The Age of Pandemics 1817-1920: how they shaped india & the world Chinmay Tumbe HarperCollins Rs.318; Pages 292 The novel Coronavirus, aka Covid-19 pandemic which originated in neighbouring People’s Republic of China in November 2019, is still spreading contagion and death nationwide — and around the world. In India, the national response has experienced play out of Murphy’s Law — everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. Only four hours’ notice was given prior to the shutdown of all public transport services nationwide. As a result, an estimated 100 million bottom-of-pyramid rural migrant labour employed in low-end daily wage work in urban habitats were stranded without money and housing, with millions of them obliged to undertake long treks back home to their villages. This was followed by shortages of hospital beds, PPE (personal protection) kits, oxygen and latterly vaccines countrywide. Yet none of these misadventures should have happened because no geographical region worldwide has as much experience of pandemics as the Indian sub continent. Proof of this verity is provided in this timely and deeply researched history of pandemics authored by Prof. Chinmay Tumbe, who traces killer epidemics that swept the world during the past century and provides convincing proof that the Indian subcontinent was the epicentre of them all. According to Tumbe, who teaches economics at the top-ranked Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, during the period 1817-1920 three overlapping pandemics spread globally — cholera, plague and influenza — claiming 72 million lives. Of that grim toll, 40 million died in India. Therefore we should have had ingrained experience of responding to — if not efficiently managing — pandemics. But as gross mismanagement and bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic still raging through the subcontinent indicates, all information and knowledge of managing pandemics seems to have been erased from our history books and collective public memory. Why? This is the question the learned author sets out to answer in this fluent and enlightening history of the great pandemics of the past century. The cholera and plague pandemics abated by the early years of the 20th century and were replaced by perhaps the even more lethal influenza pandemics for which the watershed year was 1918. History texts covering that era are replete with momentous events of the time. The First World War had just ended, M.K. Gandhi returned to India in 1915 after several decades in South Africa and quickly became the prime leader of the nationalist freedom movement, especially after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (1919) in which hundreds of peaceful protestors in Punjab were shot down in cold blood by British commanded Indian troops. “However, if there is anything that 1918 should be known for, it is the great influenza pandemic that wiped out 40 million human beings in a matter of months. Based on my estimates, around 20 million of them died in the Indian subcontinent alone,” writes Tumbe. It’s pertinent to recall that in the period covered by Age of Pandemics (1817-1920) cholera, the plague and influenza…
