The Indian poet Sukanta Bhattacharya died at just twenty of tuberculosis in 1947. Bhattacharya wrote gut-wrenchingly of the Bengal famine, which was orchestrated by British colonial authorities and resulted in the deaths of perhaps three million people. Bhattacharya’s death was probably hastened by his own experiences during the famine—as we’ve seen, malnutrition can trigger a tuberculosis infection into active disease. “Our history will be shaped by / Hungry stomachs,” he wrote. An Indian newspaper referred to him as “the John Keats of Bengal,” and like Keats he was credited with a wisdom
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