The gallery says it stayed with Chittaprosad and was kept by his family in a bank vault in Kolkata. His sister Gouri Chatterjee recalled that a parcel arrived from Bombay for their mother days after the printing and wrote: “Perhaps that single copy sent to my mother survives as the sole evidence of the awful terror of the times.” The gallery published a 60-page facsimile in 2011, its first appearance in print since 1943, the gallery says.

Zainul Abedin’s drawings from Calcutta’s pavements

Zainul Abedin (1914 to 1976) was the youngest teacher at the Government School of Art in Calcutta. Sanjukta Sunderason’s study in Third Text says the destitute he met on his daily route, among them people competing with dogs and crows for scraps from refuse bins, pushed him from watercolour into a bare ink style. He drew in haste on cheap brown paper, and the sketches ran to the hundreds. The British Museum’s curators write that he made his own ink by burning charcoal and used it on cheap packing paper, so the accounts of his materials differ.

His drawings reached the public in several forms. They appeared in People’s War, including an issue of 21 January 1945 that ran them beside Chittaprosad’s. Ela Sen’s Darkening Days, a narrative of famine-stricken Bengal in May 1944, carried about a dozen of them, Andrew Whitehead counts, mostly across double pages. Sunderason lists its publisher as Susil Gupta of Calcutta. The British Museum’s catalogue entry for a 1943 drawing it bought in 2012 says the book was banned by the British authorities. Whitehead supposes the reason was its effect on wartime morale; he cites no order. A 1944 album of famine art, Bengal Painters’ Testimony, carried a foreword by Sarojini Naidu, who wrote that depicting the famine paid homage to the hunger-stricken people of Bengal.

After 1947 Abedin left his Calcutta post for East Bengal and became principal of the new art institute in Dhaka. His famine works were shown in London in 1948 at the Royal Academy’s Exhibition of Art Chiefly from the Dominions of India and Pakistan, where the catalogue lists his Famine Sketch, and again in his solo shows at the Imperial Institute in December 1951 and the Berkeley Galleries in January 1952. The critic Eric Newton, Sunderason notes, saw in them “all the grief and suffering of a terrible famine.” Sunderason, citing a conversation with his wife Jahanara Abedin, says he refused to sell them and is known to have held on to them when he fled arrest in 1971. In 1970 he painted a 65-foot scroll titled Nabanna, which the Bangladesh National Museum in Dhaka holds. Sunderason reads the title as an echo of the play. The partition that sent him from Calcutta to Dhaka is the subject of our piece on the Radcliffe Line.

Somnath Hore and the younger artists

Somnath Hore was born in 1921 in the village of Barama in Chittagong, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum. He recalled that Chittaprosad “took me virtually by the hand” and taught him to sketch the hungry and dying in the streets and hospitals of Chittagong. His earliest published visual reports were three sketches in the party paper Janayuddha on 5 July 1944, the Prinseps note says. In winter 1946 the party made him the visual reporter of the Tebhaga sharecroppers’ agitation in North Bengal, and the V&A records that his diary of it was modelled on Hungry Bengal.

From 1971 he made the Wounds series in moulded paper pulp. The V&A says the series addresses political turmoil and suffering in general, and Ginwala reads its scarred surfaces as carrying the memory of the famine among other losses.

Nabanna on the stage

Bijon Bhattacharya, born on 17 July 1915 in Faridpur, wrote Nabanna, the Bengali word for the festival of the new harvest. The Liberation obituary of Sombhu Mitra says the sight of people dying in Calcutta’s streets drove Mitra and Bhattacharya to stage it, and that they did so on 24 October 1944 at the Shrirangam Theatre, with Mitra as Paran. Dibyakusum Ray’s chapter for INFLIBNET credits the Indian People’s Theatre Association with the staging and Mitra with the direction, and says Bhattacharya played the old farmer Pradhan Samaddar, so the accounts differ on how the credits were shared.

Rupa’s catalogue page for a 2025 edition summarises the plot. A farming family in the village of Aminpur loses its crops and home to a tidal wave and walks to Calcutta for help, where the middle class is apathetic and unprepared. The family goes back to the village and tries a new way of working together, and in the last act, the INFLIBNET chapter says, they celebrate the harvest festival that gives the play its name. The chapter reports that the Association took the play across India in its “Voice of Bengal” festival, collecting “lakhs for famine relief in rural Bengal,” and gives no sum. The Prinseps note adds that Chittaprosad’s costume designs were used in the 1944 production, and the chapter says the play inspired K. A. Abbas’s 1946 film Dharti Ke Lal, whose script Bhattacharya co-wrote with Abbas.

A novel in a magazine and a film in 1973

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Ashani Sanket ran in the Bengali magazine Matribhumi from January 1944. Gupta writes in the Journal of War and Culture Studies that the magazine folded in January 1946, he never took the novel up again, and it came out as a book in 1959. Gupta reads it as imagining the war as a predatory beast feeding on the bodies of villagers.

Ray’s film of 1973, 101 minutes in colour, is set in a Bengal village in 1943 to 1944, with Soumitra Chatterjee as Gangacharan and Babita as Ananga. The Satyajit Ray Foundation’s note says the villagers die despite a good rice crop. The film ends on a screen statement: “Over five million died of starvation and epidemics in Bengal in what has come to be known as the man-made famine of 1943.” That number is the film’s own, and other estimates are lower. The Berlinale archive lists the 1973 Golden Bear as Ashani Sanket by Satyajit Ray, and the Foundation adds the Best Regional Film award in New Delhi in 1973 and the Golden Hugo in Chicago in 1974. Ray’s earlier honours are in our profile of Ray. Sunderason also describes Mrinal Sen’s 1980 film Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine), about a crew hunting for a place to film the famine.

Where the works are kept and shown

The Free Press Journal reported in December 2023 that the National Film Archive of India holds two 35 mm release prints of Ashani Sanket, neither fit for restoration, and that the camera negative has been untraceable for some time. A good print kept by West Bengal’s Information and Cultural Affairs Department was scanned at 4K, and the archive held a free screening in Pune on 30 December 2023.

The Delhi Art Gallery opened its Chittaprosad retrospective in New Delhi on 11 July 2011 and in Kolkata on 30 August 2011, and in 2018 showed the surviving Hungry Bengal in New York at what Hyperallergic called his first retrospective outside India. Prinseps says the largest public collection of his work is at the National Museum in Prague. At documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017 the Neue Galerie showed eleven Chittaprosad works on paper from 1944, eight lent by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi and three from Ashish Anand’s collection, with three Janah prints from Arjun Janah’s collection.

Sunderason’s captions place Abedin’s famine drawings and the Nabanna scroll at the Bangladesh National Museum in Dhaka. The British Museum’s 1943 drawing, bought in 2012 from Oliver Forge and Brendan Lynch Ltd with the Modern Museum Fund, is not on display. The V&A’s Wounds print of 1977 is catalogued as IS.10-1990.