Where the Birds Never Sing

Where the Birds Never Sing is a riveting story told in fits and starts, gathering together a series of images, documents, and textual commentary to address the 1979 massacre of Bengali refugees on Marichjhapi Island in Sundarban, West Bengal. Soumya Sankar Bose has worked with survivors of this traumatic event to recall and, at times, reenact memories of their survival for his camera. Their stories and the resulting images are buttressed by a number of small-scale facsimiles of various governmental reports tipped into the pages of the book—rare fragments of documentation that have survived an effort to destroy official evidence of the incident, one of the many violent repercussions that continue to follow, decades later, in the wake of Indian independence and partition. The results, per Martin, form a “strong example of book making in the subjective documentary mode.”