"The strange fragrance of rice": Crisis Modernism in the Colony and the Bengal Famine

This article positions poetry from the 1943–1944 Bengal Famine within contemporaneous debates between modernism, Marxism, realism, and anti-imperialism. Twentieth-century Bengali aesthetic discourse often drew from international modernist and Marxist figures like T. S. Eliot and Jack Lindsay, but the Bengal Famine presented a crisis that ruptured prevalent binary thinking in those arguments, such as between decadents and progressives or East and West. Famine poems reveal the boundary-blurring vision of Bengali modernist poets who felt compelled to reinvent poetic style and language to document the exceptional reality of the catastrophe. I identify this remarkable corpus of poetry as crisis modernism in the colony.