1st Edition
Pandemics and Literature Regional and Global Perspectives
This volume provides a literary-cum-historiographical analysis of epidemics and pandemics. It looks at folklores, 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.
Introduction
Part I: Popular Responses, Rumours and Political Resentments
1. Imagining an Epidemic: Literary Representation of Plague in Colonial Bengal
Arabinda Samanta
2. Plague, British Intervention, and Variegated Indigenous Responses in Colonial Lahore
Maysoon Sheikh
3. The Plague Epidemic in Bombay and Poona, 1896-97: Perceptions of the Contemporary Print Media
Mridula Ramanna
4. Echoes of Drumbeat of Life: An Exploration into Hindi Literature on Epidemics
Binda D. Paranjape
Part II: Social Transgressions and Changing Human Relations
5. Pandemic Poetry: Tropes and Transgressions
Akshaya Kumar
6. Pandemics, Literature and Re-visions of Society
Kamalakar Bhat
7. Pandemics: Time to Die, Time to Love
Gurupdesh Singh
8. Epidemics, Fascism, Absurdity and Resistance: Albert Camus’s The Plague
Parminder Singh
9. The Rajrog: Reflections on Tuberculosis in Bengali Literature
Suvankar Dey
Part III: Divine Punishment, Dislocations and Agonies
10. Epidemics in Tribal Folklore: Sub-Himalayan Bengal in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Sahara Ahmed
11. Divine Punishment and Beyond: Epidemics and the Survey of Urdu Fiction
Shafey Kidwai
12. The Pandemic: A Literary Perspective
Manju Jaidka
13. Memories of the Unforeseen: Epidemics, Graveyard and Religion in Malayalam Literature
Shaheen Kelachan Thodika
14. Metaphorising an Epidemic: Khalid Jawed’s Ek Khanjar Paani Mein (A Dagger in Water)
Mohammad Afaan
Biography
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.
