Nowhere in the globe is there a monument, museum, or even a plaque honoring those who lost their lives. Still, a small number of survivors exist, and one guy is committed to compiling their tales before it’s too late.
‘Hunger dogged us.’ A lot of people traded their sons and daughters for a small amount of rice. Numerous young ladies and wives fled, either with men they knew or didn’t.”
During the Bengal famine, Bijoykrishna Tripathi is detailing the extreme lengths people went to in order to obtain food.
Although his voter card states that he is eleven2, he is unsure of his precise age. Among the last to remember the calamity is Bijoykrishna.
He speaks slowly and haltingly when discussing his childhood in the Bengali area of Midnapore. The basic diet consisted of rice, which he recalls becoming more expensive “by leaps and bounds” in the summer of 1942.