Representations of Disaster Victimhood : Framing suffering and loss after the 1934 Bihar-Nepal Earthquake

This article seeks to address a thematic thread that remains relatively less explored in historical disaster research – victimhood – through an analysis of publications by disaster relief funds and their supporters in the aftermath of the 1934 earthquake in Bihar in northern India. By examining the representations of victimhood, I aim to explore the historical significance of perceptions and constructions of victimhood in the late colonial period. Based on photographs, illustrations, and descriptions of suffering in images and texts, the article suggests that constructions of victimhood effectively relied on an imagery that contained, on the one hand, an absence of bodies, and on the other, a feminised anthropomorphization of suffering. The narratives underlying such depictions of earthquake victims are based on a constitution of victimhood that relied on contemporary historical and culturally founded imageries. The analysis of images and texts focuses on how representation of disaster victims effectively communicated suffering to audiences. I tentatively argue that historically and culturally founded tropes of what a victim constituted formed along two narratives of victimhood that appealed to a colonial and a nationalist readership respectively. These conceptualisations of victimhood formed the basis for collecting aid towards relief and reconstruction, rather than the loss of life, dispossession, social marginalisation, and displacement suffered by victims of the earthquake.