Trauma and referentiality in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s famine novels

Abstract

Bhabani Bhattacharya’s novels, So Many Hungers! and He Who Rides a Tiger, provide an epistemological alternative to imperial narratives about the Bengal famine of 1943, that aligns with the concept of the minor as a cultural counter-discourse. Bhattacharya resists representations of a passive, humble population accustomed to poverty by featuring individuated characters with a realist aesthetic. Yet, realism is fractured by the mnemonic (silence, screams, ellipsis), and Bhattacharya shifts protagonists from referential to performative notions of identity. These techniques produce a sense of kinship with the famine victims and question the possibility of the referential representation of trauma.