Ananya Chatterjee and Aratrika Das analyse two Indian short stories to highlight how literature portrays the violence of the third plague pandemic when placed within the socio-cultural landscape of the time.
Introduction
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Arundhati Roy, in her highly critical article “The pandemic is a portal” (2020, n.p.), lambasted the handling of the disease by the state machineries of the USA and India. Her metaphorical usage of the term “portal” attached a temporal sensibility to the pandemic, which positioned it as a “gateway” between the past and future. This remark was described as a “bold statement of possibilities” by David Arnold (2022, 10), who further asserted that the pandemic portal offered a simultaneous temporal association.
In this context, rather than offering a clear break from the past, a pandemic event becomes a concurrent point for past reference and present reflection. A major parallel between the contemporary COVID-19 pandemic and the third plague pandemic in India is the question of disease management by state authorities. The Epidemic Diseases Act, first enacted in 1897 to control the spread of the third plague pandemic across India, was reintroduced in 2020 to control the spread of COVID-19 in the country. Highly authoritarian in nature, this reintroduction of the colonial era Act highlighted a crucial link with the third plague pandemic: that of the inextricable nexus between disease and violence.
Owing to prior, devastating experiences of the Black Death (1346) and the Great Plague of London (1665), the advent of the third plague pandemic in 1896, at the port city of Bombay, emulated a crisis of frenzy among the colonial administration comparable with the “summer of 1857,” a time of violent colonial repression during India’s first war of independence (Kidambi 2014). India had already been earmarked as the origin site for the cholera pandemic of 1817 and the bubonic plague outbreak of 1896 led to international pressure that threatened the behemoth trading status of the British Empire.
In response, the colonial administration enacted the aforementioned Epidemic Diseases Act (1897), which authorised intrusive regulations and has been described as “one of the most draconian pieces of sanitary legislation” (Arnold 2022, 78). The colonised body was identified as the locus of plague pathogens and became the victim of an “unprecedented assault” (Arnold 1993, 203). The implementation of the act and its violent repercussions is one of the major ways the extrinsic factors associated themselves with the disease and defined its local experience. The incidence of the third plague pandemic, which resulted in 12 million deaths in India alone (Echenberg 2007), underscores the importance of understanding the devastating effects of the plague, beyond the visceral and observable symptoms on the bodies of the colonised.
Though the historical records of the third plague pandemic highlight the Indian people’s ensuing rage against administrative overregulation, it is in the narrative rendering of the plague’s incidence where the myriad ways colonised Indians experienced the third plague pandemic is effectively captured. Short stories – for example, Master Bhagwandas’ The Plague Witch (1902) and Rajinder Bedi’s Quarantine (1940), on which we will focus here – allow the disease to be positioned within its cultural context. Through narration, the plague acquires extrinsic, violent subjectivities, which foreground the local experiences of displacement of colonial bodies, stigmatisation of patients, and oppressive dualities caused by disease and societal inequalities.
Image credit: Captain C. Moss; National Army Museum. Out of copyright.
The pandemic narratives
In general, disease histories are considered globally relevant only when they are placed within a framework that favours the common denominators of the disease’s spread; however, the third plague pandemic is rooted in local experiences (Mukharji 2009). Since the violence of the plague was disproportionately directed towards the colonised body in India, it is imperative to highlight the indigenous people’s experience of the plague. Arnold (2022, 11) also lays emphasis on broadening the sources of evidence to understand the Indian experience of the plague, focussing particularly on the development of “a vernacular authority” and giving space to conversations otherwise shadowed in “colonialism’s domineering discourse.” Congruent with these arguments, the reading of short stories, such as The Plague Witch and Quarantine, highlight these violent subjectivities associated with the plague. The literary narratives allow space to narrate people’s experiences by contextualising the plague’s incidence within the ingrained exclusionary practices and marginalisation prevalent in Indian society of the time.
The Plague Witch, originally written in Hindi, is grounded in the pervasive fear of the plague disease. Driven by fear of contracting the plague, the wealthy landowner Vibhav Singh decides to leave the city and hands over the cremation responsibilities of his dead wife to his servants. However, it is revealed that his wife has mistakenly been pronounced dead by the doctor when she regains her senses. Following a series of fateful events, the stranded wife arrives at the place where Vibhav Singh and her son are now residing. But the villagers, who believed that she was dead, denounce her as a witch upon seeing her covered in a shroud and faintly calling out for help, with red-swollen eyes.
Quarantine, originally written in Urdu, is narrated by Dr Bakshi, who works in a quarantine centre. Bakshi is frightened by the prospect of contracting the plague himself and of ending up in quarantine. In contrast, Bhago, a street sweeper, bravely offers himself to serve the plague-afflicted patients and is tasked with getting close to them and disposing of corpses. Bhago’s actions inspire Dr Bakshi to overcome his dread of the plague and treat the poor residing in the plague-afflicted slums.
These texts highlight the extrinsic ways through which the plague inserted itself within anomalous cultural subjectivities of abrupt, forceful displacements, stigmatisation of patients as a result of fear, and underlying factors of class, caste and gender, which complicated the experience of plague in India. The reading of such narratives from the past enables the formation of an analytic framework that allows reflection on the human experiences and violent subjectivities attached to the third plague pandemic.
Local experiences of the extrinsic violence of the plague
Both Bhagwandas and Bedi commence their narratives with the question of displacement, which is presented as the foremost of the violent consequences of the third plague pandemic. By virtue of occupying the patient’s body, plague also claimed the space in which they resided. Bhagwandas, in The Plague Witch, notes that when the plague arrived, “people started to abandon their houses” (269). The rich lawyers, doctors and landowners like Vibhav Singh abandoned the plague-infected area.
In Quarantine, Bedi highlights the pervasive incomprehension associated with the plague by comparing its descent with an insidious fog which engulfed “everything in a blanket of gloom and dread” (37). The displaced are the patients, those picked up by ambulances and brought to the “worse than hell” quarantine centres (42). As the plague set “people and pathogens in motion” (Arnold 2022, 80), the violence of the disease irrevocably showed itself through the violence of displacement.
The driving factor behind this displacement was not only the fear of contagion, but also the “violence of a regime in sanitary overdrive” (Arnold 2022, 80). Indians were subject to widespread disinfection drives, targeted checking for symptoms, forceful confinement in isolated quarantine centres and the destruction of alleged infected property. Amidst this, the plague patients, believed to be the locus of contagion, suffered an agonising stigmatisation and effacement of their agency.
In The Plague Witch, Vibhav Singh’s wife is mispronounced dead by the doctor, who only “saw her face from afar” (270). The fear of the plague’s contagion is so pervasive that neither Vibhav Singh nor the servants verify the doctor’s claim and the wife’s bier is hastily dumped in the river. Despite being alive, as noted earlier, the villagers label her as a witch. This wrongful labelling of the wife’s body – first as dead and then as a witch – highlights the distress of superstition and stigma suffered by plague patients.
In Quarantine, Dr Bakshi claims that the fear of isolation in quarantine superseded the fear of contracting the plague itself. He further laments the concealing of patients by families, owing to the government mandate for doctors to inform on plague patients. Patients in the quarantine centre succumbed to death because they were placed in an unfamiliar, germ-filled environment, where they witnessed an “unceasing cycle of death” around them; they were “thrown in a heap like corpses of dogs” and cremated without observing any of the customary rituals (38).
The handling of diseased bodies in the stories further highlights the malignant social inequalities of class, caste and gender which complicated the incidence of plague (Arnold 2022; Mehandru 2023). Bhagwandas and Bedi underline the peripheralization of these inequalities in their narratives by launching a critique against the elitism of the affluent. In The Plague Witch, Vibhav Singh ascertains distance from the contagiousness of the disease by being a member of the upper class. His social standing enables him to subvert the compulsory Hindu cremation rituals, which he pushes upon the servants. Despite being the central character, Bhagwandas’s characterisation of the unnamed wife highlights how a woman suffering from plague experienced dual subjugation – that of disease and that of entrenched patriarchy.
In Quarantine, Bedi identifies similar underlying social inequalities in the context of the plague. Bhago is characterised as a foil to Dr Bakshi, whose heroic determination to support plague patients is layered upon caste-based marginalisation (Mehandru 2023). Owing to his caste, Bhago is tasked with disposing of the plague-infected corpses, which forces him to become intimate with the disease. As noted earlier, Bhago’s relentless will to serve the patients, despite his wife’s death, inspires Bakshi to visit the slums and treat the poor. Yet, when the plague subsides, Dr Bakshi’s services are gallantly rewarded, while Bhago’s obligatory duties go unrecognised. Bhago thus becomes the face of dual punitive oppression caused by disease and casteist inequalities.
Conclusion
The contemporary experiences of COVID-19 in India, marked by the reintroduction of the Epidemic Diseases Act, imposed quarantine, fear of contagion, effacement of patients’ agency, mass migrant exodus, and societal inequalities, also featured in the social realities of colonised Indians during the third plague pandemic. Yet the two pandemics differ vastly, particularly in terms of easier access to health infrastructure and augmented welfare measures in contemporary India. The similarities and contrasts in how the pandemics are experienced demonstrate the necessity of studying past pandemics to enable the simultaneous comprehension of present pandemic experiences.
Besides significantly deepening the historical understanding of the impact of the third plague pandemic in colonial India, The Plague Witch and Quarantine also highlight the simultaneous interaction between culture and plague. Foregrounded via the displacement of colonised bodies, the effacement of patients’ agency and the ingrained inequalities of Indian society, the narratives reveal the multifarious extrinsic violence attached to the plague and which defined the local experience of it. In this regard, by highlighting the frailty of human lives, literary narratives of pandemics play a pivotal role in enabling contemporary reflections on disease’s interplay with societal factors amidst looming microbial threats.
About the authors
Ananya Chatterjee is a second-year doctoral candidate (English) in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore. Her research area is Medical Humanities, wherein she studies the cultural perception and reception of diseases through pandemic narratives.
Dr Aratrika Das is Assistant Professor (English) in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore. Her research interests include nineteenth-century British literature, the Gothic, Medical Humanities and writing pedagogy. Recipient of international and national travel and research grants, she is currently working on two funded projects: “Teesta and Siliguri in Maps, Memories and Music” on methods of archiving the social, ecological and cultural practices of South Asia, funded by the India Foundation for the Arts; and “Critical Thinking and Writing Lab IIT Indore” which seeks to create pedagogical tools and theoretical vocabulary from South Asia, funded by the J P Narayan National Centre of Excellence in the Humanities, 2023–25.
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