On this day, 22 August 1943, the Statesman magazine published this photograph of starving people during the Bengal famine in British colonial India. The governor of Bengal had ordered rice across much of Bengal to be removed or destroyed in 1942 to prevent it getting into enemy hands, and they confiscated 46,000 boats from local people, devastating the fishing industry. Authorities then began diverting food from rural areas, where there were already shortages, to people deemed a “priority”, namely wealthier and better educated people, and those working in war industries and the civil service. Flooding damaged farmland, putting food supplies at risk, however Winston Churchill’s government did not act on these warnings. And when the famine began, instead of providing relief, the government forbade the colony from using its own financial reserves or ships to import food, and instead continued to export thousands of tonnes of rice for Europeans, and put excess food from elsewhere in the British Empire into storage. In all, 2 to 4 million people died, in what most historians consider an entirely man-made famine. India had previously suffered much bigger reductions in food supply without mass deaths, for example in 1873-4. But Winston Churchill was a white supremacist and an antisemite, who cared nothing for the local population. He believed that “the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks”, and during the famine he proudly exclaimed “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” Learn more about British colonialism and resistance to it in this book: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/books/products/insurgent-empire-anticolonial-resistance-and-british-dissent-priyamvada-gopalhttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1507775626074249/?type=3
Seated statue of the warrior goddess Sekhmet, with sundisk, a goddess of war and the destroyer of the enemies of the sun god Re in Egyptian mythology. Now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.
Greco-Roman mummy cases and shrouds were often painted with images reflecting pharaonic religious beliefs about the hereafter but adapted to suit the prevailing Greco-Roman style.
Egyptian divinities of the afterlife feature prominently, and include some or all of the following: Osiris, god of the afterlife and the underworld; his sisters Isis (also his wife) and Nephthys, also considered a protector of the dead. Anubis, the jackal- or jackal-headed god is also often shown as patron of the mummification process and responsible for delivering the soul of the deceased into the kingdom of Osiris. The falcon god Horus often makes an appearance too. The Greco-Roman tradition had no problem about mixing in classical motifs.
So in addition to representations of the Egyptian funerary gods, shrouds and mummy cases might depict figures in Roman dress. Greek elements might be included too: pomegranates, boughs of myrtle and rose, and kraters or goblets of wine, all alluding to eternal life in Greek iconography. On this Roman-era Egyptian shroud, the deceased in the center is dressed in Roman style, flanked to the right by the Egyptian deity Anubis.
Funeral shroud from 2nd Century CE Roman Egypt. Now in the
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
