Calcutta in World War II walking tour, Kolkata

About this place

Most people know that the Second World War was fought in Europe, in the Pacific, in the deserts of North Africa. Far fewer know that it came, quietly and then catastrophically, to the streets of Calcutta. In the winter of 1942, Japanese bombers began flying scouting missions over the city, targeting its industrial sector — the factories, dockyards, and fuel lines that kept the Allied campaign in the China-Burma-India Theatre alive. Air-raid sirens became part of the rhythm of daily life. Then the bombs started falling. But the destruction from the air was only one layer of a city coming apart at the seams. War brought worker strikes brutally suppressed, a press gagged by colonial censorship, surveillance that reached into homes and printing presses, and a famine so vast and so man-made that it killed an estimated three million people in Bengal — while the government called it an unfortunate scarcity and the newspapers were forbidden to print the truth. This walk moves through that Calcutta — not the Calcutta of empire and grandeur, but the Calcutta of 1938 to 1945: contested, hungry, surveilled, and alive with resistance. Through eyewitness accounts, forgotten documents, and the hidden geography of a city under pressure, we explore what it meant to live here when the world was at war and the people in charge were deciding whose lives were worth saving.