Capturing and Memorizing Bengal: American Soldiers’ Visual and Narrative Coping Strategies in World War II India

With the fall of Burma in 1942, Bengal became prone to the Japanese attack and American soldiers were sent as part of the lend-lease signed between Britain and USA. By 1945, more than 100,000 American soldiers had embarked in Calcutta port. Military photographers were also deployed. Many of them used their spare time for clicking pictures of the local population and their customs. This paper will use life narratives and images captured by the soldiers to explore how they remembered colonial Bengal.

The first section will focus on the themes prevalent in the photos shot by the American soldiers in Bengal. The images captured by them varied in nature: ranging from the local population to local temples. The GIs archived their memory of Bengal through these images. Here the word 'archive' has been used to define documenting a moment/space/people/experience. More than creating a product of art, these soldier-photographers documented the spaces they visited. The second part of the paper explores what precisely the soldiers wanted to remember. There were hardly any pictures of the members of the Indian upper class or posh urban localities. A similar tendency can be found in the oral and written memory. Most US servicemen chose to remember the exotic side of Bengal, for example, the funeral rituals, the beggars, snake charmers, locals in ‘native garb’ etc. These two sections lead to the main conclusion of the paper, namely that it is safe to assume that most American soldiers had a highly selective view of Bengal and chose to visually document and remember the region as being profoundly different. This way, they replicated the widespread orientalist clichés and stereotypes of an ‘exotic’ or ‘backward’ East.