The Fear of Plague: The Inner Demons of a Society

Plague activates anxieties and imageries few other diseases do. Tuberculosis invokes the images of dissipation and waste, occasionally even of nineteenth-century romanticism and self-destruction. John Keats suffered from tuberculosis; so probably did Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's hero Devdas. Cancer has become associated in recent years with mindless over-consumption and revenge of nature. It is mainly seen as a disease of the rich and the powerful who have to, after getting the best of healthcare, find some reason to die. Plague activates more primitive fears, particularly in Europe. There are countries in Europe that have lost more than half their populations to plague in the past. The continent as a whole has lost, at some points of time, as much as one-fourth of its inhabitants to different versions of the Black Death. That memory survives.

The primeval European fear of plague has got entwined with the fear of the Third World. There may no longer be a proper second world any more, to guide the poor and the dispossessed towards a proletarian heaven, but the Third World survives as a concept for the First World and the modern élites of Asia and Africa. In that meaning, the Third World is the abode of the third rate, where a surplus of obsolete people, living in dirt and penury, provide a fertile breeding ground for pestilences of all kinds. Poverty is a crime and a proof of one's worldly failures and sinful ways. The ungodly are also the god-forsaken and, therefore, pestilence-prone. The best one can do is to avoid their contagion.

Albert Camus' novel, The Plague (1947), is set in Algeria and its white doctor-hero, working among Arab victims of plague, symbolizes a person seeking existential meaning in a battle against an epidemic that did not have a known cure when the novel was written. He acts out the philosophy of life spelt out in the author's "Le Mythe de Sisyphe" (1942). As is well known, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a stone uphill to eternity. The Plague is the story of a modern Sisyphus battling the random suffering of a people and, in the process, giving meaning to the otherwise meaningless.

The fear and the fantasies associated with plague, particularly in European Christendom, cannot be contained by any discovery of plague vaccines or of antibiotics effective against the disease. Most Europeans are not impressed that the mortality rate in plague has reportedly come down to below 5 per cent the world over and, in well-equipped west European or North American hospitals, that rate cannot but be much lower. As Ingmar Bergman shows so elegantly in his The Seventh Seal (1956), plague is located in a melancholic, grey, mental landscape where it cohabits with ideas of sin, moral responsibility, death-defiance, repentance and expiation. That landscape remains, but has become invisible in recent centuries, thanks to the overdone festive style of modern capitalism. Europe's post-medieval prosperity promises perpetual happiness in a deathless society. Plague, which is remembered there primarily as a medieval disease, is a reminder that death does come, even in a world of plenty, dominated by mega-science and foolproof rationality packaged in super-consumption.

The fear of plague in Europe, however, is not only the fear of death. It is the fear of death that comes as the Biblical wages of sin. It carries the load of one's own past-when life was nasty brutish and short-projected on to the Third World. The Third World living in abject misery-because that is what the heathens deserve in God's scheme of things-is also read as Europe's past that survives and haunts the modern, desacralised Europe and its godless ways. The Third World visits Europe as plague when the European Christendom fails to maintain its purity, of body and of mind.

Plague also gives ample scope for heroism. The knight who plays chess with Death in The Seventh Seal is not a mere cinematic figure. He lives in the unconscious of all Europeans. He is a crusader who has already risked his life for his faith. His decision to take on Death in plague-ridden Europe cannot but acquire heroic proportions. Likewise, the doctor in The Plague battles an epidemic as the ultimate symbol of heroic resistance to the vagaries of fate. As befits an existentialist hero, he creates his morality out of essential meaninglessness.

The fear of plague in Indian is of a different kind. Here too, plague connotes moral waywardness and divine retribution, but the disease does not invoke the inner demons that haunts Europe. Small pox and cholera are the prototypical diseases of the tropics, without learning about which no student can graduate from a school of tropical medicine even today. Even tuberculosis has acquired a mythic status over the last hundred years in India. Plague, though it has sometimes been a great killer or mahamari, remains for the Indians, rightly or wrongly, an imported epidemic. It seems to thrive in cold weather, not in the torrid summers of India. Nor does it have, like Shitala and Olaichandi, any goddess or god presiding over it or the fate of its victims. It certainly does not have any distinctive, traditional ritual to go with it.

In India, as far as I know, you do not acquire mastery over plague by appeasing or establishing a contractual relationship-through a manat or mannat-with any particular deity. Perhaps, there is no felt need to have that sense of mastery over fate through a steady compact with divinity in the case of plague. Like Malaria and unlike small pox and cholera, plague is an outsider in South Asia.
This is implicitly admitted by many Indians. Plague has been seen by them mainly as a scourge of urban India, marred by its dirty streets, mixed populations drawn from diverse often-unknown sources, unhealthy lifestyle, and crowded slums. Public hygiene and modern preventive medicine, combined with some degree of caution, are supposed to take care of plague, even that when a specific plague threat exists. Hence, even at times of great pilgrimages like the Kumbha, efforts to inoculate the pilgrims against plague are rare; they are mostly inoculated against small pox and cholera.

Yet plague has been visiting urban India on and off to take its toll. This time Surat, and to a small extent metropolitan Bombay and Delhi, have been its main victims. I do not know how the residents of Surat explain the epidemic-as a failure in civic management, government apathy to prior warning by experts, or as the natural fate of a city that had no time to build a civic culture because it had lost its soul entirely to Mammon and chose not to look beyond commerce.

I have a fair guess what the greatest Gujarati of all times might have said on Surat's present plight. He would have almost certainly invoked his notorious theory of collective karma, the one that he had coined at the time of the Bihar earthquake in the 1920s. As we know, he blamed the earthquake on the practice of untouchability, to the utter chagrin of rational humanists like Rabindranath Tagore. Perfectly comfortable with the moral universe of premodern Europe, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would have, I am pretty sure, held the particularly cruel communal riots of Surat responsible for the outbreak of plague in the city.