Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

I'm Kavita Puri, with 3 million.

The story of the 3 million people who died in the devastating famine in Bengal

in British India during World War II.

In 1998, Kushinava Chowdhury,

fresh out of Princeton, went to Calcutta, now Colcutta, to work as a journalist at the

statesman newspaper.

When I worked there, it was still the biggest English paper in Calcutta, but it was sort of like Calcutta slowly declining.

This was the city of his ancestors.

He'd lived there as a child, and now he walked its streets, getting to know it as an adult. He went back to America at the turn of the millennium, but always felt the pull to Kolkata. Years later, he returned.

To write a book about the city and when I was working on the book these stories of famine would come up

Cush had read academic books seen the iconic photos and sketches of the famine and watch famous Indian films about it,

but it wasn't his focus back then. Like me, he overlooked it.

So I knew about it and didn't know about it and that had a lot to do with the

nature of the people who starved. I didn't know anybody who starving the famine.

None of my friends, none of my parents friends, no one, not one person and yet one in 20

Bengali's died he wrote the book and it did well but something kept niggling

at him you know books have unresolved issues in them and so this was really the

unresolved issue in in the book that I wrote you know I think it was the thing that

kind of kept you know knowing at me. And then in early 2018

while browsing at his favorite

Colcutter bookshop he picked up a Bengali magazine

...