Reading the Silence of the Bengali Diaspora
Bibliotherapy and the inheritance of the 1943 Bengal famine.
Updated June 8, 2025 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
In loving memory of Baba
“I am the foot soldier of that army / That marches barefoot through hunger.”
“আমি সেই সেনাদলের পদাতিক / যারা অনাহারে খালি পায়ে হাঁটে।”
—Subhash Mukhopadhyay, Padatik (The Foot Soldier)
In the quiet rooms of therapy , I have seen what famine does—decades after the last grain was stolen from the mouths of children. I have heard it in the trembling voice of a granddaughter who cannot explain her panic around food waste, in the hoarding of rice, in the panic at empty shelves, in the deep, unspoken guilt around survival. I heard it in my own father's silence about his early childhood —a kind of selective mutism that he never quite healed by the end of his life. The 1943 Bengal famine, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 3 million people, continued into 1944. It lives on—in cells, in stories, and silences. The more details I learn about this period, the more I come to understand that Baba was a unique historical figure in time. Coming from a rice farming family in India, he was a true outlier, as defined in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
The Bengal Famine of 1943 had a direct impact on what is now known as West Bengal, India, and present-day Bangladesh. Baba's rural village of Gangarampur was directly affected, spreading widespread starvation and disease. The Great Bengal Famine of 1770, which lasted from 1769 to 1773, devastated Gangarampur and resulted in approximately 10 million deaths, nearly a third of the population.
These days, descendants of famine survivors come my way, seeking to name what their parents and grandparents have quietly held to themselves. They aim to understand and promote intergenerational healing. Many of them instinctively understand that their family ruptures require repair for their wellness.
As a psychotherapist shaped by both legal and narrative traditions, I’ve long turned to bibliotherapy as a means of metabolizing generational trauma . When history is too painful to say aloud, books become breathing spaces. For descendants of the Bengal famine, bibliotherapy is not a luxury. It is a ritual of return. It is how we begin to make meaning from the madness.
A Famine Engineered by Empire
The Bengal famine was not a natural disaster. It was a manmade catastrophe—an act of imperial negligence and strategic cruelty. British colonial policies under Winston Churchill diverted rice and resources from Bengal to support World War II efforts, despite local officials' pleas for aid. Rice was hoarded. Prices soared. Boats were confiscated. Starvation swept across the delta. Villagers in West Bengal flooded cities like Kolkata in search of food, overwhelming relief systems. Family units disintegrated; women and children were especially vulnerable. There was a systemic increase in orphaned children and child trafficking. Starving people were often treated as untouchables. British and elite Indian observers frequently blamed the poor for their suffering.
However, what is less well known is that many survivors never spoke of it. The shame of naked hunger, of watching a sibling die, of bartering a wedding sari for a spoon of rice—these memories were buried beneath decades of forced resilience . Many survivors never spoke of the famine, embedding trauma in cultural memory as taboo or buried history. This silence, passed down across generations, has left emotional residue that modern psychiatry struggles to name.
This is where bibliotherapy enters—not as a cure, but as a ceremony.
Bibliotherapy as Reparative Witnessing
In clinical practice, bibliotherapy—the therapeutic use of literature—can help clients confront, process, and narrativize inherited trauma. For descendants of famine survivors, this often means encountering historical texts, memoirs, fiction, and poetry that reclaim the famine from academic abstraction and bring it back to life in the body.
Reading becomes a sacred practice. A mirror. A reckoning. It contributes to a psychosynthesis of generational identity .
One of the most powerful texts I assign in bibliotherapy sessions is Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, and the End of Empire by Janam Mukherjee , which details the British role in the famine with clarity and rage . Clients have described a visceral release after reading it, as if the historical validation unlocks grief that has been long denied.
At other times, we turn to Bengali fiction and poetry, such as the short stories of Mahasweta Devi, the modern prose of Amitav Ghosh , or translated poems by Jibanananda Das , whose elegiac verses envelop famine in haunting stillness. These stories give voice to those who were silenced. They allow clients to say, “This happened. This shaped us. We are not imagining this pain.”
Bibliotherapy also allows for imaginative healing. Through fiction, one can reinhabit the past not just as a victim, but also as a witness, a survivor, and a remaker of narrative.
Psychological and Somatic Symptoms in Descendants
Many descendants of famine survivors struggle with:
These are not random. They are psycho-emotional echoes. In family systems theory, this is referred to as the intergenerational transmission of trauma . In Eastern philosophy , it is understood as karma stored in the ancestral body . Whatever the language, the need is the same: to process, to speak, to name.
Bibliotherapy helps externalize what has long been internalized. It allows readers to break cycles of silence and restore a sense of agency. It is both a medicine and a mirror for the Bengali diaspora.
The Books That Feed Us
Here is a curated list of texts I’ve used in bibliotherapeutic settings with clients navigating post-famine trauma:
For younger descendants, even fiction like Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies or the works of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni can provide an entry point into the generational context.
From Shame to Psychosomatic Ceremony
What I have learned is this: Trauma that is not transmuted is transmitted. Bibliotherapy and the integration of somatic awareness allow us to transmute—to take the inherited shame of the famine and turn it into something sacred. Into shared reading. Into ancestral honor. Into truth-telling.
The descendants of the 1943 Bengal famine do not need to be cured. They need to be heard. They need literature that tells them, "You are not alone. You are not imagining this. Your grief is real, and it has roots."
In bibliotherapy, we learn that books are not escape hatches; they are entryways. They invite us into a deeper engagement with our lineage, with history, with the body of memory itself.
And in that engagement, healing begins.
“Where the rice bowl is empty, / There must the poet light his flame.”
“যেখানে ভাতের হাঁড়ি খালি / সেখানে জ্বালো কবির প্রদীপ।”
Shreya Mandal, JD, LCSW, is an adjunct assistant professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, Department of Global Social Work and Practice with Immigrants and Refugees
Professor Mandal's Critical Reflections and Recommendations
While the essay is deeply evocative, a graduate-level reader might consider the following areas for extension:
Mukherjee, J. (2015). Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire . Oxford University Press.
Mukhopadhyay, S. (1940/1994). Padatik ( The Foot Soldier) (T. Bhattacharya, Trans.). Kolkata, India: People’s Publishing House. (Original work published 1940)
Mukerjee, M. (2010). Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II . Basic Books.
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.