Three Million: 2. The cigarette tin

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A boy decides how much rice he can give from a cigarette tin to hungry people. A Christian missionary sets up a makeshift relief hospital. A small child watches through the gates of his house in Calcutta as emaciated women clutching children ask for food.

As the food crisis deepens, shocking testimonies from the countryside show the extent of starvation. Many thousands of hungry people begin moving from the rural areas towards the cities.

Indians - including children - are forced into life-or-death decisions.

Presenter: Kavita Puri Series producer: Ant Adeane Editor: Emma Rippon Sound design and mix: Eloise Whitmore Production coordinators: Maria Ogundele and Sabine Schereck Original music: Felix Taylor

With thanks to Dr Janam Mukherjee, Professor Joya Chatterji and Dr Diya Gupta.

Interview with Alan McLeod courtesy of the University of Cambridge

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:03.7	I'm Kavita Puri with 3 million.
0:06.8	The story of the 3 million people who died in the devastating famine in Bengal in British India during World War II.
0:15.0	I first heard about the Bengal famine when I was working on something completely different.
0:21.0	It was a radio series about the end of colonial rule in India.
0:25.0	Some of the people I interviewed mentioned the famine, almost in passing.
0:30.0	It sounded terrible.
0:32.0	All I knew then were the cold statistics, the 3 million victims.
0:37.0	I never asked anything more.
0:40.0	My focus was somewhere else.
0:42.0	The famine is not well remembered in Britain, and I overlooked it too.
0:49.2	It took me years before I thought about those 3 million people again and asked who were they and why on earth don't we know anything about them when it's part of British history
1:01.6	how can 3 million people just disappear?
1:05.0	So I started going back through old transcripts and research notes and contacting old interviewees about their memories of that time.
1:19.0	Some had died. Some didn't want to be recorded.
1:23.0	One Bengali British man, who lives in Birmingham now and was 13 back then,
1:28.0	is still too disturbed by what he witnessed.
1:32.0	He hand wrote me a full page letter. Having read the scenes of
1:36.8	desperation that he saw, I'm not surprised he didn't want to talk.
1:43.0	People in Britain who live among us saw such things.
1:47.8	And when I finally meet them, 80 years after the famine,
1:52.0	it's clear their memories of that time never went away.
	...

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