At one point in Rimli Sengupta’s debut novel A Lost People’s Archive (2023) the ghost of the novel’s protagonist Shishu laments that Indians never kept archives unlike Romans and Chinese, and asks if there is any serious museum on the Partition. To the narrator’s half-hearted reply that one really came about in Amritsar in 2017, the ghost counters her by asking: ‘What about the Bengal Famine? The defining event for all Bengalis.Over 3 million dead. With historic spasms downstream, notably the Great Calcutta Killings, which made Partition inevitable.
December 2023, volume 47, No 12