Watch the former VP of Odisha Sahitya Akademi, poet and translator, Sangram Jena, and retired IAS officer and author, Aurobinda Behera, take us through the making of their book Ananta Das: A Memoir in Verse. Sangram reveals the book is the only eyewitness account narrated by a victim of the Odisha famine at the Odisha Literary Festival.
At least 150 years after the catastrophic famine wiped out a third of the population of coastal Odisha during 1865-66. While the Great Bengal Famine has been well-researched, the Odisha famine, known as “Na’nka Durbhikya,” which occurred almost a century later, has remained almost in obscurity, with very few resources available on one platform.