ABSTRACT
Immediately after the 1943 Bengal Famine, the colonial government deployed the 1943 Bengal Vagrancy Act, wherein the refugee and the ‘vagrant’ were conflated. This implies that, after the famine, the refugees were perceived as vagrants in the colonial archive. Meanwhile, Chittaprosad (1915–1978) and Zainul Abedin (1914–1976) painted moving images of the famine, now famously known as the ‘famine paintings’. Using these paintings as case studies, this chapter examines the place of esthetic engagement with refugeehood versus official accounts of the same. It demonstrates how the famine paintings changed the ontic perception of refugeehood, and thus reconfigured the proscribed figure of the vagrant within a complex matrix of colonial power, archival truth, cultural memory, and ‘modern’ artistic practices.
