Interrogating the limits of bourgeois radical dissent: Nationalist discourse in the literature of the Bengal famine of 1943

Informed by debates in Welfare and Development Economics surrounding Amartya Sen's radical shift in the theorization of famine as a failure in exchange entitlements rather than a failure in the availability of food, and given the location of the Bengal famine of 1943 at such a critical juncture in India's nationalist history when it was on the cusp of independence, this dissertation foregrounds the intimate nexus between unifying anti-colonial nationalist discourses and inequitable class relations as a primary aspect of the uneven social costs of famine which constitute an insistent focus of representation in Bengal famine literature. Women and peasants come to occupy a particularly conflicted space in the intersecting discourses of nationalism and famine in the literature of the Bengal famine given the politically volatile and affective context of the decolonizing rhetoric of the times, and especially in light of the fact that Bengal has always been at the forefront of the nationalist movement in India, and was troubled by widespread peasant movements and labor unrest in the 1930s and 1940s. The striking ambivalence that characterizes Bengal famine texts is symptomatic of the ideological uneasiness of bourgeois/bhadralok radical discourse which is torn between a documentary compulsion to record the famine in all its grimness and horror, and a compensatory visionary, and indeed, distractionary imperative, animated by the unifying logic of a hegemonic nationalist discourse that underplays all conflicts stemming from inequalities of class, caste, gender, religion and region in the promise of an egalitarian postcolonial Indian state that will be organized on principles of social justice and tolerance.; My literary archive consists largely of texts that can be seen as written in the tradition of social protest literature: Krishan Chandar's "Anna-Data," Tarashankar Bandhopadhyay's Manwantar, Ela Sen's Darkening Days, Bijan Bhattacharya's Nabanna, Manik Bandhopadhyay's stories of famine and the Tebhaga movement, and Bhabani Bhattacharya's two novels of famine, among others written in the immediate context of the famine; I also explore post-independent representations of the Bengal famine in films by Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen respectively, and of famine in the work of Mahasweta Devi.