Drawing from emptiness: A new graphic anthology focuses on famine

A new graphic anthology, Famine Tales, uses exquisite art to trace famines that occurred in India and in Britain in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, through five stories and two sets of storytellers: traditional patachitra artists, and contemporary comic ones.

The stories trace the struggles of an impoverished hunter’s wife, in a retelling of a 16th-century oral poetry narrative in Bengali.

In Rebel Captain Pouch, we learn of the Midlands Rising of 1607, and a rebel leader who carried an enigmatic leather pouch said to contain enough material to defend all his troops against the king’s forces. (When he was captured and sentenced to death, everyone learnt that all it had contained was a piece of mouldy cheese.)

Famine in Shakespeare-Land traces one of the worst food shortages in the history of Renaissance England. And there is a chapter on the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, a product of failed crops and a smallpox epidemic compounded by the policies and cruelty of the region’s colonial British rulers, which claimed over 10 million lives across Bengal and Bihar over two years.

“We selected stories that would be representative of the long historical trajectory of famines, and would be representative of both sides,” says co-editor Ayesha Mukherjee, a professor of English literature at the University of Exeter. “A lot is said about famines in India, where the colonial administration had a big role to play in creating those crises, but what you hear less about is Britain’s own cultural history of famine and food shortage. Or the early history of famines in Mughal India, which are also not well known.”

The 177-page book, published by Jadavpur University Press in January, is co-edited by Mukherjee; and Abhijit Gupta, a professor of English; Sujit Kumar Mandal, a professor of comparative literature, and Shrutakirti Dutta, a research associate, all three at Jadavpur University.

The book features narrative poems by the late patachitra artist Dukhushyam, and art by Jahanara, Lutfa, Rabbani, Rahim, Rahman, Rehana and Ushaira (all of whom go by the last name Chitrakar), and comic artists Trinankur Banerjee, Aratrika Choudhury, Argha Manna, Debkumar Mitra, Sekhar Mukherjee and Sarbajit Sen.

History also came to life, in interesting ways, during the making of the book, as artists worked to create amid the pandemic.

With art-supply shops in Kolkata closed or out of stocks, comic artist Sen made his own sepia-toned paint, used catechu extract from the khair or acacia tree.

In the book, as in the traditional format, each patachitra scroll unfolds alongside the narrative.

“Overall, what readers will get a sense of is how certain political mistakes have been repeated over and over,” Mukherjee says. “The repetitions of the same crisis over time, despite industrial and scientific progress, makes these stories particularly resonant. Because food security is an ongoing, cyclical problem that requires constant alertness.”