Recording Famine, Rehearsing Memory: Empty Plates and Silent Frames in Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket and Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane

Recording Famine, Rehearsing Memory: Empty Plates and Silent Frames in Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket and Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane
Shreyashi Banerjee and Debarshi Ghosh

Abstract

This article examines the cinematic representation of famine through a comparative reading of Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket (অশিন সংেকত / Distant Thunder, 1973) and Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane (আকােলর সােন / In Search of Famine, 1980). Both films engage with the cataclysmic Bengal Famine of 1943, an event of colossal human suffering rooted in British colonial policy. However, they do so through strikingly different aesthetic and narrative strategies: Ray through the moral clarity of historical realism and Sen through the critical lens of meta-cinematic reflexivity. Taken together, they map the shifting cultural work of famine in South Asian visual narratives, from the immediacy of testimonial depiction to its haunting persistence as memory and political allegory. Ashani Sanket, adapted from Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel, renders famine as a lived catastrophe. Through a meticulously constructed realist mise-enscène and a gradual desaturation of its famously vibrant colour palette, Ray foregrounds the slow, inexorable unravelling of rural life through hunger, scarcity, and social breakdown. His approach insists on the famine’s legibility as a historical event shaped by external policies and internal human greed, positioning cinema as a crucial medium for bearing witness. In stark contrast, Akaler Sandhane displaces famine into a filmwithin- a-film, where a contemporary crew attempting to recreate the event becomes entangled in its ghostly traces. Sen’s central thesis is that famine resists full representation, surviving instead as cultural memory, silence, and a recurring trauma that destabilizes the present. The crew’s presence exposes enduring socio-economic vulnerabilities, revealing the ethical impasse of portraying a suffering one has not experienced. By juxtaposing these films, the article argues that famine in South Asian cinema cannot be confined to a single representational mode. Ray positions famine as an event to be recorded and ethically remembered, while Sen reconfigures it as a spectral afterlife that continually interrupts and questions the very possibility of artistic capture. This comparative lens illuminates the broader tension within trauma studies between historical testimony and allegorical haunting.