#06: The Pandemics of our Past
India's past as the centre of global pandemics; politics and football in South America, and more.
Issue 6 | 27th Mar, 2021
Hi, and welcome to the sixth issue of the Curiosity Catalogue. This week, I’ll be talking about one of the best books I’ve come across recently - The Age of Pandemics by Chinmay Tumbe. This review was originally published by News18 just a few days ago. You might have already seen it if you follow me on Twitter. If so, you can skip towards the bottom of the issue, where I have a round-up of other recommendations for you.
The Pandemics of our Past
As COVID-19 upturned our word, it felt like it came out of nowhere. Though brief flickers of our experience with swine flu came to mind, living memory offered little precedent to guide us through a crisis of this magnitude.
The facts of our past, however, tell a different story. As Chinmay Tumbe’s brilliant new book, The Age of Pandemics, shows, these cataclysmic events have been a significant part of India’s modern history.
We lived in the ‘age of pandemics,’ according to Tumbe, between 1817 and 1920. In this century, the world was ravaged in succession by cholera, the plague, and influenza. Disease and death spread across continents, carried by links of trade and colonialism. About seventy million people perished globally – more fatalities than from the incessant warfare of this era. Forty million died in India alone, yet, as Tumbe notes, in the country most devastated by these diseases, little is remembered of them.
Part of the reason for this amnesia, Tumbe argues, is that the world hasn’t experienced a catastrophe of this scale since the influenza pandemic (popularly known as Spanish flu). Advancements in medicine and the growth of accountable governance have helped India and other parts of the world escape the vicious cycle of calamities. Even as we struggle to conquer COVID-19, Tumbe reminds us that global COVID mortality is likely to be a fraction of Indian mortality alone in past pandemics.
These developments seems to have inspired arrogance, the belief that this can never happen again. Reality doesn’t bother with such fanciful beliefs – the current state of the world has proved that. What COVID 19 has done is trigger much-needed contemplation and a desire to understand these cataclysmic forces, evident in the flurry of new books published and old ones rediscovered on the subject. In this crowded literary landscape, Tumbe’s book stands a cut above the rest, for the audacity of its scope and the skill of its execution.
It isn’t often that histories of global events are told from an Indian perspective, and rarer still that they are told with such finesse. In fact, one of the reasons for our forgetfulness, Tumbe argues, is that much of the history we study is written in the west, which remained relatively unaffected by the age of pandemics. Their priorities remained the growth of empire and industry, reflected in the stories they tell of this era. Though clearly catastrophic in India, memories of these diseases have been blurred by the imposing legacy of the national movement.
Yet, as Tumbe writes, these catastrophes weren’t divorced from the more known forces of industrialism, imperialism and anti-colonialism. For one, they spread rapidly across the globe via networks of imperialism and capitalism. Additionally, though pandemics begin with a disease, as we’ve seen with COVID-19, their management is a matter of politics and policy. Here, the governance and ideologies of this era held significant influence.
The colonial government in India wasn’t known for its sensitivity, and this reflected in harsh measures taken to combat the diseases. The resentment these provoked fuelled Indians’ desire for self-government. New political leaders entered the fray in this context - Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Sardar Patel and even Gandhi in South Africa gained prominence and popularity, both aiding pandemic relief efforts and mobilising opinion against the British.
The book blends this world of high politics with the very human experience of dealing with death and disease. Tumbe refers, for example, to the words of Marathi writer Lakshmibai Tilak, who wrote the following about the squalid conditions of quarantine camps for those infected with plague: “We were surrounded by the sick. They screamed and beat on the tin walls… When you walked, pebbles bit into the soles of your feet. There was no food in our stomachs and no sleep in our eyes… I thought if Yama [the god of death] had a kingdom anywhere, it had to be here.”
These miseries were compounded by other catastrophes, most notably frequent famines. The famines were disasters in their own right, and killed over 20 lakh people between 1896 and 1898, significantly more than the 1.5 lakh killed by the plague. Poor rains worsened the quality of water sources, exacerbating the spread of cholera. The famines cast a long shadow - food scarcity heightened malnutrition, increasing long-term susceptibility to illness.
Unsurprisingly, the impact of disease was uneven. Privilege, as it so often does, purchased safety. As Tumbe notes, Europeans and Parsis had a fatality rate from influenza of around 1%, half of that for Muslims and upper-caste Hindus, and one-sixth what lower castes suffered. Lower caste groups also had the least access to clean water, and were preyed on by cholera with greater ferocity. Women disproportionately bore the brunt of disease – the burden of tending to the diseased often fell on them, and they consequently suffered higher mortality rates. Global inequalities were exacerbated as well, with mass mortality in India contributing to its lost stature in this period.
Accompanying these harsh details are also observations of eccentricities. Tumbe writes, for example, of the spurious treatments that abounded at times when both western and native medicine proved ineffective; those suggested for cholera ranging ranged from relatively benign, like bathing in warm or cold water and consuming opium, to the outright dangerous, like cauterizing the spine, pouring boiling water on the infected, and administering electric shocks.
As we’ve experienced, lockdowns were considered a method of preventing disease spread, though their economic impact was often unacceptable. Population density of urban areas made them more susceptible to outbreaks. Scenes we saw a year ago occurred then as well, with the fear of illness triggering waves of rural migration. At one point in the plague half of Bombay had fled the infected city, bringing economic activity to a standstill. Influenza inspired a similar movement, but the disease’s ferocity killed many before they reached their villages.
Whether we remember them or not, these pandemics were clearly an intrinsic, if unwelcome, part of life not too long ago. Because of pandemics (and other calamities), Tumbe says, rather poetically, “[o]nce upon a time, we barely lived before we died. We would celebrate on average only twenty-five birthdays in our lifetimes and we rarely grew old enough to see our grandchildren.''
Though we’ve lived with greater stability and security since then, COVID 19 has rudely reminded us of our frailties in the face of catastrophe. Lest we continue to suffer the follies of forgetfulness, we’d do well to learn the lessons of history.
It is for this reason that Age of Pandemics becomes supremely important. Replete with facts, anecdotes and analysis, it is accessible to even the lay-reader. Masterfully condensing dense history science into simple prose, Tumbe reacquaints us with our past, and prepares us better as we navigate our way through an increasingly uncertain present and future.
The Round-up
In case you’re intrigued by the review above but may not have time for the book, I recommend listening to a wonderful conversation between Amit Varma and Chinmay Tumbe about the book on The Seen and the Unseen podcast (episode 205, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc). As with most podcasts I recommend, I’d suggest you listen to it between 1.5x to 2x the regular speed.
If you’ve had enough of pandemic-related reading but want to read Tumbe’s work, you can check out his earlier book India Moving, a history of migration in the subcontinent.
I’ve recently come across Ann Patchett’s writing, and fallen a little in love with it. You might have heard of here new novel, The Dutch House - it gained popularity in India after it won last year’s Pullitzer for fiction. I’m yet to get to that, and what I’m recommending here instead is a wonderful essay she published in the New Yorker, titled How to Practice.
After the father (Kent) of a long-time friend (Tavia) passed away, Ann spent many days helping Tavia sort through the multitudinous possessions Kent accumulated across the many eccentric phases of his life. Amongst these possessions were everything from Armani suits to fifteen pairs of cowboy boots; an assortment of Buddha statues and dining-chairs with backs that mimicked Paris metro signs. These were signs of a life lived, but the meaning they held largely died with their owner. Patchett quotes Tavia’s sister Therese, who said, “He made everything magic when he was alive…Now it’s all just stuff.”
Sorting through the remnants of Kent’s life led Patchett to take a look at her own. Though not a hoarder to the same extent, possessions picked up along the way accumulated silently, beyond reach at the back of cupboards and drawers, out of sight in a basement, gathering dust in corners. Realisation triggered response, and Patchett promised herself she’d never leave anyone the task of sorting through similar mountains. Soon, she and her husband began a “deep excavation” of their house, and this essay documents the deeply intense experience that followed, where she reckoned both with her past as well as her impending mortality.
I read this essay a few weeks after I turned 25, and it feels like one of those things that came to me at the right time in my life. Consequently, It’s become something I believe is essential reading for people in their 20s. It’s at this age that we become capable of affording significant purchases, many of us having started earning. Accumulation of possessions becomes the default setting, and constant vigilance is required to forgo the superfluous. This essay, then, becomes a guide of sorts. Re-reading it, I realise that at no does it actually preach the same path to readers. It is, at heart, a chronicle of one person’s experience. Even if it doesn’t inspire similar action, it’s certainly a worthy candidate for weekend reading.
Tifo is one of YouTube’s most famous football channels, and for good reason. Beyond their hihg-quality coverage of goings-on in world football, they also create content like in the video below, with nuggets of sport history whose context and implications go far beyond the football field. This video, for example, is about Columbia’s elite “Pirate League” that arose in the shadow of military dictatorships and political turmoil in South America.
The overlap between football and politics that gave rise to El Dorado reminded me of Rhyszard Kapuscinski’s book The Soccer War. The book chronicles Kapuscinski’s coverage of South America in the 1960s and 70s, when he was the only foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency. The essay that inspired the title of the book was about the war between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969, which coincided with/followed World Cup qualifying matches between the countries. In South America, as Kapuscinski makes clear in the quote below, the battlefield and football field are inextricably linked. The patriotic fervour evoked by the game makes Indians’ devotion to cricket look like little more than a tame pastime, really. Recalling a conversation with a local journalist, Kapusciniski writes,
“In Latin America, he said, the border between soccer and politics is vague. There is a long list of governments that have fallen or been overthrown after the defeat of the national team. Players on the losing team are denounced in the press as traitors. When Brazil won the World Cup in Mexico, an exiled Brazilian colleague of mine was heartbroken: ‘The military right wing,’ he said, ‘can be assured of at least five more years of peaceful rule.’ On the way to the title, Brazil beat England. In an article with the headline ‘Jesus Defends Brazil’, the Rio de Janeiro paper Jornal dos Sportes explained the victory thus: ‘Whenever the ball flew towards our goal and a score seemed inevitable, Jesus reached his foot out of the clouds and cleared the ball.’ Drawings accompanied the article, illustrating the supernatural intervention.
“Anyone at the stadium can lose his life. Take the match that Mexico lost to Peru, two-one. An embittered Mexican fan shouted in an ironic tone, ‘Viva Mexico!’ A moment later he was dead, massacred by the crowd. But sometimes the heightened emotions find an outlet in other ways. After Mexico beat Belgium one-nil, Augusto Mariaga, the warden of a maximum security prison in Chilpancigo (Guerrero State, Mexico), became delirious with joy and ran around firing a pistol into the air and shouting, ‘Viva Mexico!’ He opened all the cells, releasing 142 dangerous hardened criminals. A court acquitted him later, as, according to the verdict, he had ‘acted in patriotic exultation.’”
I really recommend you read more of his writing. You can start with a longer extract of the above essay here.
About me: I'm Shantanu Kishwar, a lover of fun trivia and well-made hummus. I currently work as a Teaching Assistant at FLAME University, Pune. Feel free to follow my sporadic updates on Twitter and Instagram.
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