Nearly all the testimony in Three Million, a BBC podcast series by Kavita Puri about the Bengal Famine of 1943, which killed three million people, has never been broadcast before. Echoing risks surrounding documentation of Covid pandemic experiences (something for another blog), the story of what happened in Bengal Province (now Bangladesh, West Bengal and eastern India) during World War Two has been largely told by people it didn’t affect. Victims are unnamed. With notable exceptions, such as the Imperial War Museum, there are few exhibitions, memorials etc.

In Episode 4, The Tapes, we hear how Kavita Puri found a box of micro cassettes in a Cambridge University archive containing first hand accounts recorded in the 1980’s as well as recordings Kavita Puri made with people who witnessed the famine as young people. It’s a reminder of the importance of gathering first hand accounts, how easily our work can get buried in archives, and the critical work of digitising old and decaying formats.