An alumnus of Mumbai University and London School of Economics, Chinmay Tumbe is currently assistant professor of economics at IIM-Ahmedabad. Excerpts from an interview with Dilip Thakore: Congratulations for your timely new book The Age of Pandemics 1817-1920 — How they Shaped India and the World. The subtitle of your book seems to suggest that the history of the great pandemics that swept the world in those years is inadequate and its impact under-estimated. Am I right? Yes. For instance this age of pandemics between 1817-1920 took over 70 million lives which is about the same loss as in the two World Wars of the 20th century. But although we are well-informed about the World Wars, the public knows very little about the pandemics. Age of Pandemics provides compelling evidence that in those years, the Indian subcontinent was the epicentre of the great pandemics — Cholera (1817), Plague (1894) and Influenza (1918) — which wiped out 72 million lives worldwide, with an astonishing toll of 40 million in India in the 19th and early 20th centuries. So we should have been well-experienced to manage the latest Covid pandemic. But obviously we were not. How do you explain this conundrum? Unfortunately, we have little collective memory of that age of pandemics because it is not taught in our schools, nor surprisingly, in our medical colleges. We remember the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy of April 1919 and the hundreds of lives lost, but not the raging influenza pandemic a few months before that incident, which took a toll of nearly 20 million lives. Epidemics tend to slip through history because they are often not clearly identifiable enemies and leave little property destruction behind. Although the impact of pandemics is measured in terms of lives lost, they also heavily impact the economies of nations. To what extent would you say the 1817- 1920 pandemics were responsible for the precipitous decline of the subcontinent from one of the most prosperous regions of the world for several millennia, to its impoverishment in the 19th and 20th centuries? I don’t see it as impoverishment as much as relative stagnation and pandemics contributed to that by hurting economic activities. For instance, in 1918-19, real GDP fell by over 10 percent and inflation surged to 30 percent. Pandemics, combined with famines of the late 19th century, had a deadly impact on the Indian economy. The popular Western narrative is that the prime cause of the subcontinent’s successive pandemics is poor hygiene and sanitation. Yet you suggest that the major causes were rising international trade, continuous movement of British and Indian soldiers within India and the British empire. What’s your comment? There is little doubt that the British took more precautions against pandemics for their own people in Britain than for Indians in the subcontinent. In the case of cholera, British officials in India resisted scientific evidence that it was water-borne for four decades, and millions of Indians died due to that disease. In the case of plague, not enough…
