In Britain, the first memorial to a famine Bengal never forgot

Partha Mitter has distinct recollections of his home on South Calcutta’s Harish Mukherjee Road, where he grew up in the 1940s. The house was double-gated, elegantly designed, and shaded by enormous trees. He also remembers vividly the fear that engulfed the city during the Second World War, the horrors of the 1946 riots, and the turmoil that followed Partition. And then there is a vague recollection of emaciated women and children he saw through the iron grills of the southern gate in his house. They were so weak, they could hardly walk,” he says. All he remembers is their lingering cry: “ phyan de maa (mother, give me rice water).” ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO

That was in 1943, when Mitter was just five years old. Bengal was in the grip of a devastating famine that claimed an estimat