New Delhi: The Covid-19 pandemic has devastated lives and livelihoods across the world and as global efforts to curb the virus continue, it becomes important to look back in history at the various pandemics the world has faced.
In ‘The Age of Pandemics’, author Chinmay Tumbe looks at the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which is mostly known for industrial revolution and imperial conquests but was also termed the ‘age of pandemics’. The period witnessed the cholera, plague and influenza pandemics, which claimed 70 million lives between 1817 and 1920. And India was severely affected by all three.
The book, published by Harper Collins India, is due to be released on 22 December on ‘SoftCover’, ThePrint’s e-venue to launch select non-fiction books.
Tumbe, significantly, provides the first comprehensive coverage of the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed more people than World War I.
“When Covid-19 first struck, there was this remarkable assertion by some in India that Indian immunity can withstand such pandemics or that no pandemics had ever originated in India. It was as if the memory of the cholera, plague and influenza pandemics that ravaged India and the world between 1817 and 1920 was wiped clean from the public memory,” he says.
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Lessons for Covid from earlier pandemics
In his book, Tumbe presents an account of the “scale of devastation, the likely causes and consequences, and the resilience with which people faced those uncertain times” of the three outbreaks at the time.
Spread between the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Tumbe also points out relevant learnings from those times that can be used in the battle against the Covid pandemic.
“I was struck by how quickly (in about a hundred years or so) we had reached a point where there was almost no collective memory of India’s ‘age of pandemics’ – a century lasting till 1920 when India had been ravaged by successive pandemics that decimated the population and impacted every aspect of the country’s life,” says Swati Chopra, executive editor at HarperCollins India.
“In writing about that time, Chinmay brings his depth of knowledge and width of perception (and love for puns and anecdotes) to bear on a subject rendered all the more relevant by the current pandemic we are living through. A book to be read, and savoured if such a subject can be, by everyone who is curious about where we are today and how we got here,” he adds.
Tumbe is a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and is an alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He has also authored the book ‘India Moving: A History of Migration’.
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