A Review of Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence

During the COVID-19 lockdown, a group of writers from an online magazine community, Café Dissensus, came forward to develop on the growing readership virally directed towards a niche genre of outbreak narratives. The first online issue released in 2021 under the editorship of Nishi Pulugurtha was sooner improvised and made available in print format in 2023 as Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence. The collection is dedicated to interest “the students of English literature, social science, gender studies, cultural studies, psychology, society, politics and philosophy” (Pulugurtha 2021, Editorial note) and general readers, given its broad mapping of contagious environs. The volume of sixteen chapters is open and creative in its interpretation of pan/epidemics through the lens of literature, films, letters, and even digital obituaries.This book has a timely release as a crucial improvisation of Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation (Venkatesan et al. 2022)—focusing exclusively on how contagious cultures were historically negotiated till the present. The chapters are divided into the following sections: 1. Memory and Contagion; 2. Uncanny Dilemmas; 3. Moving between Language and Media; 4. Fear, Disaster and Dystopia; and 5. COVID-19, Public Health and Social Justice. Instead of bringing a fluid transition between the chapters, this arbitrary division and ordering of the chapters makes the collection seem more broken. A much better scale for the grouping and aligning of chapters could have been devised based on the genre, timeline, or geography or demography in context.The review picks all the chapters based on the suggested layers of classification to delve in-depth into the sociocultural intricacies it speaks of. Dealing with Indian literatures from the colonial era, Subham Dutta’s chapter narrates on the “Epidemic Anxiety and Narrative Aesthetics in Sarat Chandra’s Palli Samaj and Pandit Mashay,” which exhaustively deals with epidemics as “co-texts” in Bengali literature (2023, 72). The chapter stands out with its formalist development in making efforts to self-translate Bengali passages to English. It delivers a crucial problem addressed by unveiling how many vernacular texts focusing on pan/epidemics are untranslated and inaccessible to the larger public readership. Sipra Mukherjee and Ishan Mehandru, in this collection, conduct a comparative reading of Suryakant Tripathi Nirala’s Kulli Bhaat with two different short fictions, Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Rebati and Rajinder Bedi’s Quarantine, respectively. Sipra Mukherjee requests “a different literary approach” (18) and “different way of thinking” (23) when it comes to comprehending epidemics via Indian vernacular literature—however, fails to offer conclusive findings on different methodologies. Ishan Mehandru vocally declines Agamben in the Indian context by addressing how “the plague does not germinate a state of exception” given India’s history of consisting of a priori “exceptional people” who only become explicitly vulnerable during pan/epidemics. In chapter 12, Sumantra Baral focuses on a single text, Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, from the lens of Robert Paine’s no-risk thesis to critique the political milieu of colonial India, which remained in denial towards the 1918 Spanish Flu as it gripped colonial Delhi. Subarna Bhattacharya’s chapter purloins a letter written by Pandita Ramabhai, “a firebrand women’s rights activist” (128), to The Bombay Guardian in 1897. Via the letter, she explains the covert sexual abuse suffered by Indian women during the Bombay Plague, stating a historic “urgency to save brown women from white men and white women” (136) rephrasing cultural critic Gayatri Spivak. In Indian literature, the repetitive reading of the same text, like Nirala’s Kulli Bhaat in certain chapters, further indicates a dearth in the availability and accessibility of exhaustive and extensive Indian literature surrounding outbreaks.The collection compensates for such a vernacular gap with its coverage of world literature and texts from other media. However, repetition is inevitably found here, as well, with Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of The Plague Year being dealt with in comparative (transgeneric and transmedial) reading by Amit Baishya and Sanghita Sanyal. While Baishya offers a minimalist reading of the opening sequences of the latest Hollywood film World War Z and Defoe’s Journal, Sanyal compares Defoe’s entry with its pop-culture manifestation, The Periwig Maker, a stop-motion puppet animation film. Sacaria Joseph, following a similar format, continues his philosophical deliberation on Albert Camus’ The Plague by shuffling between biblical references to locate the “absent God” (84) during times of disaster-like outbreak. Sarottama Majumdar and Tania Chakravertty cleverly unveil the semi-biographical undertone of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Katherine Anne Porter’s A Pale Horse, Pale Rider, offering scope for life-writing outbreak experiences within creative spaces. Riti Agarwala “deal(s) with the gap” (57) of the porous, thin line between fiction and nonfiction in The Decameron, where storytelling during a crisis renders a cathartic experience. Goutam Karmakar’s chapter on Pandemic and Man-Less Society is a hypothetical assessment of Sweeney-Baird’s The End of Men. The idea of how “only men carry the virus [and] only women can save us” (44) is highly metaphorical towards patriarchy where the chapter critically locates “trans women and gay men” as super-minority vis-à-vis doubly marginalized. (Post)modern fiction’s popularization of the outbreak as foreseeing dystopic futures is elucidated by Paramita Dutta’s exploration of Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague and Sayan Aich Bhowmik’s reading on Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake focusing its relevance on contemporary warfare politics. Following a discussion on a similar thread, Tabish Khair brings out a Marxist analysis of “quasi-vampire” and “quasi-zombie” adaptations to offer a neo-populist model to attend informal migrant workers who are treated as “superfluous” (172) living-dead in the neoliberal necropolis. The final chapter by Yash Gupta stands out in its thoroughly critical yet creative analysis of digital obituaries as literary texts vis-à-vis the birth site of posthumous identities.This collection primarily exhausts mainstream pan/epidemic narratives as a contribution towards global crisis literature—noting it as a responsible act of cultural materialism exhibited for nurturing pandemic preparedness. It leaves further room for discussion in terms of including a larger array of narratives, both oral and written, particularly from vernacular cultures and languages, to strongly reflect on Indigenous perceptions of pandemics, epidemics, and pestilence

Pandemic · COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts · History · Medicine · Philosophy · Internal Medicine