At the Jincheng Hotel
K. G. SUBRAMANYAN
Drawings from China
on view till Saturday 9 March 2024
Seagull Bookstore
36c, S.P. Mukherjee Road, Calcutta 700025
on view till Saturday 9 March 2024
Seagull Bookstore
36c, S.P. Mukherjee Road, Calcutta 700025
This fortnight from
History for Peace
Humanity Dehumanized
A classroom module on the Bengal Famine of ’43
Imagine you’re back to high school, you have your history text book open in front of you and you are learning about the turbulent 1940s. How did the devastating, man-made Bengal famine that killed an estimated two million people feature in your text book? How was the story of the famine told and its disastrous politics revealed?
In our estimation of current school textbooks, the famine receives scant attention and the comprehensive nature of the tragedy is compressed into a series of facts and information. Our module seeks to address just this gap. It features an account of the famine told from multiple perspectives—historians, memoirs of those who lived during that time, news and media outlets, among others.
Most importantly, the module brings together, for the very first time, the visual reportage of Chittaprosad who documented the famine of undivided Bengal through his sketches in the wake of press censorship, as a classroom resource.
