Cinematic Representations of the Bengal Famine of 1943
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2026.754Keywords:
Bengali cinema, Bengal famine, Ashani Sanket, Akaler Sandhane, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, disaster cinemaAbstract
The representation of famines is a complex issue for several reasons, including the risk of aestheticizing a humanitarian disaster. Turning suffering into something visually appealing or artistically pleasing spectacles can diminish its true horror. This paper examines how visual media, particularly film, uses various cinematic techniques to communicate the realities of famine. Focusing on the Bengal Famine of 1943, this paper uses a comparative film analysis to examine Satyajit Ray's Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973) and Mrinal Sen's Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine, 1980). Ray employs naturalistic cinematography and an intimate focus on individuals, particularly women's experience, making the political interrogation of famine a humanistic and gendered one. Sen, on the other hand, deploys a film-within-a-film structure to foreground the act of representation itself. Both filmmakers highlight a structural problem in humanitarian visual media: the tension between emotional engagement and political accountability. By reading these films through frameworks of ineffability (Steiner) and witnessing (Ricoeur), this paper argues that famine representation in cinema is never neutral. Famine cinema is shaped by ideology, authorial positionality, and the risk of aestheticization, even as the genre seeks to resist it.
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