Shekkhopir-deshe Durbhikkho [Famine in Shakespeare-land]

This story is about one of the worst famines in the history of Renaissance England. In the latter part of the sixteenth century, England faced repeated food shortages. The most serious dearths occurred in 1555-1557, 1586-1588, and 1594-1598. It was a time of gathering crisis; not only did crops fail, but the population increased, prices rose, and war and diseases broke out. The 1590s were especially dismal. The wheat harvest failed for four consecutive years from 1594-1597, and food prices were driven up. England saw increased levels of vagrancy, destitution, and food riots, especially in the north and west where markets were less accessible. Anonymous parish register entries show that bodies of the displaced rural poor, who were mostly drifting south and east, were found under hedges, in barns, and on the roadside. The old, the very young, and the marginalised died of starvation or from eating inferior food. This was also, perhaps paradoxically, a time when literary endeavours flourished, and William Shakespeare wrote some of his best plays, many of which engage with questions of food insecurity in his environment.

In our rendition of these events, the patachitrakars of Naya and the graphic artist Trinankur Banerjee construct their own narratives based on the historical information and literary texts at their disposal. The patachitrakars met this challenge by making bold experiments with adapting their painting style to represent historically renowned figures like Queen Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare. Their story is narrated with a focus on the persona of "Shekkhopir" - drawing on a nineteenth-century colloquial Bengali appropriation of "Shakespeare". This enables Dukhushyam to further appropriate the English playwright as a fellow "pir" or wandering poet-philosopher, thus drawing him into a poetic tradition to which Dukhushyam himself belongs. Trinankur, on the other hand, revisits 1590s England and its troubles through the eyes of the spectacular Shakespearean character Sir John Falstaff, to construct a comic satire which suits his own medium of graphic narration.

Banerjee, Trinankur

Chitrakar, Dukhushyam

Chitrakar, Jahanara

Chitrakar, Khaleda

Chitrakar, Lutfa

Chitrakar, Mahim

Chitrakar, Rabbani

Chitrakar, Rahim

Chitrakar, Rahman

Chitrakar, Ushiara

Hugh Platt, Remedies for Famine (London: 1596).

William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.

"Famine", "Of Dearth", "Gluttony", in Englands Parnassus, ed. Robert Allott (London: 1600).

University of Exeter

2020-02

Alderson, Eve

Brock, Dan

Dutta, Shrutakirti

Elsender, Francis

Fereday, Graham

Gupta, Abhijit

Halder, Bhagirath

Hammond, Sophie

Holding, Richard

Long, Lily

Mbedzi, Tumisang

Mondal, Sujit

Mukherjee, Ayesha

Spence, Connor

Singer, Wendy

Tupman, Charlotte

CC BY-NC

Bengali

English

84e9e215a065de32bace920f42267c1c.jpg

England; 1595-98