YouSaid · the spoken record

Kavita Puri

lines on the record: 39
first: 2025-03-23
most recent: 2025-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think that's really I think epigenetics was firstly studied for descendants of the Holocaust. And I think people are now doing it for the famine as well and other famines. And I think it's quite a controversial.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And everyone was a perpetrator. And you can't deny that. And I think until there is a collective understanding between India, Bangladesh and Pakistan that they all suffered and they are all grieving for what they lost. And that terrible things happened on all sides until they do that, then they cannot heal.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't have a partition in their head or in their memory because they remembered what it was like. They remembered a time where people lived together largely without any problems, except when a border was drawn and everyone went crazy. And I think that... That is really hopeful to me that people remember that time and that the politics that was imposed upon them Hasn't changed that. What worries me is that the other generations don't feel that. They don't understand that complexity and that national narratives today don't talk about that. They talk about their own victimhood during partition. Whereas everybody suffered in partition, every country suffered.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, my biggest takeaway from interviewing people who live through partition was something I hadn't expected at all. I expected stories of horror. And I did hear those, but every single person also wanted to tell me about... Their neighbor or their friend of the other religion who transcended hate and they may have, or maybe it was a stranger at the other religion who helped them. And I thought that was really interesting. They wanted to tell me that, but they also had this feeling of belonging to a place even if they had left that place, even if they'd never gone back to that place. They felt that that was their home. And to them”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Working class history. And I think that is changing. And I think that that's, I think history and the way the next generation writes about history will be quite different. And I think that's a good thing.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's too dark. I think you can say it generically. I think you can. And I think schools have a lot of expertise with dealing with the Holocaust. And I think what is age appropriate. And children should learn about that. So I think there is a way of doing it. I think schools, and I have to say, and I really hope this evening hasn't been too depressing because I think what is good is that we are living through a time where, and I feel lucky to be living through this time where we can talk about our history and we can appraise our history and we write books on empire and people engage with that and history teachers are trying to do different things. And I think that we're looking at history in different ways, not through just high politics, as you say, but not just on empire, but female history.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But, yeah, and I think that the other thing that Amatia says is that in a democratic country and a democratic with a democratic press, it's harder than to hide famine. And the British during the war did try and hide the famine. They tried to hide it within India, but they didn't want the enemies to know about it and for them to use its propaganda, which by the way, the Japanese did use it as propaganda. They also didn't really want, and that's why it became a problem for them. They didn't want the Americans to see it on the streets, because the Americans were pressurizing them to... Kind of to hide these things.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They don't have to see it. But he also makes a really interesting point, which is after the Second World War, we had memorials. We said never again. We don't because we don't memorialize famine, there isn't that impetus to stop famines. And famines kill millions. I mean, he argues that more people died in the Second World War through famine and hunger than for other reasons. And we don't seem to kind of take it as seriously”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, so it just fair Just to also add that what is interesting is and was not the case obviously when the Bengal famine took place, although I don't think it would have come under this, is starvation as a weapon of war is now a war crime. It became a war crime 25 years ago, although nobody has ever been sentenced to war.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The things that happen during famine are so horrific. The norms that bind society are totally subverted because you have to survive. It takes generations to overcome that. It's partly why, you know, as I said, the Irish family took 150 years to memorialize. It's such a traumatic event. And so what I think of when I see these famines and their famines and war is that Consequences of that are going to be felt for so many, so many generations. So, yeah, it's kind of quite apart from all the kind of genetic consequences of it. So yeah, it's pretty.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You want to know Nobel Prize for it. He said that famines often don't largely happen in democracies. And I think that if we're looking around now, I was very conscious that when I was making this podcast, I was living through, I was seeing mass starvation in places like Gaza and Ethiopia and Sudan. And so of course, you know, learning, understanding about famine is really important. But what I realize is we often, and we memorialize. We don't memorialize famine so much. Many, many people die in war, many, many people die in famine. And we know the kind of generational consequences for war. We don't really talk about it with famine. And what I learned from speaking to people is that”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's interesting that Amartya Sen who I interview who was a witness to the famine, it affected him so profoundly that he ended up stunning famines his whole life, he said that he wanted to.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I'm not because I think, as Satnam said, You can be two things at once, can't you? And he was. And I just think if we are we grown up enough as a nation, if we can recognize the absolutely heroic things he did, and he did do those things, can't we recognize the other side as well? But I would say he didn't, you said he's not responsible for the Bengal famine. The question with him is, could he have done more to alleviate it when he knew? And, you know, did his racist attitudes affect that? But he didn't cause it. But he was the prime minister. He could have done something, he could have done something sooner. But I think two things can be true.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, testimonies, how did I? I mean, to be honest with the testimonies, I didn't have a lot of choice. And what I wanted to do was have a wide, as wide kind of variety as possible. So of course I wanted survivors who lived through it. They felt the hunger pangs and all their stories are different. But I also wanted to hear from onlookers and know what that was like too. But I also wanted to hear from colonial British. That's always really important. And then I go into the archives and I had testimonies of relief workers. I had people who were civil servants on the ground who were looking to assess the famine. I try in as much as I can to do a 360 because this is a hugely complex event. But I wanted to reflect that in as much as I could through first-person testimony.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know but I hope there will be one and there are calls now in India for there to be a memorial and actually something quite exciting is going to happen later on this year with perhaps a kind of memorial thing but so things are changing like that's why you know once people know about these things it galvanizes people to ask questions to read about it but also you know I think one day one day we will be talking about empire hopefully with kind of that it's not so kind of angstridden and I do believe that one day there will be a memorial to these three million people because there should be.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And that's a famine that a lot of Bengalis, of course, remember. And he said, why don't we put, that's a statue there, which I thought was a really brilliant idea.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was called the weakest government. Sorry, yeah. And they were thinking, they did Amory and Lynn Lithgow did talk about getting rid of him. He became very, very sick very quickly. And so during the epicenter of the famine, he was in hospital and then he died. With regard to a memorial, so Alex Daval, who studies famine, had this brilliant idea that where the clive of India statue is outside the foreign office, and everyone's favorite.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hugely weaponized. I mean, how could it not be that if the British can't feed you, what on earth are they doing there? So it massively fueled the independence movement. And in quit India, just before the Quit India Resolution in August, The precursor to that was there was a denial resolution because Congress had seen how it had completely destroyed the local economy of so many people living in the Bengal Delta. And so it hugely fueled calls for independence. And the moral authority of the British people being there. I mean, what can you say?”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Help me, we ask those questions and we're right to ask those questions. They're really important questions, but that's not how they remember things. Svetlana Alexievich, who has done really seminal work on collecting testimonies in Chernobyl, says that it's often middle class people. It's, say, the people who were the onlookers in Calcutta who mediate their stories because they read books or newspapers. But these people I was interviewing hadn't read books. They hadn't read literature on the Bengal famine. They hadn't watched the films. They hadn't seen documentaries. They were really telling you the things that they saw and the things that they felt.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there is some catharsis in knowing that your story will be heard and that it meant something and that was valued. Because they were sitting there all along in the countryside for decades and decades and nobody went to ask them. Nobody thought of taking down their testimonies about a way of life that was completely lost, all those people that died. Nobody in India did that and they could have done that. It's the largest living archive in the world. They were just there and no one did it. And so I think they realize the importance. Like they couldn't believe that the BBC, in this middle of the jungle, talking to them about the Bengal famine, it blew their head. But what's really interesting is that not one of those survivors mentions Churchill. They didn't even know Churchill is. They don't talk about the governments. They don't have a sense of state. It's always about that my neighbor did this or that person.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's like there was a memory collector that's going around recording their stories with pen and paper. And they say, why did you come so late? And it's this kind of... Know it is late, it's probably too late for so many of them, but, you know,”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, I don't know, because it's important work. And that helps and you just have to be silly other times in your life and just flippant. And you can't be serious all the time. But it's a lot. It is a lot. But as I say, I do worry about asking them to recount these things because it really affects them a lot. But they really want to tell you and they want to put it on record. And there is, I do think there is a dignity in telling your story, but there's also a dignity in being heard. And I think that especially the survivors, nobody ever asked them. Nobody went out into the countryside and asked them their story.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's pretty full on. I mean, I try and be professional, but sometimes I get really emotional and they cry and I will cry. It's quite a lot.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think he said that in the context of him, Gandhi He was on a hunger strike. And I think it was in that context rather than the context of the famine. That makes sense.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who do good things within a system, and there are people who don't. And it's, you know. There are layers to this, it's complex.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which Churchill says I can't do, that's too much. And they have this back and forth throughout 1944. And it's really interesting reading this because he puts his job on the line. And Churchill says, you know, we've got D-Day, we can't release ships. It's really difficult. And he says, what is happening in Bengal is a stain not only on the British Empire, but on Britain. We are doing incalculable damage. And he understood what was happening in Bengal was bigger than Bengal. It was even bigger than India. And to his credit, you know, Churchill's fury, you know, has had enough of him. He doesn't fire him. He does get a million tons of aid by the end of 1944. However, it's not enough because by that point, millions, millions of people have died. But it's interesting because it's something you talk about a lot, which is there are...”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grow kitchens, he steps at soup kitchens, he really makes a difference, and he doesn't do this to help the war effort. He does this out of humanitarian purposes. And so things then begin to change. There is a better harvest, but with famine, it's often not starvation that kills you, it's malnutrition, it's other diseases. And so he is worried that the famine could carry on. And so he says to Churchill, We need a million tons of food grain.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really shocked it's being reported on in the papers, Parliament's discussing it. They can't pretend that this isn't happening. In Calcutta in the second city of Empire. And so Wavell goes out in October. And he does what the previous viceroy hasn't done, which is he visits Calcutta. I mean, it's incredible to think that Linlithgow didn't do that, but he visits Calcutta and is really shocked by what he sees. And immediately takes a few measures which are really important. He makes sure that Calcutta is now no longer fed from the countryside of Bengal, but is fed from outside the province, which is really important. He diverts the military who were, you know, considering going back into Burma, and he diverts them to help distribute relief to the countryside.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he got round the censorship rules by publishing photographs of what was happening on the streets of Calcutta and a long story short. These images went viral and they went to London and the government was embarrassed and they had to do something. And so Wavel comes in at this point when Parliament is discussing the famine. In the end, you know, people talk about famine, although famine was never, ever officially declared ever in India for Bengal. And it's really important that that didn't happen because it meant that when famine was declared in India, there was a responsibility on the colonial authorities to then help. And they never did that because of the war. But once famine is out there and once people know and once effectively the censorship breaks down, people in Britain”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Under the emergency rules. And it's very easy to say, oh, colonialism are one thing, but there are people, British people, who made different choices and they went against what they put their jobs on the line. And Ian Stevens, who was the editor of the Statesman newspaper, he did that. So it was the most widely read English language newspaper incredibly well respected. And he was looking out into his city, Calcutta. He'd been India for 20 years. And he grappled with whether he should break the censorship rules to tell the world about what was happening on the streets of Calcutta because they were full of dead bodies, they were full, as Pamela was saying, of vultures eating them. It was just, it was like a horror movie.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there was a good viceroy and Wavel, Field Marshal Wavel, who had run the army in India, was appointed by Churchill, and he was sent out in October. We should probably just before that the word famine was banned. You couldn't say famine.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. But that hasn't happened with colonial families. Now, obviously, they didn't profit or some did, but they didn't profit in the same way. But it made me think maybe it's the beginning of something, but I think seeing how hard it's been for her, I don't know. I think maybe it's not ready yet. But I would say broadly people have been really interested in the famine, in empire, as you know, and I think particularly the younger generations, they're not so hung up on things. They're not so hung up on empire and they do want to know their past. And I find that really hopeful, but they are pretty...”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really thoughtful and she's looking into her past, but it's been, I think it's been difficult with her family and probably her siblings. And it's made me think that, you know, Alex Renton has been looking into, he's a descendant of Scottish aristocratic family, and they've been looking into their links with slavery. And there are descendants who have profited from the slave trade who are looking into their past.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, but it's not a normal thing, but they Apparently. No, but they have a big family house that her grandfather. I think he grew up in. And so the family archive that goes back a long, long time is in that room. And they have an archivist who's going through it all. But I mean, a lot of families have archivists”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he's kind of wearing spats, right? It's what you imagine him to be wearing and his wife is wearing this kind of glamorous fur. And her dad is on the floor. He's just a little boy. And it really, you know, provoked something in her and in their big Welsh house they have an archive that's in a climate control room and she went through the archive and was trying to dig things out. And she is really looking into her past, into what her grandfather did, and it's really painful because it's not a great story. And, you know, I've”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Colonialists So I spoke to the granddaughter of Governor John Herbert and really randomly met her at a dinner party and she was like, I listened to your podcast and I was like, oh, that's nice. She said, it was really good. And I said, okay, thanks. And she was like, oh, my grandfather was John Herbert. And I was like, what the John Herbert? She was like, yeah. And I was like, wow. And she said she didn't know about what her grandfather had done. That day she'd just been back to her family house in Wales and she just happened to have a picture of him in her bag. And it was like one of those photos that you get at school and there's her grandmother.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Husbands, you know, people did terrible things. And I spoke, you know, I have testimony of people who say, you know, they took other people's land, they put it in their names, they had a bit of money in the countryside, they could see these people were really hungry. So they said, we'll give you a little bit of rice, but we want your land. People did terrible things. And these are hard things to remember. But I also think famine, not just the Indian famine, but famine's a hard things to remember for all those reasons. It took the Irish 150 years before they could memorialize their famine. It's a really long time.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Freedom from the British meant freedom from hunger. And, you know, there hasn't been a famine since independent India. And so you could argue they remember it in that way. But the famine is a really complicated event for Indians because, as I said, onlookers, people I spoke to who had fine lives, they were middle class Indians, they were elite Indians in Calcutta. They didn't suffer. They never wanted for rice. And there is a guilt in that. But there were also people who profited, who made a lot of money, who some people say are still quite powerful in India. And then people did things that are really kind of unforgivable. They sold their daughters to pimps for a bag of rice. They left their house.”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I was really surprised that they didn't. And I think the 40s were such a kind of tumultuous decade you have the famine, you have in Bengal, you have the 1946 Great Calcutta killings, which are the kind of the beginning of this kind of horrible genocidal pre-partition, then what become partition cleansing, ethnic cleansing, Muslims and Hindus being killed in their thousands. And then you have partition, which is so kind of traumatic. And then you have these two new independent countries. And you can't just can't look back. You have to look forward. And they did learn from the famine in the sense that”
2025-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · Kavita Puri and Sathnam Sanghera on War, Empire and the Untold Story of the Bengal Famine (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT