Suravi Sharma Kumar
Over centuries, disease outbreaks have shaped politics, crushed revolutions and entrenched racial and economic discrimination. In short, they have been a mirror to society
Each disease has a persona and it isn't just an interchangeable cause of death. The persona depends upon the nature of humankind and how societies react to it. It also depends upon how many people the disease kills, how it kills, whether it has children among its victims or orphans them, or if it surprises everybody. And once it has acquired a definitive trait, it reflects in popular culture as the transformative agent of the human condition.
During the last plague epidemic in the 19th century, one can see the impact of the disease on the thinkers and the artistic world. There was a cult of religiosity, there were themes of sudden death, repentance and getting your affairs and soul in order just in case the plague suddenly got you. It had a transformative effect on the iconography of European art.
The bubonic plague killed half the population of full continents and, therefore, had a tremendous effect on the advent of the industrial revolution, slavery and serfdom. The circumstances created by the pandemic set free many serfs in Europe, forced wage rise for labourers and caused a fundamental shift in the economy along with an increased standard of living for the survivors.
The 1918 Spanish Flu disproportionately affected young men, which in combination with World War I, created an overall shortage of manpower. This gap enabled women to play a new and indispensible role in the workforce during the crucial pandemic period, which in turn led to granting of suffrage to women in the US soon after.
Epidemics hold up the mirror to human beings, as to who we really are. They lead us to think about life's big questions. Outbreaks raise the whole question of man's relationship with God and one another. Even in India, though our historical tradition isn't very good at recording epidemics, the veneration patterns of epidemic goddesses preserve the folk memory of diseases sweeping the country. As early as the 2nd century, the outbreak of smallpox across the Silk Road led to the worship of goddess Hariti, believed to have the power to cause and thwart the disease. It resulted in numerous sculptures of the deity in the Gandhara region (present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan). In India, the legends of Shitala Mata, who had the powers to heal fever and small pox and Oladevi, the goddess of cholera, have been painted by folk artists for a long time.
The post-plague European paintings started featuring symbols like an hour glass with the sands of time running out, wilting flowers, heaps of bones and skeletons. In European Catholic countries, the main thrust was to see this as a reminder that life is temporary and provisional. One sees a great attention to themes of suddenness of death, that is, the danse macabre (dance of death) where everyone is swept away into the lap of the grim reaper.
In ancient literature and scriptures, right from Homer's Iliad to The Old Testament, plagues are associated with the idea that man is being punished for his sins. Venetian churches were built to demonstrate repentance. In the 14th and 15th centuries, we see the Flagellants embarking on a “40-day procession of repentance, self-chastisement and prayer,” whipping themselves and others.
From the perspective of political instability, the bubonic plague struck India in the late 19th century. The ruling British Government responded by introducing Renaissance-era anti-plague measures — draconian exercises of power and authority. Such measures by a colonial Government made the natives more fearful than the plague itself and they resisted.
The anti-plague activities of the health department involved police searches, isolation of the sick, detention of travellers in camps and forced evacuation of residents in parts of the city. These measures were widely regarded as offensive and alarming. The outrage against this led to the murder of WC Rand, the British chairman of the Special Plague Committee, by the Chapekar brothers, two Indian revolutionaries.
Diseases do not afflict societies in random and chaotic ways because microbes selectively expand and diffuse themselves to explore ecological niches that human beings have created. Those niches show who we are. For example, during the industrial revolution, people actually cared about what happened to workers and the poor and the conditions that the most vulnerable people lived in, which had never been a concern earlier. In today's world, we see that cholera and tuberculosis move along the fault lines created by poverty and inequality and we seem to be prepared to accept this as inevitable.
But it is also true that the way we respond depends on our values, our commitments and our sense of being a part of the human race. Many positive changes are seen arising after epidemics in history, like the end of slavery. That and the success of the Haitian rebellion and Toussaint Louverture were determined, above all, by yellow fever. When Napoleon sent the great armada to restore slavery in Haiti, the rebellion succeeded because the slaves from Africa had immunity that White Europeans in Napoleon's army didn't have that insurance. It was one of the causes that led to the Haitian independence. Besides, from an American point of view, this was what led to Napoleon's decision to abandon the idea of projecting French power in the New World and, therefore, to agree with Thomas Jefferson in 1803 to the Louisiana Purchase which doubled the size of US territory.
Varied diseases provoke different responses. One of the vaguest societal responses to a disease was to tuberculosis and how it was perceived in the Romantic period, in the early years of the 19th century. Though tuberculosis is one of the most gruesome ways to die, where, in the end, you're cyanosed and asphyxiate to death, yet, in that era, you would have it displayed on stage in a glorified way with beautiful opera heroines enacting plays with a theme around the disease.
People of that era thought that it was a disease of the élite, of the artist, of the beautiful, of the refined, and that it made people much more beautiful. So much so that fashion tried to turn women into tubercular creatures. In Toulouse Lautrec's painting, you see an anorexic-looking woman applying rice powder on her face so that she looks pale like patients with tuberculosis.
Those days, famous French novelist Victor Hugo was told by his friends that he had one great fault as a writer, which was that he wasn't tuberculous, and, therefore, he wouldn't be as great a writer as he would have been otherwise.
The germ theory of disease as put forwarded by Louis Pasteur brought forth the reality of tuberculosis in the late 19th century. The theory insisted that tuberculosis was not a disease of spontaneous generation of the beautiful classes but of the unhygienic and the poor. The whole interpretation changed and the idea of a beautiful disease disappeared.
Over the centuries, disease outbreaks have shaped politics, crushed revolutions and entrenched racial and economic discrimination. Since World War II, humanity has been living with the promise of unbeatable health and long life with prospects of reversing ageing and living forever.
The current outbreak of Covid-19 has revealed to humanity that beyond all its techno-scientific powers, the modern human being is still a fragile creature. This pandemic precipitated changes in our perspective about our relationship with the environment and with one another. While holding up a mirror to society, the virus has also deepened our social fissures. The other significant change is the rise of the Government in people's lives. Being done by many Right-wing governments across the globe, this has fit with the Indian way, too. The Government runs the show.
The current pandemic has touched every person's life in some way or the other, forcing isolation, uncertainty, anger, and hopelessness. This, coupled with the economic meltdown, is causing huge psychological distress and sets the alarm ringing for an impending mental health crisis. The full impact of the pandemic on the socio-political aspects are yet to emerge and so are the responses of the artistic world which will be reflected on canvases and papers in the coming decade.
(The writer is an author and a doctor by profession)
