Diya Gupta
Educated at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, as well as the University of Cambridge and King's College London, I am a literary and cultural historian interested in life-writing, visual culture and literature in response to conflict.
My first book, India in the Second World War: An Emotional History, was published by Hurst and Oxford University Press in 2023. See https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/india-in-the-second-world-war/ for more details. The book was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's 2024 Gladstone Prize.
Watch a short film on my research here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbKO-C-kZ8A.
I am developing my current research project, which is on the 1943 Bengal Famine, empathy and the future of food.
My first book, India in the Second World War: An Emotional History, was published by Hurst and Oxford University Press in 2023. See https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/india-in-the-second-world-war/ for more details. The book was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's 2024 Gladstone Prize.
Watch a short film on my research here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbKO-C-kZ8A.
I am developing my current research project, which is on the 1943 Bengal Famine, empathy and the future of food.
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Academic Publications by Diya Gupta
Diya Gupta draws upon photographs, letters, memoirs, novels, poetry and philosophical essays, in both English and Bengali languages, to weave a compelling tapestry of emotions felt by Indians in service and at home during the war. She brings to life an unknown sepoy in the Middle East yearning for home, and anti-fascist activist Tara Ali Baig; a disillusioned doctor on the Burma frontline, and Sukanta Bhattacharya’s modernist poetry of hunger; Mulk Raj Anand’s revolutionary home front, and Rabindranath Tagore’s critique of civilisation.
This vivid book recovers a truly global history of the Second World War, revealing the crucial importance of cultural approaches in challenging a traditional focus on the wartime experiences of European populations. Seen through Indian eyes, this conflict is no longer the ‘good’ war.
In this peer-reviewed 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.
Selected Feature Pieces by Diya Gupta
Selected Blog Posts by Diya Gupta
Book Reviews by Diya Gupta
Diya Gupta draws upon photographs, letters, memoirs, novels, poetry and philosophical essays, in both English and Bengali languages, to weave a compelling tapestry of emotions felt by Indians in service and at home during the war. She brings to life an unknown sepoy in the Middle East yearning for home, and anti-fascist activist Tara Ali Baig; a disillusioned doctor on the Burma frontline, and Sukanta Bhattacharya’s modernist poetry of hunger; Mulk Raj Anand’s revolutionary home front, and Rabindranath Tagore’s critique of civilisation.
This vivid book recovers a truly global history of the Second World War, revealing the crucial importance of cultural approaches in challenging a traditional focus on the wartime experiences of European populations. Seen through Indian eyes, this conflict is no longer the ‘good’ war.
In this peer-reviewed 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.