"People began collapsing in the streets and dying on the pavements"

In 1943, a devastating famine claimed the lives of millions of people in the Indian province of Bengal. Kavita Puri (left) tells us why she's keen to ensure that the stories of those who endured the crisis are not forgotten

- MATT ELTON

Matt Elton Your new radio series explores the 1943 Bengal famine, which is a subject that's both unfamiliar to a lot of people and the source of ongoing controversy. Can you give us a sense of the famine's scope and significance?

Kavita Puri The numbers are just huge. In 1943, as the Second World War was raging, a famine occurred in Bengal [a region now split between Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal]. Low estimates are about 1.5 million deaths, with that figure going as high as 6 or 7 million. Although there's long been debate about its full extent, there is a consensus among academics that the death toll was at least 3 million. To put that in context, it's one of the largest losses of civilian life suffered on the Allied side - and yet this is a subject that's largely unknown in Britain. Even in India and Bangladesh, remembrance is complicated.

There is a lot of academic literature on the causes, and the most important contributors to the famine are widely debated, as well as questions of culpability. My purpose was very different. I wanted to understand why this subject has become largely overlooked, and its memory fraught, and to try to shift the lens to look at the humanitarian catastrophe in a different way by focusing on individuals who survived and lived through the famine. More than 80 years on, that generation - like the war generation - will soon no longer be with us. This is really the last chance to capture their voices. So I set out to do that, and to explore archives around the world for first-hand testimonies.

What do we need to understand about Britain and India and their relationship to make sense of what happened?