"I went back to Calcutta and I found a little magazine where they had published an issue on the Bengal famine. And in that issue, there were 16 interviews of people who were witnesses of the family, who were still alive, they had their photographs, and testimony. And these people are in their 90s, one person was 112 years old. And I just could not believe that these people were alive to tell the stories. These are just ordinary people who were farmers in the countryside.What happened when the rice disappeared, what they did, how they sold their house and home, fled for their lives, many of them went into the jungles in the Sunderbans, with the Tigers. And when I read those stories, I really did not want to read them. Because in a way that was shocking to me, but in another way, there were stories I wish did not exist, because the fact that they existed, meant that there were 10s, 100’s, 1000s of people who were out there who had stories to tell, who had simply not been asked, and one of the people who had not asked them was me."

Kushanava Choudhury is the writer of the Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta (Bloomsbury 2017).

He has worked as an academic and a journalist in India and in the US. Most recently he was the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. He spent much of the last decade living in India and is currently working on a book about what he witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic in New Delhi, and how it changed him.

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