Trauma and referentiality in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s famine novels

Introduction

It is estimated that three million people died as a result of the Bengal famine of 1943, an event that was characterized by the British Empire as the result of Malthusian population fluxes, local hoarding, and the incompetence of Indian officials, unready for autonomy. In past decades, economic historians have countered that the famine was caused by the “Denial Policy” which confiscated crops and boats in anticipation of a Japanese invasion, by policies that prohibited the distribution of grain from outside the state, and by a failure to curb inflation (Sen, 1981). The colonial state refused to acknowledge food shortages and mass starvation until late in 1943 and forcibly dislocated famine victims arriving in Calcutta from the provinces in search of food back to destitute rural locations. While the state erased evidence of the famine, Bengali artists such as Somnath Hore, Zainul Abedin, Sobha Singh, and Chittaprasad; photographer Sunil Janah; writers including Ela Sen, Sukanta Bhattacharya, Kazi Nazrul Islam, and Bhowani Sen; and journalists Tushar Kanti Ghosh, Freda Bedi, and many others resisted the official accounts with their own representations.

The Anglophone author Bhabani Bhattacharya was encouraged by his friend Francis Yeats-Brown and by Rabindranath Tagore to use English to reach an elite Bengali, Indian, and international audience. Working as a journalist in Calcutta in the early 1940s, he was interested in the institutions that were complicit and responsible for the famine, the impact on families, the role of sexual violence, the vulnerability of children, and the role of the state in displacing the victims. In translating the famine to an Anglophone readership, Bhattacharya imagined a more inclusive sense of community than was the case in government rhetoric using realist and non-realist representations.

His work provides an epistemological alternative to imperial narratives about the famine that aligns with the concept of the minor as a cultural counter-discourse. While Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 17) famously cite deterritorialized discourse, political engagement, and solidarity as qualities of the minor, in Bhattacharya’s (1947) first novel, So Many Hungers!, the author lays emphasis on the political policies that produced the famine in contrast to the imperial emphasis on natural disaster and war. As such, Bhattacharya counters bureaucratic representations of a passive, humble population accustomed to poverty by featuring individuated characters with a realist aesthetic. Within this, he focalizes multiple registers of language including what Ashis Nandy (2015: 598) refers to as the mnemonic (silence, screams, ellipsis) to create a deterritorialized sense of language at odds with the language of the imperial bureaucracy. In He Who Rides a Tiger, Bhattacharya (1954) links the Bengal famine and caste, exploring the system of signification that transformed people of low caste into non-persons vulnerable to death by starvation in an expression of biopower. He 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. In the novel, resistance to exploitative systems of signification is found not only in anti-imperial nationalism led by an elite but also in craft, empathy, and storytelling. Amid widespread shirking of responsibility by authorities, Bhattacharya invests the reader with a sense of engagement with famine victims, and responsibility for community rehabilitation.

So Many Hungers!

Scholars have characterized Bhattacharya as realist and writing in line with the Progressive Writers Association, which sought to use literature to foster social change and decolonization (S. Bhattacharya, P. Gopal, R. Kaur). In So Many Hungers! there are crises of representation in response to the scale of the suffering, which have been understood as interruptions of excessive emotion, nationalist enthusiasm, romanticism, and abstraction. There are departures from the realist representation of famine, but I will argue that these non-realist aspects of his work exhibit a tension between the desire to document the famine and its emotional, physical, and social impact and the diversion from this documentary impulse into fragmented language.

So Many Hungers! was published two months after independence in October 1947, while Bengal was still recovering from the famine and experiencing the violence of partition, and it uses literature as a way of shaping public opinion and garnering resources. The novel adopts a dual focus narrative as it follows two families, one rich and urban, the other poor and rural. Rahoul is son of the wealthy and corrupt industrialist Samarendra. Intermittently involved with nationalism, Rahoul is a Cambridge-educated physicist, husband, and father. His younger brother Kunal enlists as an officer in the army during World War II, and he sees it as a way of achieving the intellectual confidence required to throw off the shackles of imperialism. Rahoul’s grandfather Devata is a staunch nationalist who is imprisoned over the course of the novel for his anti-imperialist activities and has sired a second rural peasant family with whom Rahoul makes contact. In the second family, the primary figures are a young girl Kajoli who lives with her younger brother Onu and their mother. It is this family that falls into the grips of famine and migrates to the city, where Kajoli prostitutes herself to earn money for her family and community of destitutes after her husband Kishore is shot by the authorities. Kajoli is raped and then attacked by a jackal on the road to Calcutta. This results in the loss of her unborn child.

Countering the government’s refusal to declare a famine and garner resources under the Indian Famine Code passed in the late 19th century—via what Priyamvada Gopal (2001) has called “a crude constructivism which attempted to retain control of material conditions through the control of language” (p. 81)—Bhattacharya’s efforts to document the event in great detail become all the more urgent. One of the most striking moments in the novel is the author’s astute description of the causes of the famine, which are similar to explanations given by modern economists:

The empty stomach was due to no blight of Nature, no failure of crops. It was a man-made scarcity, for the harvest had been fair, and even if the Army bought up big stocks, with rationing at the right level there could be food for all. But there was no rationing. The belated law against hoarding was a dead letter—never was it lifted against the rich food-profiteers, henchmen of the Excellencies and Honourables. Forty thousand country boats wantonly destroyed. Many villages evacuated. The uprooted people pauperized. Inflated currency, the spine of War finance, added the finishing touch, eating up the people’s purchasing power, reducing the small savings of a lifetime to a fifth of their worth. Nothing was left of the foundations of life, the roots deep down in the soil. (Bhattacharya, 1947: 146)

Bhattacharya makes clear that such policy failures have a personal and collective impact. He emphasizes that each famine victim has the complexity of life experience that he sets out in Kajoli’s story. “Humanity, all the same—all Kajolis and Onus and their mothers and their aged fathers. All people, with minds, with the capacity to feel, an inner gift that was now a curse, for the agony of the spirit was even harder to bear than hunger” (Bhattacharya, 1947: 186). The process of using Kajoli to speak to the collective is significant because it is a population that has been characterized as abject and pitiful but not resourceful, politically engaged, or ambitious. Kajoli’s story links a remarkable, sensitive, and politically aware individual and family to the collective.

The realist aesthetic is most directly explored in the often-discussed passage when Rahoul and an artist reflect on the ethics of representation. Rahoul encounters a man sketching a baby nursing from her dead mother on a railway platform. A mob attacks the artist and destroys his sketch. The artist begins to feel regret at having done nothing to help the baby, and Rahoul observes, “The artist had lost his detachment and, and with detachment, vision. He seethed with human feeling” (Bhattacharya, 1947: 216). Rahoul had previously implored the artist to sketch the image again from memory: “Let India see the picture” (Bhattacharya, 1947: 215). He despairs at its loss: “It seemed to him as though the dead mother on the platform nursing her tiny one now died for the second time” (Bhattacharya, 1947: 216). Rahoul demands a dispassionate representation of real events that is carefully crafted to bring attention to a cause.

The nationalist frame also occurs primarily through Rahoul’s narrative, although Kajoli’s husband and many peasants face imprisonment and shootings as a result of their protests of grain and boat confiscation by the government. Rahoul and his grandfather are aware of the inequities of the Empire, as they discuss miners going on strike in Australia over a butter ration while a mother drowns her three children in famine-stricken Bengal (Bhattacharya, 1947: 249). They understand the impact on generations who have been traumatized by the famine and “those who survived but whose growth would be stunted” (Bhattacharya, 1947: 250). Rahoul has a keen sense of the irony of his brother volunteering for the war “[b]ut the champions of freedom abroad were the eaters of freedom in this land” (Bhattacharya, 1947: 57).

Dorothy Shimer (1975) writes that Rahoul’s characterization makes him a spokesman for the author: “His role in life is to be sensitive to (but not sentimental about) the human condition and get it into words that will capture it for the widest possible reading public and for posterity” (p. 31). Yet, Bhattacharya features moments of futility as the nationalist elite find themselves beholden to a mercantile class complicit in the famine. As Rahoul and his wife run a food kitchen during the famine, there is this dark side to their work. Their wealthy father, Samendra, who “had hoarded foodgrains in secret dumps in the famine areas,” funds the kitchen (Bhattacharya, 1947: 238). He was “like the Right Honourable at Whitehall who called the famine an act of God and cast a blind eye on the clear process of cause and effect” (Bhattacharya, 1947: 238). The difficulty for Rahoul becomes how to separate himself from the vast array of those complicit with the imperial regime, from industrialists, landowners, merchants, and the military to officials in every level of the imperial service. In many ways, Rahoul is not an authorial proxy but rather the targeted reader along with British, American, or other international readers, for whom terms for rice and dal are translated. Bhattacharya positions them at a crossroads in which they have to choose between self-interest, profit, and familial comfort or attention to inequality and human suffering.

Bhattacharya at various moments challenges the accuracy of Rahoul’s ideas. Rahoul wonders how a population so active in the anti-imperial movement could succumb to hunger:

Barely a year had passed since these men, or their brethren, had risen in anger against the tyrants, the robbers of freedom, who had swept the people’s leaders into prison even without a pretense of trial. But they would not rise in revolt that their stomachs could be soothed—a selfish personal end! (Bhattacharya, 1947: 149)

Rahoul struggles with what he views as the people’s passivity, but Bhattacharya presents a highly active community of characters. Kajoli’s mother, for instance, gives her beloved cow to a dying mother and her infant. Kajoli prostitutes herself to provide bread to the destitutes’ camp, not just her immediate family. Destitutes forage rather than commit theft. Through such acts, Bhattacharya suggests that ethical choices, of which nationalist work is one, will provide a more just future.

While Rahoul’s perspective stands for the nationalist impulse to document injustice and connect it to the exploitations of the imperial state, there are other focalized perspectives that prioritize different impulses, including the human feeling for which Rahoul feels such contempt. Sourit Bhattacharya (2016) argues that So Many Hungers! balances “analysis, documentation, and emotional outbursts,” thus “combin[ing] social scientific analysis and emotional description” (p. 47). Ravinder Kaur’s interpretation of famine literature is that there is a utopian nationalist thread through them that exists in tension with the realist representation of the famine. I find there to be neither a purely documentary aesthetic in the novels nor an interruption by excesses of emotion or utopian nationalism. Rather, co-existing with the nationalist impulse to document reality as a means of promoting social change is a focalization on a diversity of nationalities and classes. These plural narratives deterritorialize the fixed perspective that Rahoul sees as most serving nationalism.

One alternate perspective to that of Rahoul can be found in his impoverished half-sister, Kajoli. We follow Kajoli from her rural life as a hopeful wife and expectant mother into the famine. She is resourceful in planting a garden or foraging for shrimp, and her mother throws out a woman seeking to recruit her daughter into prostitution. As fruits and vegetables for foraging disappear and even those that are barely edible are consumed, the family moves along the road to the city on foot, the trains having been blocked by the police. Her family is generous, with even little Onu sharing the figs he picks high up in the trees with families less fortunate than his own.

When they leave their home in desperation, the narrative becomes more extreme. In the sequence in which Kajoli is raped and then attacked by a jackal in the field, language disappears into ellipses both on the part of the soldier who rapes her and Kajoli herself. At first, “the soldier was lost in a twilight, half dream, half reality . . .” (Bhattacharya, 1947: 199). After he leaves Kajoli on the ground, “the jackal attacks her. The jackal was gazing down on her, tongue lolling. Cold sweat bathed her body. She felt the snout of the animal and shuddered and screamed in mad terror, and her voice was a faint gurgle in her throat. Mad, she screamed over and over again, and all her shrinking body screamed . . .” (Bhattacharya, 1947: 203). Ellipses occur like this throughout her narrative and dissolve language in silence or screams.

There are other moments when excesses of suffering cause not a breakdown in language but rather an aesthetic shift. The extreme and gruesome detail compels the reader to be a witness to the material impact of famine, as in the following passage:

Corpses lay by the road, huddling together. Picked to the bone, with eyeless caverns of sockets, bits of skin and flesh rotting on nose and chin and ribs, the skulls pecked open, only the hair uneaten—fluffy babies’ hair, men’s hair, the waist-long hair of women. (Bhattacharya, 1947: 189)

This discursive shift of emphasis onto the grotesque body, disfigured by animals, disrupts the empathic realist narrative, turning the reader into a witness of a body under assault.

Michael Rothberg (2000) has characterized the tension between the realist impulse and the breakdown of language in the face of trauma as “traumatic realism” (p. 6). Cathy Caruth (1995) describes as follows the problem with the referential representation of trauma:

I would propose that it is here, in the equally widespread and bewildering encounter with trauma—both in its occurrence and in the attempt to understand it—that we can begin to recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential (that is, no longer based on simple models of experience and reference). (p. 11)

Neither Kajoli herself nor the reader can fully access the trauma of her rape and assault. Ann Kaplan (2005), in discussing films, has related the possibility of positioning “the viewer as a ‘witness’ to trauma in an elusive, disturbing, perhaps haunting way that nevertheless provokes in the viewer a need to take responsibility” (p. 124). If the ellipses serve to remind the reader of his or her limited access to experience, perhaps the shift to the witnessing of the brutalization is a reminder of the readers’ engagement and responsibility in the memory of the event, however fragmented it might be.

Ashis Nandy (2015) has described experiences that exceed language as “mnemonic or memory-driven and cover some of our intimate relationships, private hatreds, traumatic or life-altering experiences, dreams, and encounters with the sacred” (p. 598). Nandy (2015) describes them as “outside the domain of the state, and outside authoritative, professional, disciplinary constructions of the past” (p. 598). The novel seems to be balancing both the disciplinary, detailed construction of the past to counter its official erasure, and a recognition that certain kinds of trauma cannot be contained in this documentation.

The dissolution of language is experienced by the predatory characters as well as those victimized by the famine. After the rape, the soldier reflects, as if “lost in a twilight, half dream, half reality . . .” (Bhattacharya, 1947: 199). This state of mindlessness is abruptly cut short by the reality of Kajoli’s injuries: “A piercing shriek, a deep heavy groan. The soldier felt blood against his skin and jerked up frightened, panting, looking hard. She lay inert, lifeless. She bled” (Bhattacharya, 1947: 199). The juxtaposition of his disassociation and her intense physical pain emphasizes a connection between the two. While the soldier was focused on his own gratifications and appetites without thought to the impact of his actions, he reduces Kajoli to a state of acute distress. Focalization creates a sense of interconnectedness among the characters, and through the reader’s position as witness, he or she is included.

In addition, focalization in the novel creates connections between communities of victimizers, victims, and witnesses to the famine. Few have more fully explored the potential of the deterritorialization of language for social change than Édouard Glissant. Reflecting on the origins of Caribbean Creole, Glissant clarifies that his concept of Relation does not mean the collapse of difference nor does it imply a union of essentialized categories. Rather, as he explains, “Relation neither relays nor links afferents that can be assimilated or allied only in their principle, for the simple reason that it always differentiates among them concretely and diverts them from the totalitarian” (Glissant, 2010: 172). In Bhattacharya’s novel, the relation between the rapist and the victim, for example, does not imply a blindness to power imbalance but rather that the act of the rapist cannot be separated from the traumatic impact on the victim, Kajoli. There are no essential categories to be found, such as that, which would make the rapist absolutely other. Glissant (2010) writes, “Relation, as we have emphasized, does not act upon prime elements that are separable or reducible” (p. 172). Relation means that sketching the dying baby means not helping him and looking at prostitutes with disdain means being blind to loved ones.

This concept is helpful in understanding the unique nature of Bhattacharya’s focalization. The language of Relation means that rather than having each character utilize a distinct style of language, as is often the case in focalization, the characters’ experiences shape the language attached to them. Trauma, whether inflicted or experienced, creates a breakdown of language, for instance. As such, the unusual quality of language in the novel makes it seem that, despite the dramatically different levels of privilege and suffering, there is something similar in the voices of the characters. Influenced by Glissant, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the singular plural articulates this aesthetic in terms of simultaneity: “The individual is an intersection of singularities, the discrete exposition of their simultaneity, an exposition that is both discrete and transitory” (Nancy, 2000: 85). Via focalization, we encounter the kindness of a soldier as he pats Onu’s head with the lessening of his sense of humiliation. “No stranger had touched him with fondness—ever” (Bhattacharya, 1947: 258).

The collective, the political, and the deterritorialized qualities of the minor can be found in the focalized voices of Bhattacharya, as they counter the denial of responsibility of the imperial regime and its naturalization of poverty and devastating famine in a way that is also at odds with the dispassionate, nationalist approach of Rahoul who fails to intervene in both the lives of the baby at the railway station and ultimately Kajoli, his half-sister. In So Many Hungers! the experiences of the famine cannot be represented through one objective discourse and sometimes cannot be represented at all, but they implicate each character and reader.

He Who Rides a Tiger

Bhattacharya’s (1954) He Who Rides a Tiger is often analyzed together with Hungry Bengal, but it features a very different focus in which the Bengal famine of 1943 is connected to a critique of caste and class inequity and capitalist exploitation. The characters work within an eviscerating system of signification and attempt to reform it. Bhattacharya reflects on the ways in which the signifying systems of caste and class discrimination and capitalist greed perpetuated the othering of the destitutes as disposable non-persons, resulting in their exploitation and death. He cultivates a national sense of solidarity based on political involvement in the food access and anti-imperial movements, and on empathy and craft to replace self-interested and caste-based modes of identification. One narrative arc charts the low-caste protagonist’s changing ideas of caste, from embodiment to performativity and finally into anti-imperial nationalism. In others, there is an emphasis on his witnessing of social inequity and solidarity with the destitute in ways that do not require hierarchical organization.

In the novel, the low-caste man and devoted father named Kalo (Black in Bengali) sets out from his village during the famine, leaving behind his beautiful and accomplished daughter Chandralekha. He is imprisoned for stealing bananas and, upon release, works at a brothel in the city. There, he finds that his daughter has been coerced into sex trade. He rescues her and, recalling the advice of a fellow prisoner and former Brahmin named B-10 (later Biten), he concocts a ruse in which he persuades the wealthy faithful that he has brought about the apparition of the Hindu god Shiva. He gains wealth and prominence in posing as the Brahmin leader of a temple. With the arrival of Biten, who has a history of advocacy for the destitute, he grapples with the ethics of his actions.

The novel features a system of signification in which people relate to each other based on visual and linguistic markers. In the society of the novel, dark skin and an impoverished appearance are indicators of low caste and poor moral character. As Gyanendra Pandey (2013) puts it in writing about the Mahars, “The body of the Mahars—unclean, grimy, superstitious, irrational, lacking in human dignity, self-confidence, and self-respect, is the mark of their degradation” (p. 177). Bhattacharya thus explores the consequences of this method of signification, although he does not escape the prejudices associated with it.

Priyamvada Gopal has focused on the use of language in the novel to reimagine signification. She gives as examples the naming of Kalo and Lekha and the invention of the narrative of the miracle of Shiva’s appearance: “both survival and revenge can only be effected through speech acts, however difficult they may be to initiate” (Gopal, 2001: 70). The control of language—whether it is the failure of the colonial administration to declare a famine in order to avoid dedicating resources to relief efforts, or the language of religious devotion—has a profound impact on the material well-being on the characters. Sourit Bhattacharya (2016) argues that both physical appearance and language are crucial markers that get manipulated in the course of the novel (p. 57). Kalo uses not just language but also “skin color and a host of other phenomena including the legal basis of the production of the colonized body” (Bhattacharya, 2016: 59) to resist the determinative notion of caste.

These critics make astute points about Bhattacharya’s critique of caste as a system of relation based on surface rather than interiority. Yet, caste is part of a broader system of signification in the novel centered on materiality. The problems of signification are found not only in the caste-burdened body and in language but also in institutions of law, policing, finance, and colonial governance. The novel considers how this results in the characterization of the destitute as bereft of personhood.

Kalo is named for his dark skin, but he breaks with the system of signification that named him. The name Chandralekha is given by a Brahmin customer of Kalo the blacksmith, who remarks that it is a name of the “gentlefolk”: “Dark minded folks of your caste have a fancy for Haba and Goba, Punti and Munni, han?” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 2). Once she enters school, her peers are envious of the beautiful girl from the Kamar caste excelling academically. She makes no effort to acquire expensive clothes or jewelry, remaining satisfied with her deceased mother’s glass bangles, but her light skin, intelligence, and beauty appear to Kalo as exceptional. By contrast, Kalo believes himself to be instantly recognizable as lower caste to the gatekeeper and others he encounters: “Even though he wore his best clothes, the gateman probably knew who he was. ‘Lo! A kamar’s daughter comes to school!’ he would think” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 6). The racialization of caste in this part of the novel would suggest that Kalo would be less likely to pass for higher caste than his daughter. Yet, Bhattacharya (1954) emphasizes repeatedly the anomalous qualities of father as well as daughter in terms of his belief in girls’ education and his paternal devotion “as if Kalo had a mother’s urge” (p. 4). Their exceptionalism complicates Bhattacharya’s social critique, suggesting that the majority of his community is in line with the stereotypes of the caste.

Despite her unusual qualities, Chandralekha has little role in the novel beyond symbolizing beauty, devotion, and morality. Charu Gupta, in writing of gender and caste in reform literature, has argued that representations of low-caste women shifted in the early 20th century from stereotypes of illicit sexuality to victimhood:

Dalit women emerged here as victims of caste exploitation, circumscribed employment, and poverty. Metaphors of sympathy, however, were marked by incongruity: they coalesced with images of acquiescence and superiority to regulate Dalit women’s bodies. (Gupta, 2016: 54)

Lekha’s role is to evoke sympathy as a victim of sexual violence and poverty, and for the majority of the novel, she is guided either by the beliefs of her father or by Biten. In the intermediary period in which she is depressed due to her father’s deception, abjection communicates her dissatisfaction until she takes on a maternal role toward the destitute child Obhijit. Motherhood is the only redress for her unhappiness until Biten introduces her to the anti-imperial movement.

Kalo is a more generative source of critique. Already pushing the boundaries of his caste, as Kalo poses as a Brahmin, he replaces his assumptions regarding the surface markings of caste with a notion of caste performativity. He realizes he can pass as an unsophisticated but sincere country Brahmin and use his newly constructed identity to create a more prosperous future for his family. As such, he is successful at duping the wealthy worshippers, but because he is still working within the system of caste, he is beholden to it. As Kalo’s temple gains prominence, he sometimes becomes consumed by status, even berating a beggar who happens to touch his hand.

The character’s awareness of his own hypocrisy results in the fracturing of his psyche into Kalo and his Brahmin persona Mangal Adhikari: “Was not Mangal Adhikari contaminated every moment of his existence by the contact of a smith man? Or was the smith man gone altogether, leaving no shadow on the Brahminic self?” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 112). He recovers by hiring Viswanath, the beggar who touched him, as a gardener. Viswanath, like Kalo, is a former blacksmith, and he gives the milk from the devotional service to destitute babies. Although Kalo’s partial internalization of caste hierarchy prevents him from explaining or combating inequity, he supports Viswanath’s actions, admires his background as a craftsman, and shares his empathy for destitute children. It is this friendship with and support of Viswanath that allows him to maintain his authentic self.

The system of signification’s focus on materiality is not entirely maligned by Bhattacharya. It is part of the closeness of father and daughter that Kalo enjoys “every little change that came on that face, mirroring her moods,” while Lekha loves to watch him at his craft (Bhattacharya, 1954: 9). The Ashoka memorial medal she wins for an essay becomes a marker of her achievements and means even more for Kalo: “The medal lifted her out of the oppressive bonds of her class. It gave her a status denied by her caste, he meant” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 55). Elsewhere, Bhattacharya relies on metonymy for referring to the police (Red Turbans) and personification throughout, from Kalo’s beloved tools Thunderbolt and Swollen Cheek to physical environment in which “the shadowy mass of a mango grove swallowed” the destitute migrants (Bhattacharya, 1954: 27). In these examples, the signifier is communicative of the signified, the light skin transparently expressing the nobility of character and the dark mango grove the fate of the migrants.

The breakdown of meaningful significations occurs not only because of personal decisions such as Kalo’s assumption of a false identity but also because of his society’s exploitative manipulation of the material. Gross inflation prevents Kalo from having enough to eat: “Five of his hard-earned rupees now had the value of one” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 19). Seemingly overnight, the value of money is reduced, so that previous experiences of feasting and travel become a distant memory. Sumit Sarkar (1983) has written of the tendency toward speculation rather than production in this period as a source of revenue: “The really fantastic increase was not in production but in profits, particularly speculative gains through profiteering in food, share-market operations and the black market in general” (p. 407). Speculation creates the capital behind the ornate temple, and it is part of an unethical system of signification. Economic structures are divorced from the production of goods and religious practices from sincerely held beliefs, and they both impose a devastating burden on the poor.

The manipulation of food prices, so central to causing the famine, is part of the broader ethical lapse involving investment in an economy with no stable value, which can be easily manipulated in accordance with the demands of those in power and in which there is no connection between labor and capital: “The money was spent, the rice eaten, and the hungry peasants starved while their fields bore the harvest they did not own and could not touch” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 44). The structure of imperial capitalism is laid bare in the complete alienation of the farmers from the fruits of their labor.

The greatest indictment caused by the breakdown of structures of signification is that of colonial institutions. When Kalo is arrested for stealing bananas on a train, he encounters a system in which the poor are seen as worthless. Prior to his appearance before the judge, justice holds a very different meaning for Kalo: “Among his simple set of values was faith in the law, that instrument which served out justice even to the poor” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 30). When Kalo explains that he stole the bananas in order to survive, the judge asks, “Why did you have to live?” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 31). Although the judge asks it with no “metaphysical implication,” there is clearly a weighty assumption in the question he asks about whose lives have worth and whose are worthless: “‘Why?’ asked the man of justice in his somber English clothes. ‘Why did you have to live?’” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 31). Those who have worth are recognizable by their possessions, like the gold pen Kalo stares at during the trial. The realization of the absence of meaningful justice in the social system results in a collapse for Kalo: “Something was gone and Kalo, blacksmith of Jharna town, could never be whole again” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 32).

Kalo must continually come to terms with the bankruptcy of the system of signs and its denial of personhood. In prison, he revises his past reverence for the law: “His own hatred of criminals was gone. Most of them in this prison were common people charged with petty theft” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 35). Bhattacharya presents alternatives to this system of signification that result in a more collective mode of thinking. Gopal (2001) writes that “the act of passing as a high-caste man in order to turn his life around is also the logical culmination of Kalo’s belief that language can produce new realities” (p. 69). Indeed, Kalo’s creative use of language is full of both endless possibilities and pitfalls. The character tells false stories after his disenchanting encounters with hostile listeners, such as the judge who is unwilling to hear about the truth of his struggles. Although it saves him from starvation, ultimately his deceptive use of language cannot transform an economic structure in which the destitute are insignificant.

Both self-preservation and social transformation require Kalo to revise the signifying system with which he was brought up. Finding Lekha in the brothel demands that he breaks with old assumptions that “even to have breathed the air of the harlot-house would mark a woman as fallen” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 71). Initially, neither father nor daughter is able to speak, but after a day, Lekha’s story of how she was tricked into coming to the brothel fosters a critical reflection on his actions. Reflecting on his work at the brothel, he cries, “I was made to do what I did. How was I made to do it? By whom? Who are the ones responsible?” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 76). He does not have a clear answer linking personal experience and structures of oppression, as Biten does, but Kalo uses language to pose the important questions as to sources of oppression.

Eva Cherniavsky (2006) characterizes non-personhood as typical of imperial power, which “generally refuses the colonized both property in the self and the bodily protections it requires and confers” (p. xviii). When the city seeks to solve its crisis of death by starvation, it simply removes them from the streets. Biten remarks: “This is the way they answer our demands. Throw the hunger back to the countryside. There it will remain unseen” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 194). Because they are seen as without any rights to their own labor, family, or body, the destitute can be displaced or used for coerced work and prostitution. A pimp articulates the commodification of life: “But some lives can be saved—at a price” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 38). He articulates the concept that Michel Foucault (2003) calls biopower: “The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and let die” (p. 241). The logic of the pimp is that of the court. Some lives matter—such as the Allied troops and the wealthy of the city—and can receive the resources to live, while others are abandoned to death by starvation. Foucault (2003) argues that “racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed” (p. 256). This is the plight of the lower castes in the novel.

Kalo finds a sympathetic listener in Biten for his stories about his daughter and their struggles with hunger and social inequality. These stories, when spoken and heard, indeed allow for dialogue, meaningful communication, and eventually friendship. Biten himself is a very careful presenter of his own life story. He recalls a conversation with a pimp who says that the famine’s impact cannot be changed through language: “You and I cannot change famine’s story by a single letter” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 38). Bhattacharya presents Biten as a man who can change the story of the famine, not by lying as Kalo does, but by transforming his own life story in such a way that he can best promote his advocacy for the destitute. Born to a Brahmin family with all of the privileges that such a genealogy bestows, Biten abandons his caste privilege and appropriates his prison name in solidarity with other prisoners. He tells Kalo of the transformative moments in which his previous assumptions about the world broke down. One was an encounter he witnessed between a policeman and an old destitute man looking at food in a shop: “His very look poisons the rich man’s food!” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 39). In place of the visual system of recognition, with its contaminating gazes and prejudices, Biten favors collective action through caste-inclusive, anti-imperial, nationalist organization against hunger and exploitation.

At the temple, Bhattacharya describes the food movement and the Quit India struggle as bringing together classes and castes, men and women. He writes: “for the roots of this struggle reached back to the jails where the Quit India men were held. These men were drawn from all social levels, down to the humblest” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 175). Bhattacharya makes a problematic choice by making his ethical leader of caste reform a Brahmin. As such, he seems unable to imagine the leadership of the movement as being other than high caste in origin, and Kalo and Lekha appear to require Biten’s guidance in order to create more authentic stories.

Biten’s project of personal reform is very much in line with nationalist efforts of the period. Kalo’s vengeance and self-enrichment—despite the small-scale benevolent acts that he is able to achieve through the temple—are abhorrent to Biten, who stands for a Gandhian mode of thinking in which ethical action in line with community interests are paramount. In writing about Gandhi’s philosophy, Partha Chatterjee (1998) highlights his emphasis on “moral failure” as the primary cause for the British colonization of India (p. 86). For Gandhi, the reform of society necessitates a reimagining of the economy. Rather than achieving greater societal wealth and happiness, “[i]t is precisely because modern civilization looks at man as a limitless consumer and thus sets out to open the floodgates of industrial production that it also becomes the source of inequality, oppression, and violence on a scale hitherto unknown in human history” (Chatterjee, 1998: 86). Contextualizing Kalo’s actions in Gandhian philosophy clarifies why Biten considers Kalo’s subversion of caste and his dispensing of milk poor redress for his deception, self-interest, and exploitation. Biten articulates the Gandhian precept that argues, according to Chatterjee, that “it is only when politics is directly subordinated to a communal morality that the minority of exploiters in society can be resisted by the people and inequalities and divisions removed” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 91). For Biten, only his and Viswanath’s involvement in the food marches are examples of this communal thinking.

There is a tension throughout the novel between Biten’s mode of resistance led by an elite and forms of solidarity along affective lines. In the text, Kalo acts as the primary means of critiquing the dehumanizing system of signs. Carrying corpses to a cart, he discovers they are being sold so that their skeletons can be sent to medical schools abroad. He thus realizes that the colonial economy of Bengal places more value on the dead body than on the living: “He would sink, sink, until he was lost in that mass of misery on the streets, until his skeleton, which had more value than his living body, would sail across the black water to schools of medicine” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 47). Both the commodification of the body and the prospect of his loss of individuality haunt Kalo.

As such, the character is also expressive of a strategy of care and compassion on a personal level for creating social change. Kalo and Lekha adopt an abandoned child and allocate milk for the destitute. Their kindness toward the child Obhijit is on a small scale, but it is transformative for the child. Yet, the novel is not without ambiguity as to whether personal efforts at reform always coincide with broad-scale social transformation.

Vocation conceived in a way that is divorced from the burdens of caste also offers a way of building community. Ashis Nandy (2011) writes that reformist discourse often required a total embrace of modernity alongside a characterization of the low-caste community exclusively in terms of their oppression: “as if the Dalit communities did not have their gods, caste puranas, legends, cuisines, and systems of knowledge; as if empowering their culture was to disempower the Dalits” (p. 273). Bhattacharya celebrates the craftsmanship in Kalo’s vocation. The material markers of caste such as his tools are not only oppressive for Kalo but also a source of pride. They connect him to other characters such as Biten who was a mechanic and to Viswanath and the blacksmiths at work in the temple. Indeed, his fondness for artisanship becomes a release for Kalo from the deceptions of temple life.

As Kalo “rides the tiger” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 85) of his fake identity, he also raises the question of who counts as a person: “The hungry destitute—are they not people?” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 138). This question implies more than the vengeance at the heart of his ruse. It may appear that only the confession of deception and embrace of Biten’s philosophy allows a shift toward a new epistemology, but Kalo has already been a witness to and thought critically about the structures of oppression and their role in the famine. Bhattacharya makes Kalo as much as Biten a trenchant critic of materialism and its assumptions of disposable bodies necessary to the advancement of society. Caste is part of a broader system of signification, which serves only to enrich the few at the expense of the many. The remedy according to Bhattacharya is not subversion but a solidarity based on something broader than caste or class, which includes anti-imperial nationalism as well as empathy and creativity.

In both, So Many Hungers! and He Who Rides a Tiger, referentiality is broken by colonial rule and social prejudice. Trauma theory centered in Euro-American art, literature, and experience has focused on the unrepresentability of trauma. In the aftermath of the Bengal famine, Bhattacharya, like other Bengali artists of the time, approached trauma with a realist aesthetic as well as an eye to how existing systems of signification were in crisis. This crisis was both a cause of the famine, in terms of speculative financial schemes and exploitative social structures and an opportunity to reorder society to allow for a consideration of the inner lives of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Realism was necessary to bring understanding of structures of oppression but perhaps no longer sufficient for representing a traumatized society. Bhattacharya integrates realism with deterritorialized forms of expression to both express horrific suffering and offer a vision of reform.