Three Million

Puri does profound and elegant work bringing forgotten narratives back to life SATHNAM SANGHERA (on Partition Voices)

A landmark history of the Bengal Famine.
An estimated three million people died in Bengal in a famine during World War Two. They were Indian, but they were also British subjects. It is one of the largest losses of civilian life on the Allied side during the Second World War. And yet there is no memorial, not even a tiny plaque to them anywhere in the world.
Three Million is Kavita Puris quest to understand this forgetting and write those who perished, as well as the survivors, back into history. She begins with a question about silence: why, eight decades on, are the millions of victims so absent from public memory, and this history is still so difficult in Britain, and overlooked in India and Bangladesh.
Puri travels deep into Bengal’s countryside and finds the last survivors. In rare testimony, they recall the fire of hunger, and the unbearable choices they had to make. She tracks down witnesses who remember when Calcutta’s streets were full of dead bodies, being torn at by wild animals, while the colonial and Indian elite, as well as Allied soldiers ate sumptuous meals in restaurants, clubs and luxury hotels. And she conducts extensive research to piece together the unfolding catastrophe. We learn how colonial and Indian politicians responded, the attempts to censor the famine, and how journalists and artists challenged the authorities to document it, and tell the world what was really happening.
Three Million is also an examination into memory. At a raw and difficult meeting in London between two grandchildren, one Bengali, the other a descendant of the colonial wartime Governor, Puri asks what remembrance and reckoning — between individuals, and for nations — might look like.
This is the story of war, the dying days of empire, the battle over truth and moral courage. It is a mission to find the stories behind the statistics and to give the dead the dignity of a name. It is also about us today and what we choose to remember.
Powerful, painstaking and deeply humane, this original book refuses to allow three million people to be forgotten.