In the Sundarbans, storms and cyclones have long forced families across the India-Bangladesh border to survive. In her new book, ‘The Undocumented: One Family’s Journey from Bangladesh to India’, journalist and author Nidhi Dugar Kundalia traces one such journey, that of Safrat and her two children, drawing on thirteen years of fieldwork in a Kolkata slum. On this episode, we talk to Nidhi about why people leave home, the perilous crossings into India, the trafficking networks, the lives of people in slums, and what it really means to live undocumented, from a hospital that won’t release a body without papers to a mother fighting to get her son into school.

References:

1. Nidhi Dugar Kundalia: Instagram, X, LinkedIn
2. The Undocumented: One Family’s Journey from Bangladesh to India by Nidhi Dugar Kundalia
3. Other books by the author: The Lost Generation: Chronicling India’s Dying Professions, White as Milk and Rice: Stories of India’s Isolated Tribes, 10 Indian Tribes and the Unique Lives They Lead
4. The Past is Beautiful: Virginia Woolf
5. How Delhi Police Sent Six Indians To a Bangladeshi Prison by The Telegraph India
6. ‘Disappeared’: In Bengal, Muslims picked up from homes in midnight raids, sent to detention centres by Rokibuz Zaman
7. Last hope: Family of Bangladeshi girl ‘shot by India’s BSF’ waits for justice from Supreme Court by Ariful Islam Kurigram
8. Home by Warsan Shire
9. Why border killing has not stopped by Jamal Uddin
10. How the Climate Crisis Is Impacting Bangladesh by Diego Rojas
11. New Town slum fire sparks political slugfest by The Statesman
12. Episode 9: Journalism, Narratives and Syeda X: In conversation with Neha Dixit