In this article, I interrogate the representation of bodies on the Indian home-front in 1943, the year of the Bengal Famine. I begin by examining letters Indian soldiers wrote to their families from Middle Eastern battlefronts, and analyse the empathic role of soldiers’ bodies as they imagined distant hunger. I then move on to study Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Ashani Sanket (Intimations of Thunder, 1944–1946), in which he imagines World War II as a predatory beast, feeding upon the bodies of Bengali villagers. While the first section of this paper focuses on the cultural history of the Bengal Famine recovered through wartime letters, the second section engages with literary criticism, analysing how hunger and its contexts influence form. I argue in this article that letter-writing and literature read alongside each other yield new layers of meaning to the experience of hunger in the homeland.

中文翻译：

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饥饿中的尸体：第二次世界大战期间印度家庭阵线的文学表现

在本文中，我询问了1943年孟加拉饥荒之年在印度家庭中的尸体表示。首先，我考察了印度士兵从中东战线给他们的家人写的信，并分析了士兵们想象中的遥远饥饿时其同情心的作用。然后，我继续研究孟加拉小说家Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay的Ashani Sanket（《雷电启示》，1944-1946），他在其中将第二次世界大战想象为掠食性的野兽，以孟加拉的村民为食。本文的第一部分着重于通过战时信件恢复的孟加拉饥荒的文化历史，而第二部分则涉及文学批评，分析了饥饿及其背景如何影响饥饿。