Pandemics and Literature

This volume provides a literary-cum-historiographical analysis of epidemics and pandemics. It looks at folklore, tribal folktales, eyewitness accounts, memoirs and missionary writings from India and the west to explore the history of some of the major outbreaks in history. The chapters focus on the impact of outbreaks such as plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis and COVID-19, upon the material life of people, their social dislocation and their complex responses to such crises. The book studies the role of pandemics in pushing scientists, social actors and littérateurs to develop new paradigms in knowledge generation, theories of environmental dislocation and the economic slide. It examines themes such as changes in the perception of epidemic diseases across different periods of history, popular responses to state intervention during epidemics, gendering epidemics, as well as the impact of rumours during epidemics. An important contribution to the social history of health and medicine, the volume will be useful for students and researchers of cultural studies and medical anthropology, public health, literature, history of pandemics and epidemics, sociology of medicine and South Asian studies.

Kamlesh Mohan is an emeritus professor of modern history at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. Saurav Kumar Rai is Research Officer at Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti, New Delhi, India.

Part I: Popular Responses, Rumours and Political Resentments 1. Imagining an Epidemic: Literary Representation of Plague in Colonial Bengal 2. Plague, British Intervention, and Variegated Indigenous Responses in Colonial Lahore 3. The Plague Epidemic in Bombay and Poona, 1896-97: Perceptions of the Contemporary Print Media 4. Echoes of Drumbeat of Life: An Exploration into Hindi Literature on Epidemics Part II: Social Transgressions and Changing Human Relations 5. Pandemic Poetry: Tropes and Transgressions 6. Pandemics, Literature and Re-visions of Society 7. Pandemics: Time to Die, Time to Love 8. Epidemics, Fascism, Absurdity and Resistance: Albert Camus's The Plague 9. The Rajrog: Reflections on Tuberculosis in Bengali Literature Part III: Divine Punishment, Dislocations and Agonies 10. Epidemics in Tribal Folklore: Sub-Himalayan Bengal in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 11. Divine Punishment and Beyond: Epidemics and the Survey of Urdu Fiction 12. The Pandemic: A Literary Perspective 13. Memories of the Unforeseen: Epidemics, Graveyard and Religion in Malayalam Literature 14. Metaphorising an Epidemic: Khalid Jawed's Ek Khanjar Paani Mein (A Dagger in Water)