Epidemic Narratives

Dilip K. Das introduces an interdisciplinary framework for epidemic narratives in India by drawing on methods from literature, social theory, and public health. He explores how communities, writers, and scholars make sense of outbreak narratives.

In the summer of 2020, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to put together material for a course on epidemic narratives. I found very little in terms of theory and nothing on narratives from India, though epidemics of both old and new diseases have continued to break out regularly. The course had three objectives: to develop a theoretical framework for epidemic narratives; to compile a corpus of narratives across genres such as epidemiological reports, media accounts, autobiographies, novels, short stories, and films; and to develop an interdisciplinary method for analysing them that connects the human sciences and humanities.  

The human sciences study general laws and structures governing human phenomena, while the humanities explore the meanings we attribute to them. In reading these texts, I drew on concepts from social theory and public health medicine, as well as the interpretative methods of literary studies. The texts covered epidemics ranging from plague at the turn of the 20th century to Spanish flu, hepatitis, HIV/AIDS, Nipah virus disease, and COVID. I taught the course for two semesters in 2020 and 2021, and four years later, published it as a book titled Epidemic Narratives.¹

Types of Epidemic Narratives: Narrative and Explanatory  

Epidemic narratives fall into four broad types based on narrative style and explanatory paradigm. The first two types of epidemic narratives are founded on the opposition between objective and subjective styles. Epidemiological reports exemplify the former, while stories of personal or collective suffering represent the latter. For instance, Dr E.S. Phipson, Special Assistant to the Health Officer, Bombay Municipality, recounts the outbreak of Spanish flu in his report, which is impersonal, objective, and based on tabulated case data.² ‘Writing of the same outbreak in his memoir, the poet Suryakant Tripathi recounts in a style that is deeply personal and subjective the tragic deaths of his wife, uncle, cousin, sister-in-law and infant niece: ‘Words cannot describe how pitiful the scene was, how hopeless, how tender.’³ Yet actual narratives rarely fit into this schema. Emotions may find expression in epidemiological reports, such as that of F.N. White, the Sanitary Commissioner of India. Reporting on the outbreak of Spanish flu in Delhi, for a moment he forgets the statistics of infection and death. He breaks into an impassioned testimony of the suffering caused by it: ‘The heart-rending scenes witnessed by all who took an active part in endeavouring to combat the influenza outbreak in India in 1918 will never be forgotten.’⁴ As Catherine Belling argues in an essay on Spanish flu in fiction, statistics cannot capture suffering except only abstractly, as ‘deceptively simple … numerical data’; because it cannot be quantified, suffering needs ‘subjective embodiment of facts’ to convey its magnitude.⁵ 

The next two types of epidemic narrative concern explanatory paradigms. Naturalistic explanations attribute outbreaks to natural factors like microbes, miasma, or an imbalance of bodily humours. They dominate literate, evidence-based health traditions such as biomedicine, ayurveda, and unani. Cosmological explanations involve divine wrath moral or transgression, and they prevail in oral, faith-based traditions. Both modes often coexist without contradiction in many societies, constituting what is called ‘medical pluralism.’ In 1998, when cases of HIV/AIDS appeared in a rural area of Karnataka in India, a high-school science teacher set up a shrine to a deity he named ‘AIDS Amma.’ He drew on the existing tradition of epidemic goddesses⁶, utilising it to raise awareness of the disease and counter stigma. Worship comprised of ritual offerings to the goddess and reading aloud scientific information on HIV/AIDS written on the wall of an adjacent water tank.⁷ Turning to narratives, when cholera breaks out in the village of Patapur in F.M. Senapati’s ‘Rebati’, ‘the immediate response was to bolt the doors and windows and keep out of the path of the demonic deity, as though the evil hag was out with her basket and broom sweeping up heads.’⁸ In Narayan’s Kocharethi, people attribute an outbreak of smallpox to the wrath of goddess Bhagavathi: 

‘It was rumoured that the people living near the temple had committed some crime. This enraged Bhagavathi … She threw a handful of small pox seeds all around, that too the very virulent variety called karinjapatta. The boils swelled up and burst open; the flesh split and pus oozed out. People just fell down and died in hordes … it was terrible.’⁹ 

In Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, the narrator interprets the outbreak of Spanish flu in 1918 as nature’s retribution for ‘the inhumanity of man’: ‘Nature herself was rebellious and seemed angry with the people of Hindustan.’¹⁰ In U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara, cosmological and naturalistic explanations coexist. For the lower-caste people, the plague outbreak is caused by a ‘Demon’; for the brahmins of Durvasapura, it is punishment for their ‘dereliction of duty in not performing [Naranappa’s] final rites’; while for the more well-informed Manjayya, it is ‘only one thing, an epidemic’ that must be stopped by sanitary measures and vaccination.¹¹   

Why Epidemics Call for Narrative 

Why do we tell stories of epidemics? What is it in an epidemic that seems to call for story as its most appropriate form of representation?  First, an epidemic unfolds as a sequence of events that are linked causally and chronologically, in the form of a story. Charles Rosenberg divides this sequence into three segments: the slow build-up of cases and deaths that leads to the acknowledgement of the outbreak; efforts to make sense of the epidemic in terms of naturalistic and cosmological explanations and measures to control its spread; and the gradual decline of the outbreak, whether through effective measures or herd immunity.¹² Though he compares this structure to that of a three-act play, it is equally applicable to narrative – his sole literary example is in fact a novel, Albert Camus’ The Plague. 

Narrative provides the most suitable form to represent the unfolding an epidemic. Secondly, in recording of an epidemic, we understand why outbreaks occur and how they are controlled, offering guidance for the future. Finally, recounting epidemics as stories of suffering and survival allows us to share experiences, draw solace and strength. 

On 24 November 2020, when nine million COVID-19 cases and more than a million deaths had been reported across the country, The Times of India launched a free blogging platform for its readers called ‘My COVID Story.’ The platform invited individuals to share their experiences, stating: ‘Your story can inspire, guide and give strength to others who are battling this pandemic in isolation.’¹³ Outbreaks of communicable disease, as Priscilla Wald argues, undermine community by placing at risk the need to communicate with each other.¹⁴ Chandan Singh’s film Infected 2030 underscores the isolation and loneliness of those who are quarantined, an experience that became a part of our everyday reality during the COVID pandemic.¹⁵ By sharing such stories, we connect empathetically with each other and together try to make sense of a calamity that overwhelms us with its devastating suddenness.  ‘We tell stories,’ writes Paul Ricoeur, ‘because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being told.’¹⁶

About the author
Dilip K. Das is a cultural studies scholar. He taught at the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. His recent publications include Epidemic Narratives: The Cultural Construction of Infectious Disease Outbreaks in India (2025) and Teaching AIDS: The Cultural Politics of HIV Disease in India (2019). You can reach out to him at deekaydas@gmail.com. 

References

1. Das, Dilip K. 2025. Epidemic Narratives: The Cultural Construction of Infectious Disease Outbreaks in India. Orient BlackSwan. ↩︎
2. Phipson, E.S. 1918. “Influenza in Bombay.” The Indian Medical Gazette, 53(12), p. 447. ↩︎
3. Tripathi, Suryakant. 2016. A Life Misspent. Translated by S. Khanna. Harper Perennial, p. 54. ↩︎
4. White, F.N. 1919. A Preliminary Report on the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in India by the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India. Government Monotype Press, p. 7. ↩︎
5. Belling, Catherine. 2009. “Overwhelming the Medium: Fiction and the Trauma of Pandemic Influenza in 1918.” Literature and Medicine, 28(1), pp. 56-57. ↩︎
6. The most well-known are the smallpox goddesses Sitala and Mariamma and the cholera goddess Ola Bibi/Ola Chandi. During the plague outbreak at the end of the 19th century, a new goddess called Plague Amma, or Uramma, found worship in various parts of the country, while Corona Devi found worship in April 2020 in Assam, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Kerala. ↩︎
7. Das, D.K. (2019). Teaching AIDS: The cultural politics of HIV disease in India. Springer, pp. 189-222. ↩︎
8. Senapati, Fakir Mohan. 2019. Rebati. In The Greatest Odia Stories Ever Told, translated by L. Mohapatra, P. St-Pierre and K.K. Mohapatra. Aleph, p. 208. ↩︎
9. Narayan. 2011. Kocharethi: The Araya Woman. Translated by C. Thankamma. Oxford University Press, p. 47. ↩︎
10. Ali, Ahmed. 1940. Twilight in Delhi. Rupa Publications, p. 229. ↩︎
11. Ananthamurthy, U.R. 1976. Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man. Translated by A.K. Ramanujan. Oxford University Press, pp. 51, 89, 89-90. ↩︎
12. Rosenberg, Charles E. 1989. “What is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective.” Daedalus, 118(2), pp.1-17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20025233. ↩︎
13. The Times of India. 2020. “My Covid Story.” November 24, 2020. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/my-covid-story. ↩︎
14. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke University Press, p. 2. ↩︎
15. Singh, Chandan P., director 2021. Infected 2030. Eros Now. ↩︎
16. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative, Vol. 1. Translated by K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer. University of Chicago Press, p. 75. ↩︎