Matt Elton Your new radio series explores the 1943 Bengal famine, which is a subject that's both unfamiliar to a lot of people and the source of ongoing controversy. Can you give us a sense of the famine's scope and significance?
Kavita Puri The numbers are just huge. In 1943, as the Second World War was raging, a famine occurred in Bengal [a region now split between Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal]. Low estimates are about 1.5 million deaths, with that figure going as high as 6 or 7 million. Although there's long been debate about its full extent, there is a consensus among academics that the death toll was at least 3 million. To put that in context, it's one of the largest losses of civilian life suffered on the Allied side - and yet this is a subject that's largely unknown in Britain. Even in India and Bangladesh, remembrance is complicated.
There is a lot of academic literature on the causes, and the most important contributors to the famine are widely debated, as well as questions of culpability. My purpose was very different. I wanted to understand why this subject has become largely overlooked, and its memory fraught, and to try to shift the lens to look at the humanitarian catastrophe in a different way by focusing on individuals who survived and lived through the famine. More than 80 years on, that generation - like the war generation - will soon no longer be with us. This is really the last chance to capture their voices. So I set out to do that, and to explore archives around the world for first-hand testimonies.
What do we need to understand about Britain and India and their relationship to make sense of what happened?
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