His accounts — as well as other stories centred on food insecurities in India and the UK between the 16th and 19th centuries — are now part of a project called Famine Tales, which seeks to highlight the overlapping history of famines in the two countries. Kolkata’s Jadavpur University (JU) has joined forces with the University of Exeter in the UK in order to turn these tales into a visual format that features the ancient art of patachitra as well as modern graphic-novel styles. “A big part of what the project sets out to do revolves around engaging with archival data that seems far-off and distant, and make it more immediate and accessible through community engagement and art,” says Shrutakirti Dutta, a PhD scholar at JU who is a part of it. She adds that the patachitra painters hail mainly from Naya, a village in West Bengal, while the graphic artists are spread out across the country. Both groups had free reign to reinterpret the tales in their own way, adding their distinctive visual flavour to the textual narrative.

Ayesha Mukherjee

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And these narratives highlight how there is a curious overlapping of time frames when it comes to India and the UK experiencing famines respectively. Professor Ayesha Mukherjee, who teaches at the University of Exeter and is the principal investigator for Famine Tales, tells us how you’ll find the timelines to be eerily similar if you simply list out the big famines that occur in the 16th and 17th centuries in both countries. She says, “It made me wonder about this relationship, since it couldn’t just be coincidence. One of the reasons was climactic occurrences that led to weather anomalies like incessant rain and excessive cold. And the dates of the famines in both places also coincide with the nascent period of growing interaction between the two countries.”

Shrutakirti Dutta

It’s that interaction that Mundy’s journals and the other tales shed light on, almost 400 years later. They speak of a time when our relationship with the British wasn’t that of master and subject, but of business partners with common commercial interests and a shared history of famines. Most of us are familiar with the era of the Raj. But this project takes us further back in time, to a period when the British were mere traders on our land, before turning into colonisers ruling us with an iron fist.

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