From fascism to famine: Complicity, conscience, and the narrative of ‘peasant passivity’ in Bengal, 1941–1945

Abstract Between 1941 and 1945, the Second World War changed the physical and moral geographies of Bengal, an important base for the British government. In 1943, a man-made famine resulted in the death of about four million peasants. The Bengal Famine has been the subject of intense scrutiny in terms of establishing the moral culpability of the colonial government and its provincial collaborators. This article revisits the wartime period and the famine as a moment of historical and social transformation. By examining the Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Association’s engagement with fascism, I argue that a new form of Bengali subjectivity emerged, one that recognized itself as part of a global collective, premised on its being forced to participate in the Second World War. I explore how this predicament led to reflection on the intellectual legacies of colonialism, including the promises of Enlightenment and the fraught universality of literature itself. By analysing selected works, I show how the Bengal Famine represented a moment of moral collapse that implicated both the imperial centres of power and the local colonial bourgeois class. A left-leaning intelligentsia had to struggle to find a language through which to express the inexpressible realities, local and global, of this genocide. What emerged was a tortured literature of complicity and conscience that decentred the peasantry. I argue that the historiographical problem of ‘peasant passivity’ is intrinsically tied to the literary and cultural production of the time, which made the peasant a symbol of social disintegration and moral transformation for the bourgeois middle class.