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Thanks for your support and I do hope you enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome back to our new monthly series, History Behind the Headlines.

In each episode, our expert panel will be exploring the historical news stories that have caught their eye and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world.

Each month I'm joined by our two regular panelists.

An Escoda, I'm a tutor in late medieval history at St John's College in Oxford and I'm

Rana Mitter I'm the St Lee chair in US Asia Relations at the Harvard

Kennedy School and I work on Modern China. Hello to you both and thank you so much as always for being here.

We're doing something a bit different on today's episode because I'm really pleased to say we're joined by award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and producer

Kavita Puri, whose most recent radio series, 3 million, explores

the devastating 1943 famine that claimed the lives of millions of people in the Indian

province of Bengal.

The series, which launched on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds back in February,

has caused quite a stir,

so we wanted to talk more to Kavita about making the series

and about some of the wider issues of tackling complex subjects such as

famine which as a look at today's headlines will attest is still a problem that's very much with us.

This is also a subject that's controversial due to Britain's Second World War story and the role of

Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

And as you're here, it's a story with connections to regular panelists Ranamita.

Kavita, thank you so much for being here today.

Before we go any further and get into some of the wider issues relating to your series,

...