#Blood island full
#Blood island tv

Fish breeding was my grandmother’s department and the three ponds on the property offered almost every variety a Bengali palate could pine for.

#Blood island full

The salty soil was made cultivable by manuring it with wagons full of new earth.

Our Taldi house became the way it did through months of hard work.

It is a place so postcard perfect that my parents would not feel like forcing me back to the city when school reopened after weekends. Taldi is one hour away by local train from the southern tip of Kolkata. In his travels across the newly formed state of West Bengal, he saw in the South 24 Parganas the charms of the land he’d left behind. My grandfather, a deputy magistrate in the British-ruled undivided India, had settled in the western half of Bengal after Partition, the part that had remained with India. I become my child self again at times like this, playing inside a two-storeyed house sitting in the middle of the seven bighas of land that used to be my weekend getaway. It’s amazing how the most horrific sits pretty with what is serene. Even almost forty years after I first heard the story of Marichjhapi, such references take me back to an unending farm with coconut and palm trees, ponds and paddy fields, and an abiding memory of a dark secret shared in whispers as a bedtime story.

#Blood island tv

Marichjhapi, as cold fact and sweet lullaby, comes to me at unexpected hours – when the TV ticker screams that India will deport Rohingyas or a new story on Syria brings out that old photograph of Alan Kurdi yet again to tug at heartstrings. It is also about my oldest memory a memory that is both a fairytale and a bad dream. Preface HOW THEY KILLED THE DREAMERS IN THE SUNDARBANS T Some of the refugees who survived Marichjhapi say the number of those who lost their lives could be as high as 10,000, while the-then government officials maintain that there were less than ten victims.How does an entire island population disappear? How does one unearth the truth and the details of one of the worst atrocities of post-Independent India? Journalist Deep Halder reconstructs the buried history of the 1979 massacres through his interviews with survivors, erstwhile reporters, government officials and activists with a rare combination of courage, conscientiousness and empathy. Most of the refugees were sent back to the central India camps they came from, but there were many deaths: of diseases, malnutrition resulting from an economic blockade, as well as from violence unleashed by the police on the orders of the government.

By May 1979, the island was cleared of all refugees by Jyoti Basu's Left Front government. Deep Halder is one of them.' - Amitava KumarIn 1978, around 1.5 lakh Hindu refugees, mostly belonging to the lower castes, settled in Marichjhapi an island in the Sundarbans, in West Bengal. 'When the house of history is on fire, journalists are often the first-responders, pulling victims away from the flames.