A new book examines how epidemics have been represented in Indian literature and cultural media

Quarantines and the evacuation of places of disease have been standard measures globally to contain epidemics for centuries, ever since the plague outbreak in Boccaccio’s time, though their scientific basis came to be known only after the emergence of germ theory in the 19th century.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault details the closure of plague-stricken towns and the meticulous surveillance that was invented as a new mode of visibility at the turn of the 18th century. During the Bombay plague epidemic in 1896–97, municipal authorities evacuated the areas where the number of cases was high, fumigated and lime-washed the buildings, demolished structures that blocked air and light, and razed to the ground the huts of the poor. But epidemics were then largely local phenomena, and their spread to other areas was relatively slow as communication systems were not highly developed. The Spanish flu pandemic presented a different scenario, as the virus was rapidly carried from the battlefields of Europe to other parts of the world by soldiers returning home – a rapidity that surpassed, as the Sanitary Commissioner of India F Norman White put it, the speed of travel.

The speed with which COVID spread was unprecedented, even when compared to Spanish flu, solely...

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