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The Bengal famine of 1943 is one of the most catastrophic and violent outcomes of British colonial rule in India. Recently, there has been a surge in understanding the famine from an anti-colonial perspective. However, the relation between the impact of the famine and caste-based subalternities has not received adequate attention. The immediate concerns that arise with the task of filling this gap are ethical-methodological and narrative: even from the lens of caste-subaltern consciousness, how does one arrive at and share stories of the famine, and can they ever be 'recovered' and 'represented'? This paper narrates the story of fieldwork-filming, carried out as part of ongoing research in artistic practice, which attempts to understand and engage with caste-subaltern (especially Dalit) experiences of the Bengal famine of 1943 and to explore methodologically how these experiences can be creatively and collaboratively imagined and negotiated. The paper proposes that there is a need to shift away from 'recovery' and 'representation' of the 'authentic' caste-subaltern experiences of the famine and towards negotiated imagination. To illustrate and make a case for this shift, this paper provides a detailed description and analysis of methodological processes and their implications that emerged during the fieldwork-filming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focusses on the cultural work of dancer Bulbul Chowdhury who performed extensively in East and West Pakistan (1950) and toured Europe with his troupe (1953). Chowdhury's approach towards dance in newly formed Pakistan coincided with larger political events of WWII, Bengal Famine, Partition as well as the Language Movement. His methodology of dance encompassed a vision of "inter-Asia" in which he excavated Muslim pasts to create a vocabulary of "national dance" for Pakistan. During early years of decolonisation and Cold War, Chowdhury's performances for the Shah of Iran in Sylhet or for Jawaharlal Nehru following the Nehru-Liaquat Pact signified how such high-level state events were crucial for his travel abroad and thus gained a cultural currency/endorsement for his troupe. Drawing upon Kuan-Hsing Chen's "Asia as Method" (2010), this article concentrates on Chowdhury's role in connected geographies to identify structural limitations and alternative possibilities of knowledge production in dance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Friends' Ambulance Unit and the American Friends Service Committee responded to the Bengal famine, 1942-45. Relief and rehabilitation during the Bengal famine are under-studied despite a large database of written records housed in the AFSC archives and the London Friends House Library. Much of the existing work on the Friends' Ambulance Unit and the American Friends Service Committee focussed on efforts in Europe and China rather than India. In an attempt to fill a gap in historical knowledge, this paper will demonstrate how humanitarian disaster relief and rehabilitation attempted to improve conditions during the Bengal famine. Relief also provided an opportunity for pacifists to provide relief in areas greatly affected by war before massive non-government international organisations existed, as is the case today. I argue that, while small in size, the transnational response made by non-government humanitarian organisations is an early example of government attached relief operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study utilizes the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war and the subsequent 1974 Bengal famine as a "double hit" design to estimate their impact on the health status of intrauterine birth cohorts. As a novel attempt, the study also investigates whether such "health legacy" is passed onto the next generation. By addressing the selection prohlem via Heckman two-slep estimation and using the rich 1996 Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS), the study finds that individuals bom or conceived during the war, who faced the subsequent famine, had lower health outcomes compared to non-shock exposed cohorts. This provides evidence for the intrauterine growth restriction (IGR) hypothesis. The study also finds that children whose mothers were conceived or bom during the war had significantly lower health outcomes with the effect being more pronounced among daughters than sons. The latter finding suggests the possibility of inter-generational transfer of the IGR effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a creative writer, situated in a geography of disaster, represent a disaster? Which areas or factors of the disaster does he highlight and which does he ignore? What happens if that writer is also a professional historian, journalist, and social scientist? These are some of the questions that this essay asks through a reading of the representation of the 1943-44 Bengal famine in Bhabani Bhattacharya's novels. The first section concerns the relations between late colonial governance, disaster, and violence in So Many Hungers! (1947), and the second analyses the roles of caste, law, and subaltern agency during this famine in He Who Rides a Tiger (1954). This essay argues that the Second World War, the class basis of the disaster, and the immediacy of suffering compelled Bhattacharya to write in a deeply analytical-ethnographic mode that also had to negotiate with the literary. By studying the novels' representations of the economic, historical, and political elements of the era, this essay attempts to situate the wider horizons of the social in times of famine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report on a panel on victims and victimization convened during the Historikertag, the annual congress of the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands (VHD) and Verband der Geschichtslehrer Deutschlands (VGD) professional associations in Göttingen, Germany on September 20-23, 2016. Topics discussed included the history of famine victims in Bengal, India, famines in media and in mid-20th century political discourse, and victimization of civilians within the context of military activity in former Yugoslavia.