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Everything that is happening now has happened before.
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A pandemic has struck India.
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There have been heated debates about lockdowns, about masks, about vaccines.
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The state has been negligent and the state has overreached.
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Civil society has risen up in protest.
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All kinds of rumours about the disease have spread through the land and the bodies of
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the dead have piled up.
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Except, wait a minute, all this has not only happened before, but it has been much worse.
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Between 1817 and 1920, India was struck by three pandemics, which at one point were upon
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Cholera, the plague and influenza killed 40 million people during these 100 years.
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In fact, 70 million if you count the 30 million killed by cholera in the years when it was
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merely endemic and not a pandemic.
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In this time, populations have been devastated, villages wiped out and bodies have piled up
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The state has failed and the backlash has changed our history.
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And yet, when we are faced with a modern pandemic today, we have forgotten all these lessons
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of the past, but these lessons matter.
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To understand these modern times, to deal with the situation in which we find ourselves
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today, we need to learn about India's twist with pandemics.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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Our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science.
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Chinmay Tumwe, author of Age of Pandemics, a marvelous new book that
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looks at how the Indian subcontinent was ravaged by three pandemics in the century between
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They took more lives than we could imagine and they shaped our history, our economy,
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our politics and our society in profound ways.
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Chinmay argues that we need to build a collective memory about this past so that we can avoid
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its mistakes and apply its lessons.
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Age of Pandemics is a wonderful book of scholarship and analysis, which is not a surprise to me
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because Chinmay's previous book, India Moving, a study of migration within India, is in my
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opinion, one of the most underrated books written about India in the last decade.
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I did an episode on that book with Chinmay about a year and a half ago and both that
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book and that episode will be linked from the show notes.
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I was delighted to have him once again on the show.
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But before we get to our conversation, let's take a quick commercial break.
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We often think of ourselves as the masters of the universe, the one species that managed
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If you look at it one way, we are puppets colonized by viruses and bacteria, we should
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have had occasion to think about this in 2020 and we certainly should learn about our past
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encounters with these mysterious forces.
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This episode and Chinmay Tumbe's book is a great way of doing so and I have one more
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Hop on over to thegreatcoursesplus.com, the sponsors of this episode and check out the
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In 24 fascinating lectures, Fox takes us through our long struggle with infectious diseases
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Don't procrastinate, soak up that knowledge.
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Chinmay, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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Hi, thanks for having me over.
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You know the last time we spoke it was about your wonderful book India Moving which I keep
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recommending to people because I just think it deserves to be more widely read and more
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specifically because it gave me so many insights into my own country, so many TIL moments and
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that of course took sort of a long time in the making.
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On the other hand, this marvelous book that you have now written has happened in the space
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You know, tell me the story of how that came about.
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Yeah, it's just, you know, if you told me in Jan that I would write a book by December
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on pandemics, you know, I would have laughed and in a way I'm still laughing because it's
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just a series of events which happened this year, but you know, ultimately culminated
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But really, the starting point is of course that, you know, when I was writing on migration,
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even my PhD thesis, you know, I was coming across cholera, I was coming across plague,
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I was coming across influenza.
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In fact, even my PhD thesis in 2012, you know, I have this map of population growth rate
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So I clearly knew some of these interesting things about these pandemics because I encountered
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them before in my research on migration.
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But obviously I had not done, you know, any, I had never written a research paper on pandemics.
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I had never really followed up on that initial interest, but I had been scraping through
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material wherever I went.
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I was at the British Library, you know, many years back doing archival research, and there's
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a report on cholera in 1867, and I kind of got that photocopied.
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So I had certain material, and the starting point of this project was really March 11th,
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12th, you know, when the WHO declared it to be a pandemic.
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And I, in fact, actually tweeted a bit, you know, an influenza impact on India, and it
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got a fair amount of traction.
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And one of the things I very quickly realized was, you know, first, there's actually no
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book written on influenza in India, which is the greatest demographic disaster ever
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in human history, actually.
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I mean, 20 million people dying in a few months, it's never happened before.
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So this was, you know, something truly unique, somebody had to write it.
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And then, you know, as the book starts off with this dialogue with my son, my son actually
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asked me, you know, what's this whole thing about pandemics, was it happening in the past?
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And you know, he pointed out that influenza was also mentioned in the Tintin.
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And I realized that, you know, there's some ways in which the memory is stored.
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But overall, you know, unless it's the Black Death of Europe in the 14th century, where
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a lot of books have been written, or even the influenza, you know, there's a book by
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John Barry on the influenza, India is one small paragraph in a 500 page book, when half
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the deaths of that pandemic happened in India.
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So India was really underserved in the current research.
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And the fact that in all three pandemics, cholera plague, influenza in the century between
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roughly 1817 and 1920, India was at the epicenter.
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And this just really struck me in March that, you know, somebody really has to be writing
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And then, you know, I quickly realized that I was in a unique position to do it, because
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I had already assembled this massive mortality statistic database as part of my interest
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in economics and history.
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And so I started analyzing that database, and I could see the trends, when is mortality
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So that gave me more confidence that, you know, I could do something on this.
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And then coupled with, you know, the fact that a lot of the databases on this are actually
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freely available online.
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So the Wellcome Trust has, you know, all these pictures and reports freely available online.
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So that kind of reduced the transaction costs of doing research.
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A typical, you know, project in history would take many, many years, you sit in archives
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But I realized that at least some of it was easily doable.
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So then I think in about April, you know, I kind of said, okay, this is a potential
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Of course, it would not be possible without family support.
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You know, the amount of hours I've put into writing consecutively meant, I mean, I should
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really thank my wife and son for giving me that space to just go out there.
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I think I would say 100 days of just literally non-stop work, you know, coupled with then,
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of course, many more months of post-production and so on.
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So it's been a crazy year for everyone.
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It's been a crazy year for me.
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In the process also, I lost a friend, so the book is dedicated to a friend who's a librarian
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And it's really thanks to, again, the library of Ahmedabad, you know, that we could actually
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get a lot of this material.
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So it's a combination of amazing teamwork, which kind of got the book.
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And I really wanted it out in 2020, you know, that would have had a nice ring to it.
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So finally, the last month, you know, December 2020 is when we could get it out.
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You know, what's crazy about this is that your book is by no means a quickie in the
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sense it's immaculately researched.
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And what I do, what I like to do whenever I read nonfiction is I'll go over to the footnotes
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whenever I find something interesting and look at where that's from and look at sort
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And you just read a bunch of books while doing this, not just books in terms of historical
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works, books on previous epidemics slash pandemics, but even, you know, you've quoted throughout
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your book from different novels and literary works and all of that very aptly.
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So I simply have to then ask you about, you know, what are your processes of knowledge
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management, for example, like how many books, if I may ask, did you read during this period?
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How many books do you normally read?
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How many did you read during this period?
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And what are your sort of methods or hacks for compressing this kind of data gathering
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and knowledge gathering and, you know, all of that?
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I have read more books in 2020 than any year of my life and I love to read, you know, so
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this is definitely been a year of massive, massive amount of reading, not just the number
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of books, but also research articles, papers, and so on.
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Now, well, you know, the book has like 800 footnotes and it cites over 400 studies, but
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I should say that, you know, does that mean I have read each and every book cover to cover
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for, you know, that's impossible.
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That's impossible for anybody to read, say 300 books, you know, that's just impossible.
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So a lot of books, of course, I quickly realized what is the really important part of it and
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really, you know, get that into the book.
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So for example, there's a great book called Everyday Technologies, which is about really
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technology history of India, but there's this amazing part on play where there's a reference
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in this book about how the tailors of single manufacturing company, you know, which is
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a multinational based in India, they had this particular issue of tailors dying because
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of the plague in late 19th century.
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And I just got that reference.
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Now, it just so happens that I've read this book in the past, but there are many books
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in which very quickly as a researcher, you know, you can go through the index, you're
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looking for play cholera influenza.
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These are the three pandemics.
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And if you're not, if you get it, you're lucky.
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So I would also say I've gone through many more books which are not cited just to find
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out if they mentioned play cholera or influenza.
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But in the process, I had to read certain code.
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The first book, let me tell you the process.
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The first book I read was this Cambridge encyclopedia of human diseases, right?
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Because I had to tell myself, look, I don't know anything about medical science.
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I'm looking at this literally from a trained economist who's getting into history.
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That's you know, that's my background.
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So I said, I have to be at least, I should not get the science drastically wrong.
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You know, so I had to read it.
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So this is a thousand page book, you know, which came out in 1993, obviously, there's
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But this is supposed to be the canonical book in the in on medical history.
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And so those thousand pages gave me like this nice quick summary of all the major disease
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of the world, major medical schools.
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So that was the starting point.
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And then some of the canonical works on cholera, canonical works on plague, and unfortunate
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influenza, literally nothing has been written on India, you know, so there's really no book
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Similarly, with plague and cholera, you know, David Arnold has a book.
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So that was useful to start with.
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And then he's done wonderful work, even in the recent days.
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So then slowly after that, of course, for a writer, you want to tie up the basic academic
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blocks with literary references, with, you know, variety of things, newspaper archives,
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which are easily accessible, at least from our library.
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But there are a lot of chance discoveries.
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So I was, you know, literally one find it thinking, you know, they're not enough first
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person references in what I'm doing right now.
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It's becoming a drab sort of statistical kind of analysis.
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And I was just looking at my bookshelf.
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And there it was, you know, Smriti Chitre, which is this Marathi autobiography by Lakshmi
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by Tilak written in the 1930s and translated in English just a few years back shot by Shanta
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And there it was, there was a first person reference about plague and unknown even to
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Shanta Gokhale, who translated the book, the disease Manmodi was nothing but this great
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influence epidemic of 1980, you know, and I just, it was a Eureka moment that, you know,
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I said, she's talking about influence in 1980, which is the greatest disaster in a first
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person account because that family went through that.
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So I got these amazing references purely out of chance.
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So I think the writer's thing is then about putting these things in a nice sort of a story.
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But the big story was very clear.
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This was a period where we are told in India is the rise and fall of British rule.
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And yet what I was finding is in the day-to-day lives of people, I mean, they were less scared
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of the British than infectious disease because it's like today, you know, we have concerns
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with the politics and so on.
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But the primary concern over here is trying not to get this disease.
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And that's pretty much how Indians were looking at this.
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And the numbers were stock, you know, they're saying about 70 million people globally died
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of these three pandemics, 40 million in India alone.
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These are numbers greater than the wars fought in these periods.
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More people died in India and the influenza than all of the people who died on the battlefield
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So putting all that together, you know, I thought I had a fair amount of work cut ahead
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But luckily, access to resources was relatively easy because I live on a university campus.
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So that's, I think, I think there are various things that cut down transaction costs of
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There's an amazing library team, they got me really rare, even manuscripts from, you
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know, just talking with other libraries, they have this fantastic interlibrary price.
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So clearly, if you're not in a university setting, obviously, I think the transaction
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costs are much, much higher, but a lot of chance encounter, you know, I was in South
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Park Street, Symmetry in Calcutta, which is a burial ground, literally a few days before
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the lockdown, a few more days and I'll be stuck in capital and this book will probably
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You know, it's just so happened that came back to him, but but South Park Street, Symmetry,
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my economist training, you know, I saw this book at the counter and that was the registry
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of all the deaths out there.
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Now at that point, I didn't know I was going to write a book on pandemics, but I picked
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up that book, I bought it and I got it to a spreadsheet.
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This is what all economists will do, you know, put it in a spreadsheet and there it was because
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I wanted some evidence that 1817, a lot of people said this was an important year and
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the book starts on this year.
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You know, how do you show that 1817 is there were a lot of deaths in 1870?
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One is by saying or people said that something happened in that year, but ideally you would
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like to see like a trend line.
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You would want to have pre 1817 data and then show that no 1817 things jump up and there
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it was I got this digitized and this was the burial grounds in Calcutta where color had
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struck big time and it's a flat line before 1817 and it spikes up.
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So the number of burials recorded in South Park Street, Symmetry conforms to what people
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were saying then, you know about which years cholera struck very, very nicely not just
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waiting 17, but you know for the next 50 years.
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So again a chance encounter literally a walk through the symmetry picking up a book and
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then that becomes a useful source.
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So I'll kind of stick on the subject for just a moment before we get to the book.
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Once you're sort of you're doing all of this reading, how do you organize the knowledge
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that you're taking from there?
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Like is there a special software that you use many of these I'm guessing especially
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if you're getting them from the library, there'll be like physical books.
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How do you organize all of this knowledge?
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How do you manage all of that?
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Yeah, I would say I'm quite old fashioned that way.
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I know they are, you know, specialized software.
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I'm sure I can do research more efficiently than what I'm doing right now.
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I'm old fashioned in the sense I use a spreadsheet.
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So I, you know, I put all my thoughts in a spreadsheet and you know, I have lines put
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in bold, which I don't want to miss over and what I can miss, you know, it's not in bold,
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but what I definitely do is like in this project, kind of try to collect all the basic literature.
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So what I made a list of about 500 studies, which I said I have to go through even if
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I don't read each of them cover to cover, I should be aware of what they're saying.
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And so I put those final studies, you know, worksheet.
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So it's a reference sheet and that's going to be, by the way, next week, it's there's
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a supplement to this book, which is going to go online.
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And so that will have a list of, you know, all the studies.
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So I did, I made that first and so I knew what, you know, I was working within and then,
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you know, after that, the spreadsheet kind of helps sort your ideas kind of saying, okay,
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You know, when I started in March, I really didn't know what is I, all I knew is that
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there could be three chapters, core chapters of the book, which is going to collate up
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like an influenza and then maybe an introductory chapter in a concluding chapter kind of reflecting
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But then beyond that, you know, how do you write a collator because collator is almost
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a hundred year pandemic.
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So it's really pick and choose.
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You can't talk about each and every year.
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You can't talk about each and every country.
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So you really have to select.
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And so my process of selection then is like in the book on migration is demographic.
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That is, where did it have the largest impact?
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So obviously India had the largest impact and India gets covered the most.
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But in cholera, I devote some time to Egypt, you know, because Egypt had the largest like
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10% of its population was wiped out.
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So as a percentage of population, Egypt was the most affected.
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So you know, it affected us, it affected Mexico.
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So I tried to then cover those regions which are most affected.
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And I think that's the pattern in all the chapters that is the regions most affected
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So if you talk of plague, not just Bombay, you know, most of plague literature in Bombay
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on India is Bombay city.
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And this book, probably the first time, you know, it's really expanding that thing because
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Bombay city was a really small part of India's plague encounter.
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The bulk of it was the Bombay Presidency, Punjab, UP outside Bombay, the bulk of it
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People think of plague as being a Bombay incident, the bulk of it was actually rural India.
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So that's the sort of sorting process to try and get the big picture, where is it actually
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affected and then trying to get literature which has looked at that and where it's not
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been written then to actually dig up sources, go to newspaper archives and you know, variety
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of other things to kind of hold reports, vaccination records and a variety of things.
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And along the way, discover a lot, you know, so some of it has been done by medical historians.
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So I looked at that literature very closely, but beyond that, you know, to your question
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about efficient management of information, I don't think I'm terribly efficient, but
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there is some method, I think, in this, you know, research process.
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Let's move on to the book now.
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And before we start talking about pandemics per se, there was a broader question which
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I thought I should ask at the start because it really intrigued me and struck me, you
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know, how we normalize all the progress that we make in terms of technology or standards
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And I was, you know, struck by when you wrote the following words about mass mortality,
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where you wrote, quote, once upon a time, we barely lived before we died, we would celebrate
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on average only 25 birthdays in our lifetimes, and we rarely grew old enough to see our grandchildren.
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Mass mortality through war, famine, natural disasters and epidemics was a way of life.
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We began to live longer only when we fought fewer wars, understood how to fight famines,
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grew resilient to natural disasters, and learned how to control the spread of disease.
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And at different points in the book, when you talk about, you know, specific pandemics
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or even diseases, we see how you could not take life for granted.
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For example, at one point when you're writing about smallpox, you write, quote, there's
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an old saying in India, common in the 19th century, that children were not counted as
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permanent members of the family until they had encountered smallpox once and survived.
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And, you know, later, when you're sort of talking about another pandemic, you quote
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David Gilmore in the British in India, saying, quote, one visitor reported that he had twice
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lunched with men whose burials he had been invited to attend before supper the same day.
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When an epidemic arrived at a station, people began measuring their lives in hours.
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They went to the club each evening, apprehensive to know who was missing from the night before.
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Death was so familiar to the British in India, so quick and so frequent that they hardly
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seemed room for prolonged grief.
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If an officer died on campaign, his belongings were auctioned as soon as the funeral was
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Horses, clothes, revolver, even his cooking pot and his water bottle.
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You know, and it kind of struck me that back in the day and pandemics weren't obviously
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the only threat to life.
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It was almost a fact of life that when you are young itself, your friends are going to
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You know, you have such huge amounts of people and we are possibly one of the few generations,
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you know, over the last few decades that we don't have to kind of deal with this, you
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know, the mortality rate, your, the average lifespan used to be 25 a few decades ago and
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now it's 70 and we can take certain things for granted.
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So in your reading of history, I mean, it seems to me that this then hangs over everything.
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It hangs over everything that people do, the way they live their lives, the way they behave.
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So you know, what are your sort of thoughts on this as a historian kind of coming across
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this because you know, this layer of sort of likely mortality where, you know, you can't
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take long life for granted as we all do that simply isn't there for most of human history.
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You know, before 1920, I mean, this book ends in 1920 because that's the transition point
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when you look at India's death data, India's death rate starts falling only after 1920,
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but before 1920 in India, and of course, before certain periods, say 1850s in Britain and
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so on, you know, death rates, we're talking of something like 50 per 1000, 5% of the population
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Now those are very, very high numbers.
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That's about 10 times higher than what we are living with today, right?
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And the worst part of that death rate is infant mortality, right?
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So it's also the fact that most people who died actually in a year were actually small
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kids, which is also a great achievement of the last hundred years of getting, you know,
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So for example, when I walked around this South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta, you
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see these tombs, right?
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And when you walk past them, you think, okay, these are the guys who've died and so on.
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When you look at the data, 20% of those deaths were actually kids.
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So they're actually buried out there, but you don't really think when you walk in a
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cemetery of kids who died in such large numbers.
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So that's pretty much human history.
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You know, there are theories that say, no, you know, there's some bad periods and so
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But all the evidence is pointing out that there's no real epoch in human history where
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people live for 100 years and so on.
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Of course, you have few individuals, you know, who live for a long time, like in the age
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of pandemics, the two people who, you know, live for nearly 100 years coinciding with
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the period I'm mentioning is Dada Bhai Naoroji, you know, Dinyar Patel has a nice book on
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But he survives the entire age of pandemics, you know, it's perfectly, his life is just
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He dies, I think, a year or two before influenza, you know, but almost 90 plus years in that
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The other one is Florence Nightingale.
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You know, she also lives for almost 100 years.
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So these are outliers, but the average person, you know, cannot expect to live more than
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So there's even this concept of a grandparent, you know, obviously people are marrying young,
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so you're becoming potentially grandparents at the age of 40 or 50, but you don't live
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So it's this whole notion that, you know, today we can see our grandparents and so on.
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It's a very modern day concept, just the mortality was so high.
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And why was it so high?
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Of course, like I mentioned, you know, there's war, there are these other things, but fundamentally
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And so the big killers of history is malaria.
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At least, you know, more people have died from malaria than probably anything else.
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But then you had these chance epidemics like cholera or, you know, plague and influenza,
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which we call as pandemics.
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But then variety of other things, you know, diarrhea, then tuberculosis, you know, a big
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And ultimately, all of this is linked with nutrition, you know, the healthier we are,
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even if there was play, you could survive it to a certain extent.
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So at the base of mortality is how well are you eating food, as simple as that.
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And in a world where you had famines, where your whole economy was completely rain fed
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or, you know, rain dependent, especially in India, a slight sort of, you know, bad rainfall
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meant people would start starving.
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And even if you're not going to die out of complete starvation, the disease would act
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And that has used salience today, you know, because we're saying that, you know, this
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is the year where the average Indian actually got poorer nutrition, even the latest data
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suggests a kind of, you know, not so great.
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What it means is that if you don't get your basic nutrition levels up, there's always
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going to be a, you know, this impact of infectious disease is going to be that much more.
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And that is why it was so, so stock, you know, before 1920.
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So after 1920, it improved precisely because nutrition kind of improved a little bit.
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But also because the better control of, you know, certain diseases, which increase.
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And that's, I would say, you know, the great achievement of the last hundred years is precisely
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this what Angus Deaton calls the great escape, you know, this rise in well-being, real life
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expectancy, the fact that people can live, you know, for almost 70 years now in India,
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the life expectancy at birth compared to it being 25 and falling, you know, for some years
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in the early 20th century is the remarkable achievement of modern science.
#
And is it fair to say that, you know, the 19th century in a sense was the period that
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In fact, specifically 1817 to 1920, almost as such is like if you were pandemics personified,
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you would think that this is an optimal time for you to exist because on the one hand,
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you suddenly have globalization and travel everywhere.
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So all of these things can spread.
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And on the other hand, modern medicine hasn't yet caught up with all of this.
#
And it is in that sweet spot where these things, they're spreading faster than ever, but science
#
hasn't figured out what is causing them.
#
Leave alone how to cure them.
#
Like think about the railways, you know, so much fascination with the railways and that
#
obviously any transport, I mean, one link between my first book and the second book
#
is that, you know, you cannot have a pandemic without some migration.
#
I mean, that's the link between pandemics and migration.
#
And there's no doubt that obviously some transport would have, you know, carried out, you know,
#
these infectious diseases.
#
Though having said that, even some of these diseases also travel just by, you know, when
#
It's not that you had to have modern transport to have a pandemic in the first place.
#
But let's take railways.
#
You know, people are fascinated by the railways.
#
But at the same time, over time, as these diseases intensified, there was no doubt that,
#
you know, there was some sort of negative fallout because of the railways in spreading
#
So you're absolutely right.
#
This globalization, all the things which are celebrated in the 19th century, right?
#
I mean, this is the birth of the modern world.
#
One of the reasons this book, you know, I mentioned this in the first chapter, you have
#
on the one hand, say Christopher Billy is the birth of the modern world.
#
This is a grand project of, you know, the rise of the modern world between 1789, the
#
French Revolution and 1914, First World War.
#
Then you have the Eric Hobsbawm series, you know, Age of Empire, Age of Capital, and,
#
you know, all these grandstanding books.
#
And yet both these series don't, or because they're Eurocentric, you know, most of that
#
stuff comes from a European view.
#
Epidemics and pandemics are really not part of that story, right?
#
And that's one of the things, if you wrote European history of the 14th century, you
#
would have to talk about the plague, the Black Death.
#
And so this is where, actually, this book comes in, because it's pitched at this idea
#
that this was an age of pandemics, pandemics affect, of course, most parts of the world,
#
but it had a disproportionate impact on Asia, and within Asia, a disproportionate impact
#
And that is why this overall century of progress seen from the, say, Western prism, you know,
#
America is surging ahead, you know, they go from a population of something like five to
#
10 million to 100 million by the end of this time period, Europe is surging ahead.
#
And typically the Indian view is, you know, colonialism kind of dented India's prospects
#
Actually, what this book is arguing is that pandemics was also a constraining factor.
#
The fact that we could not do business in the first place as much as what the West could
#
do was because we had these pandemics in the first place.
#
So you're absolutely right.
#
You know, this is an interesting period of history, because on the one hand, there's
#
this dramatic revolution, what we call is the first and second industrial revolution.
#
And yet, on the other hand, you have this, you know, massive spread of diseases.
#
And the West is continuously concerned, you know, when you see what they're talking about
#
cholera plague, the memory of them is the Black Death, you know, it's a memory which
#
stays on for five centuries or six centuries.
#
And they don't want that to happen because the Black Death, you know, wiped out one third
#
of Europe by most estimates, which is a huge percentage, you know, one third of a big region
#
as Europe are dying out.
#
And so why the Black Death had registered in the European consciousness, somehow this
#
period 1817 to 1920, it's kind of completely escaped memory, you know, it's not really
#
been recorded well in our history.
#
And that's one of the reasons why the book was written.
#
You know, one of the things that struck me and I had no idea that, you know, that it
#
would be the case to this extent, that pandemics actually shaped our history, like as we'll
#
go on to discuss in detail, each of the three pandemics that you talked about, obviously
#
changed economics and society, but also had a massive impact on politics, especially the
#
I kept reading about the battle between the extremists and the moderates in the Congress,
#
but it was, you know, the plague had a big part in that coming about, which was quite
#
And you also kind of point out how during this period, you know, which is sometimes
#
called the Great Divergence, because this is where Asia's share of world GDP falls from
#
And what you point out is that during this time, mainly because of these pandemics, Asia's
#
population share of the world population also fell from 65 to 50, which obviously, you know,
#
had a role in that fall in GDP as well and is a major part.
#
And yet you're right, you know, whatever histories I have read of these times in these periods
#
and especially of India, you know, historians will hardly mention all of this.
#
It's almost like in our everyday lives, we kind of take disease for granted.
#
Like I just recorded an episode yesterday, which will actually release after yours, in
#
which my guest pointed out that every day America is losing as many people to COVID-19
#
as they lost during 9-11, you know, and yet one is so incredibly visible.
#
And the other is, you know, it gets normalized very fast and it is not one big event which
#
makes for great television.
#
So it kind of just gets lost.
#
You know, early in the book, you point out about, you know, your two core arguments during
#
the book and you've actually elaborated on them in the last few minutes.
#
And one is that, you know, you want to place these pandemics in the global historiography,
#
For a lay person like me, you know, what do you mean by global historiography?
#
Like, is what you're saying that, you know, the historical narratives that have emerged
#
of the grand themes that shape society have to perforce or speak about these pandemics?
#
So historiography is used by historians.
#
It's another way of saying the narrative, right?
#
So for example, what is the, you know, what is the most important thing that we remember
#
of say the 1700s of India, right?
#
And it's about this tussle between the Mughals and this disintegration.
#
So that's the historiography, Mughal decline, East India Company ascent and the Marathas.
#
This is probably the defining historiography of this period.
#
Now somebody comes and tells you that, look, this is happening.
#
But there's something else.
#
They were actually, hypothetically, five major earthquakes which hit the 1700s, which actually
#
nobody's talked about right now.
#
It's actually those earthquakes which tilted the balance of power between these three things.
#
You know, that's the kind of stuff I think which what this book is doing.
#
That is, there is certain things which actually happen, you know, I'm not inventing these
#
They happen, you know, all these people died, unfortunately, in large numbers.
#
Yet the dominant narrative of the 19th century, right in the West is one of ascendancy, right?
#
It is one of Empire building.
#
So imperialism as one isn't nationalism.
#
This is a period, especially from the 1850s onwards, massive trade through GDP ratio start
#
Variety city building, urbanization, right?
#
So these are, this is the historiography.
#
So when we talk of global history, of course, this is not happening all around the world,
#
but this is happening in the West, right?
#
And I would say that the major historiography of the 19th century is imperialism, right?
#
Because this is a time when empires really grow and by the late 19th century, even Africa
#
is almost completely colonized after this, you know, Berlin conference and so on.
#
So in this whole milieu, if you have to look at, especially India, let's start with India,
#
the historiography is one of British ascendancy, right?
#
So 19th century as a world of British essence.
#
And what I'm arguing is actually that the sort of an important event running through
#
this thing is pandemics.
#
Now it is true that they did not actually use the word pandemics in the 19th century.
#
The word pandemic out of these three diseases really applies to influenza.
#
So if you see the Indian government reports, the pandemic word comes for influenza, play
#
people are using it, but not so much.
#
So the operative word is epidemics, right?
#
But one way of actually seeing the 19th century, the historiography is actually that people
#
Of course, they're scared of each other fighting wars and so on, but they're really scared
#
of diseases and new diseases, which they have no clue about.
#
So one way of saying is, you know, and why this particular period, you know, I'm trying
#
to make this argument in this book.
#
You can say death rates are always high before 1920.
#
One of the things I'm pointing out is that actually death rates started increasing.
#
Even from those high death rates, you know, they started actually increasing towards the
#
And that, you know, a lot of political events actually were shaped.
#
Much of the book also talks about, you know, important political events, which were shaped
#
by these pandemics itself.
#
So what I want to do in this book is to give a more central role for pandemics in global
#
It's true that they did not, you know, these pandemics did not kill too many people in
#
Europe, in North America, but it killed a lot of people in Asia and it killed a lot
#
So there is really, I mean, even if you think of World War One, you know, it had such few
#
casualties outside of Europe, yet we called it, we call it World War One.
#
Now there's this attack word attached to it called world.
#
So that's something similar to what I want to do out here that the fear of this pandemic
#
was that throughout the world, the Americans were concerned about what they call as Indian
#
Just as today they call it the Chinese virus, you know, and so around the world, India was
#
also not known just for, you know, the British rule, but as a source of diseases, like how
#
we look at China today.
#
And so this kind of also looks at global history in new light.
#
That is different parts of the world.
#
So it also impacted geopolitics.
#
That is, you know, how countries were perceiving each other.
#
One part of that story was actually epidemics.
#
So that's what I mean by historiography.
#
And the standard narrative right now is imperialism, nationalism, globalization.
#
And what I want to argue is that, you know, epidemics was also there in this, in this
#
picture and especially these three pandemics of cholera, plague and influenza, which definitely
#
I do have a, you know, my subtitle of the book has the word world in it, yet any reader,
#
you know, reads this book is going to realize that most of this book is about India.
#
But I do that because most of the debts were in India.
#
But it's a fact that it did touch upon many parts of the world from Russia, from Egypt
#
to even Brazil, where, you know, some part of the population was wiped out.
#
And you know, there's a book, Love in the Time of Cholera, you know, Marquez would not
#
have written that book if cholera was not such a defining period and that cholera emerged
#
from India in at least some, you know, some form or the other.
#
So that's the whole idea of putting pandemics in 19th and early 20th century, what historians
#
call as historiography.
#
And your other core focus, which you talk about is also the building of collective memory
#
as you put it in the sense that you argued that, you know, quote, the age of pandemics
#
has been forgotten in the country most affected by it, India, and there is value in remembering
#
it as a major event, just as the Black Death Plague pandemic of the 14th century is registered
#
in European consciousness to this day, stop quote.
#
And you know, at another point where you're talking about the historical context of such
#
epidemics, you speak about how in the Arthashastra, you know, Kautilya writes about, you know,
#
the four great threats to life, which are war, natural disasters, famines and epidemics.
#
And yet epidemics is like fourth in his list of priority, and it's not taken so seriously.
#
Why do you think that is?
#
Why do we forget, you know, 20 million people dying and that too, when it was a, you know,
#
6.4% of India's population then, as you point out, is a big deal.
#
So you know, why do we tend to forget, is it because there are individual lives and
#
individual stories and there's like no kind of mass representation or a grand narrative
#
Yeah, I think, you know, how is memory, how is any memory preserved?
#
I mean, how, why is it that we, you know, still narrate the Mahabharata and Brahma from
#
generation to generation, that memory is kept alive.
#
Nobody's telling us, you know, narratives of plague and cholera as a bedtime story is
#
One is of course that it's, it's negative, it's about death.
#
So you want to forget it, right?
#
So that's, that's one attribute of why we don't want to hold on to negative memories
#
and you want to hold on to more such positive memories to there is no identifiable enemy
#
as with say a war, right?
#
So in a war or like, you know, look at influencer, you know, 19 April, 1990, you had the Jallianwala
#
That has been memorialized.
#
You know, there's, there's a whole thing attached with it, right?
#
I mean, if you go there today, there's a particular, you know, monument.
#
You have these hundred year anniversary events.
#
Nobody was, you know, commemorating hundred years of influenza, which killed 20 million
#
But for Jallianwala Bagh tragedy killed a few hundred Indians, but the, the, the memory
#
Why does a clear enemy that it was a British in that case with influenza, you know, H1N1A
#
is not really an enemy.
#
The public is going to sort of take it.
#
So clearly identified enemies.
#
I'd also point out, you know, uh, compared to wars or natural disasters, right?
#
Which affect both capital and labor, that is it not only kills people, it kills the
#
actual building and you know, it, it destroys buildings, it destroys monuments.
#
So in his historical recording as well, people noted down, you know, the destruction of Rome,
#
the destruction of Delhi, for example, now with an epidemic, you know, the city, the
#
physical stock of the city doesn't fall, it's just people kind of withering away in that.
#
It could be the case that the epidemic sparks a revolution, then there's mayhem in that,
#
but otherwise a pure epidemic just takes labor.
#
It doesn't affect capital.
#
And that means an historical recording, it's not glamorous enough.
#
And so that's why historians often have failed to actually systematically document these
#
So I think that's one of the reason inadequate memorization.
#
So I pointed like, if you want to know something about play and so on.
#
If you look closely enough, there might be some markers like the Haffkin Institute in
#
Bombay, you know, is one memory because Haffkin was his great scientist who was associated
#
with both cholera and plague in India.
#
So there's an Institute in his honor, but nobody would associate Haffkin with pandemics
#
There's a statue in South Bombay of, you know, Vegas was the first guy who spotted plague
#
There's a statue, you know, there's a statue, but nobody's really thinking that thinking
#
of that statue outside of Metro Cinema as, you know, a memory of the plague back then.
#
And so one of the things that might be, you know, useful is, you know, it's a open question
#
whether we need to have museums on these epidemics or something like that, but definitely it
#
You know, I feel it has to be taught in our history curriculums in the sense and especially
#
medical schools, you know, I'm what I'm really amazed is that this is not being taught in
#
medical schools, right?
#
So okay, you know, there's a straw man argument that, you know, just because, you know, we
#
say that, you know, this is not taught to us in history.
#
I have my sympathies with people who write history textbooks because simply put, we cannot
#
put everything in the textbook, you know, some things have to be left out.
#
So okay, you don't want to put this history in classical textbooks, that's fine.
#
But medical students, they have to be exposed to this idea that India went through this
#
massive, you know, episode once and it should definitely inspire them to not only research
#
the past, but also use some of those lessons, you know, for today.
#
So memory is important and that's what the book is trying to push that we need to build
#
collective memory, not only of our past, you know, major pandemics, and that can happen
#
For example, so many health officials in the last 40 years, you know, have devoted their
#
lives to eradicating polio, for example, before that smallpox, they should write their autobiographies
#
or they should write their memoirs, you know, because that will be of tremendous, you know,
#
use for public health people going forward as to how did we manage to eradicate polio,
#
that was such a great success story.
#
So there need to be books written on that, for example.
#
So if not movies, and that's expecting too much, you know, or even like a day of the
#
year to remember, you know, contributions of nurses, doctors, police, people, mortuary
#
I think just basic introduction of some of these themes in curricula will help, you know,
#
and that's the grand hope of this book that some of this gets picked up in history textbooks,
#
if not the main class 10 history textbook, you know, at least medical school textbook,
#
or at least be taught as a course in medical schools, that this is, you know, an important
#
Because I can tell you, in Europe, kids grow up knowing what is the black death.
#
Black death is now an interesting event in general history, right?
#
And I think this period demands such attention.
#
Because for us, this period is just about British rule, you know, and I think there's
#
something something beyond British rule, which in fact took many more lives than British rule
#
Yeah, and then you know, one of the things that kind of, again, struck me about your
#
book is that, you know, what we sort of have a vague idea of how the black death and how
#
plagues shaped, you know, European history, in a sense, you know, the three pandemics
#
of these hundred years did a similar thing to India.
#
For example, in Europe, you talk about, you know, the black death court is said to have
#
had consequences that are open to debate, such as laying the foundation for the rise
#
of Europe, the Renaissance movement, the protestant reformation, and even accelerating
#
anti-Semitism, stop quote.
#
And later you talk about all the different consequences at that time, like inequality,
#
like in Northern Europe, more women went into the workforce.
#
And of course, anti-Semitism continued rising because Jews were blamed for the pandemic
#
in, quote, Aragon province, Catalonia, Switzerland, Rhineland, and southern Germany.
#
So you have these major sort of trends happening and the pandemic played a part in that.
#
Was it kind of a surprise to you to realize the extent of the role that pandemic played
#
Like, you know, at one point in your book, you write about how while researching your
#
previous book, you put together this map.
#
Tell me a little bit about that map and, you know, you point to it as a sort of a moment
#
Was there kind of more to it than that?
#
And did some of it perhaps come after you had started the work on the book?
#
Yeah, no, you know, that map that you're referring to, it's a simple district level map of India,
#
which shows population growth rates between 1911 and 1921.
#
So on this particular map, when I drew this population growth rate map, it was really
#
stuck because most of India actually registered negative growth rates.
#
So it wasn't like one region pulling down the overall population growth that most of
#
India that one decade, you know, I plotted these maps from 1901 to now every decade.
#
So they were about 10 or 11 maps and they were all positive growth rates and this one
#
decade, the population of India fell, right?
#
And there's no doubt as to why that happened.
#
It was the influence of 1918.
#
And when I looked at that map, you know, I said, how is it that there's no book on this?
#
This was back then, you know, in 2012 and out of interest, I read this one or two research
#
papers since then, Siddharth Chandra, you know, the health economist, he's done some
#
work interesting work on it, but very, I mean, you can count it's in single digits, you know,
#
the amount of research done in on influenza in India.
#
And it was a big mystery.
#
But I didn't follow it up back then because I got more interest on migration.
#
And that's what I worked on for most part of the last decade.
#
And that kind of map really came back when I was in looking at these mortality statistics
#
I literally went back to the map and kind of started exploring.
#
In fact, you know, one of the things which is coming out with the book, as I mentioned
#
is the supplement and the supplement has, so how can I say that India lost 20 million
#
In fact, this is now my estimate based on a certain method, which I'm using to calculate,
#
you know, influenza losses.
#
So that's going to come out in a supplement in the coming week.
#
And what I do out there is look again, you know, at this district level data and kind
#
of estimate the population shortfall.
#
So there's a lot of revelatory moments and this idea that, you know, pandemics, like
#
you mentioned the black pet, they can have consequences.
#
So throughout this book, I was trying to understand, no, influenza happened 20 million people die,
#
there must be some consequences.
#
And at least one debate, interestingly, took place by two great economists, Theodor Schulz
#
And they had a debate, this was both of them eventually won Nobel prizes, but they actually
#
had a debate on the impact of influenza on India.
#
They had this debate on is there surplus labor in Indian agriculture or not?
#
So the idea being, you know, so many people die out, can agricultural productivity still
#
And so the very interesting debate that they had back then, there's some now research on
#
influenza and you know, it's impact, but throughout the book, there's some which I definitely
#
believe had a massive impact that we can talk about that labor movements and so on.
#
But there's some also which I talk about speculative, as of now in the realm of speculation, as
#
to, you know, what was the impact?
#
What are the consequences of this pandemic, you know, going forward?
#
And one of them, which I'm very excited about, and I hope to do more research on is that it
#
really changes India's urban trajectory.
#
You know, these pandemics have a disproportionate impact on cities in North India.
#
And we know for a fact that what are some of the largest cities of India in, you know,
#
in the early 20th century were Lucknow, Idhabar, and so on.
#
And they are nowhere on India's urban landscape today.
#
So a potential reason for this relative decline of, you know, some dynamic cities of the early
#
20th century was actually pandemics.
#
So that's one of the sort of, you know, just like people say Renaissance is because of
#
These are big questions, you know, a big sort of grand theories, but interesting hypothesis.
#
I don't think anybody's really got the data right now to prove them.
#
And I guess there are never like absolute answers like, yes, this caused the Renaissance.
#
I mean, everything is multifactorial and this stuff kind of plays into all of that.
#
Let's kind of now, you know, begin with the narrative of the book and let's talk about
#
But before we talk about cholera, give me a context of, you know, what 1817 is like.
#
Give me a context of the time.
#
Like we know that the East India Company rules less than a third of the landmass of the subcontinent.
#
You know, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras are your key sites of commerce, as you point out.
#
Your publishers HarperCollins are formed in that year effectively.
#
Give me a sort of a context of what is the world like?
#
What are the kind of lives people live?
#
So we can then sort of look at the ground on which, you know, everything begins.
#
The first thing to note is that there's no real base.
#
That's a big part which happens post 1825 when it really comes to the UK.
#
So this is a world with no real base where like the earlier 2000 years, the fastest way
#
to get across the subcontinent is the speed of the horse or you could, you know, go down
#
the Ganga in terms of waterborne navigation, which is still highly prevalent.
#
This is a world where movement and migration is happening a bit, but movement, a lot of
#
it is happening for pilgrimages.
#
And these are large scale pilgrimages, people going in large groups across the subcontinent
#
across and which are the major pilgrimage centers that they continue to be the major
#
Whether it's Tirupati in the south or Haridwar in the north and you know, different places
#
So many people from India actually making this journey to Mecca even in 1817.
#
They were around 1 billion human beings in 1817.
#
So today the population is, you know, seven times more than that.
#
And about 60% of that was in India and China, you know, so about 400 million in China and
#
more than 200 million in India.
#
And the population of US in 1817 was about the size of Calcutta today, right?
#
So it's literally nothing in 1817, everything I mean, think of American history, you know,
#
it really starts off in terms of some demography by the late 19th century when there's this
#
mass transatlantic migration, but before that, it's a really tiny sort of Republic.
#
We have the slave trade still on in some pockets, but there's growing pressure to quash the
#
So the British, the East India Company is on the rise, but it's only in 1818.
#
So 1817, they've still not managed to defeat the Marathas.
#
So that is also in balance of, you know, this tentatively sort of poised, but they've got
#
the East India Company does operate through these three ports of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta,
#
which are doing very well in the Ottoman Empire is there, but it's not doing, you know, too
#
There's a guy called Moumad Ali Pasha, who's rising up in Egypt.
#
There's a sword dynasty in Arabia.
#
There's a Qing dynasty in China.
#
They've not yet fought the Opium War.
#
So China, that's still a proud imperial sort of rulers in that time.
#
There's a Qajar dynasty in Persia.
#
And as you pointed out, you know, Harper Collins or Harper Brothers, as they were called the
#
publisher of this book, also started in 1817, just a coincidence out there.
#
So this is really the background.
#
So it's a book on pandemics arising out of what happened in the pandemic year, essentially.
#
And you know, cholera is not something new.
#
You pointed out in your book about how it had in fact been in what we today call India
#
even as, you know, long before this in 1543, where, you know, it was there in Portuguese
#
ruled Goa where they had a rule that, okay, every time somebody dies, we shall have a
#
And then so many people started dying that it became a cacophony and they kind of had
#
And you've spoken about how in 1757, Amat Shah Durrani's army was affected by it.
#
In 1783, 20,000 people died in Haridwar and all of that.
#
Tell me a little bit about cholera.
#
What was known about it at the time?
#
What sort of, you know, happens when one gets cholera?
#
How fast does it spread?
#
So, you know, what is cholera?
#
The best way to understand that is posting to the symptoms.
#
So if you get cholera, you know, what happens to you?
#
So likely the almost any in this, there's some amount of headache.
#
You start feeling uneasy, but the classic symptom of cholera is what we would call as
#
loose motions or, you know, basically watery stools, but classically rice water stools.
#
This is the classic description clinical description of cholera dehydration, you know, that's what's
#
happening with cholera.
#
That is, you're losing a lot of fluids from your body, you know, especially through bowel
#
And that's one of the things about cholera, you know, because it really shocked societies
#
wherever it appeared because literally you have to go to the toilet.
#
I mean, that's what we are talking about in this disease.
#
Now are there references to cholera before 1817?
#
You know, so it's not something which is completely new in 1817 historians that pointed out that
#
even in Ayurvedic traditions, people call this particular thing called Vishu Chikka
#
as the closest equivalent to cholera, not another sort of disease of diarrhea.
#
I mean, we use the word diarrhea today, today hardly anyone talks about cholera, but there's
#
So both of them have similar symptoms, but cholera was far more deadlier and often patients
#
will also turn blue because of massive dehydration.
#
So you know, turning blue was also part of the sort of folklore around the disease and
#
case fatality rates were more than 50%.
#
And this is a nice number to know because it was kind of observed in different settings.
#
So what does that mean for, you know, the lay reader right now is that out of hundred
#
people who get the disease about more than 50 would die.
#
So that is what we are calling as case fatality.
#
So in COVID-19 today we are saying it's about one to two percent, but it's much more violent
#
But cholera is case for fatality rate at that time was much more than 50%.
#
And there are references.
#
So the words for cholera before range from Maureekshi in, which was used in Goa.
#
Like I said, Vishu Chikka is the closest equivalent in Ayurvedic tradition and Haiza.
#
So Haiza is like Unani practice, you know, so in the Arabic world as well as, you know,
#
Muslim practitioners, health practices in India, Haiza was the font.
#
So example, if you read this book by Munshi Premchand, you know, called Eid Gah, the father
#
of that kid, Hamid, you know, it's a very famous story, dies of Haiza, right?
#
So Haiza is what is, what is known out there.
#
In fact, that chapter starts with this particular quote by an Hakim, you know, Syed Amal Dar
#
Bahad bade doctor mea Haiza ki surat dekhte hain, to unki roo kaap utti hai.
#
And that tells you the kind of thing that doctors are scared to kind of treat patients
#
with this because nobody really knows how to treat.
#
So the mystery of cholera is really the fact that you couldn't treat it.
#
I think that's the mystery about any disease that it's, you know, it's so hard to treat
#
And by the 1700s, the first English references to cholera come about.
#
So you can see the word cholera, and it's called cholera morbis, for some reason, in
#
British medical circles.
#
And that's really what sticks on.
#
And so in 1817, when it kind of, you know, breaks out, it's clear to medical practitioners
#
in India that this is cholera.
#
But what takes them completely off guard is its virulence.
#
So you know, so the same diseases, it's been recorded in pilgrimage sites, it's been recorded
#
as, you know, devastating Haridwar in the 1780s.
#
So stuff happening before 1817, yet in 1817, when it strikes, it goes across the subcontinent
#
And that's why 1817 is different.
#
So the most accepted reason for why 1817 and why not earlier is that there's some sort
#
of a mutation in the strain of cholera.
#
We now know cholera is caused by bacteria, that's a different bacteria and in a virus
#
That's a bacteria, which was later, much later, much, we've talked more than a century later
#
called as cholera vibrio.
#
So today, you know, mentioned the symptoms of cholera and cholera vibrio is the sort
#
But what happens from 1817 for almost 100 years is a really fascinating story of people
#
trying to get to grips with this disease and the whole debate on its transmission.
#
You know, today, at least we're lucky to know some elements of transmission, though during
#
the year, you know, we move from being obsessed about surface transmission.
#
Now people say, you know, there's not so much surface transmission.
#
But you saw these debates this year.
#
Back then, the fundamental across medical schools in the world, the idea was that, you
#
know, bad air or impure air, what the British call as miasma was the reason for every disease,
#
And so cholera is an environmental problem.
#
That is, if you have filth, if you have dirt, you will get cholera.
#
That was the causal sort of relationship in 1817.
#
So that's the sort of background.
#
And just the way people talk of super spreaders today and, you know, we were quick to blame
#
the tablighi japaat a few months back.
#
You know, the same shit was happening back then.
#
Like you point out about how at one point you say quote, Puri and many other pilgrimage
#
sites were perceived by Europeans in the 19th century in the way many see Chinese wet markets
#
That is, as places that generate pandemic stop code.
#
When you speak about how, you know, both Hindu and Muslim pilgrimages were blamed for it,
#
there was even an outbreak in Mecca where many people died.
#
And in 1866, the International Sanitary Conference in Constantinople as it was then blamed Puri
#
But I want to kind of go back to this question of trying to figure out what causes it.
#
Like, you know, one thing you point out is that really it's only by the middle of the
#
20th century that oral rehydration therapy comes about and people kind of figure out
#
what to do about cholera and it isn't such a big deal.
#
But back then you have this sort of atmosphere of complete ignorance and all kinds of crazy
#
Like at one point you, you know, you describe this one incident in Russia where, quote,
#
a few villagers abducted two doctors on duty who espoused quarantine, tied them to cholera
#
corpses and placed them in a pit.
#
Their survival would be proof against contagion.
#
In that particular case, they did survive and were eventually pulled out of the pit.
#
Stop, quote, which is fascinating.
#
You know, the other thing that strikes me is that medicine based on science at that
#
time is at such a primitive stage that alternative medicines are thriving.
#
Like you write at one point, quote, the native physicians, Vats and Hakims did command respect
#
and were enlisted by the British in relief efforts.
#
The cures offered could be a mixture of various medical traditions.
#
The Vats prescribed black pepper, ginger, cloves and at most beloved Indian ingredient, heen
#
or asafoetida, however you pronounce that.
#
In Madras in South India, physicians practicing Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha native to the region
#
assisted the government and where the cure seemed to be effective, it won the appreciation
#
of the royals, of the locals, irrespective of who the ruling class was, the British or
#
Stop, quote, and it strikes me that, you know, medicine back in the day is so primitive,
#
you know, for various diseases, you would have bloodletting as an option and all of
#
Hospitals would not yet be sanitized.
#
So you could actually die because you went to a hospital that, you know, that is why
#
people would believe in some of these alternative systems, like, you know, the explanation that
#
I give whenever I talk about, you know, why so many people believe in something like homeopathy,
#
for example, is one, of course, we all know about the placebo effect, but there's also
#
a reversion to the mean that, you know, some diseases, you will just automatically get
#
And if you take whatever medicine you think is medicine at the peak of that, you will
#
obviously ascribe causation and say, oh, no, no, no, this cured me and all of that.
#
So what's kind of the medical landscape like?
#
Because you know, today we think of, okay, there is science and, you know, there is proper
#
kind of medicine and we have a great understanding into all of these.
#
But at that time, everything is kind of faith based depending on whatever you think that
#
works because nobody really knows anything, right?
#
I mean, you know, also this today, this notion of Western superiority in medicine, right?
#
If at all it was, in fact, what I pointed out in this book is like for these pandemics,
#
it really didn't matter that much.
#
Maybe cholera in the late 19th century, but for plague, they figured it out very late
#
after the pandemic, influencer after the pandemic, so it really didn't help during the pandemic.
#
But in the early 19th century, they were all the same.
#
I mean, there is really no advantage that Western medicine gave in, you know, surviving
#
cholera vis-a-vis either way given vis-a-vis unani vis-a-vis siddha, which is in South
#
So as you said, you know, completely faith-based.
#
Does that mean, you know, there's completely useless against cholera, it's hard to say,
#
but against basic diseases, I'm pretty sure that some of these things that they would
#
have been offering must have worked obviously every, you know, there is a credibility criteria
#
and these doctors would have gained reputation over time only, of course, if things worked.
#
But you know, this is a world where even these doctors living on side-by-side with massive
#
superstitions and you have these witches, you have these sorcerers, you have all kinds
#
of people in, especially rural India, but also urban India, who command huge respect.
#
So of course, goddesses and gods, you know, so in Indian history, Sitala is this classic
#
goddess in Eastern India for smallpox, but very quickly for cholera, you know, across
#
the 1700s and early 1800s, this Ola Bibi came into prominence and it's really fascinating.
#
So in 1817, and the years proceed following that, Ola Bibi's kind of stock went up much
#
more than Sitala, you know, and so different temples had to kind of woo, in fact, their
#
own patrons saying that, no, no, our God can, you know, help you out better.
#
So it's interesting how religion was, of course, very closely intertwined, you know, with healing
#
Also, you know, I point out in cholera, this is a jumping hundred years later, but Christian
#
conversion, for example, right?
#
So using epidemics as a pretext for, you know, missionary movement saying that, look, our
#
Actually, it wasn't better for a long period, but the claim that our science is better.
#
So if you join our religion, you know, you get some benefits out of it.
#
So this is open game and health being a day-to-day matter, right?
#
It must have been such an important thing in guiding people's decisions whether to convert
#
If somebody is going to say that, you know, I can cure you, it is the most powerful kind
#
of advice, you know, anybody can potentially take.
#
Even in India today, a lot of the spiritual guru market thrives on healing powers, right?
#
And so it's a very closely attached notion.
#
So the medical landscape in 1870 is, as you rightly pointed, very primitive, right?
#
There are no clear advantages of any system and on cholera, as you said, pretty much everyone
#
In fact, some of these things that they were doing like bloodletting, this was a British
#
practice, it was completely opposite of what anybody should be doing.
#
You know, the analogy I use in the book is like, you know, contracting money supply in
#
This is pretty much what they were doing.
#
That is literally, you know, what you need is actually some amount of fluids in your
#
And so taking out even some of that was really a crazy idea.
#
In one of the practices, they would put leeches on the anus to suck out the blood, you know,
#
really crazy practices which emerged in the 1820s and 1830s.
#
And all of this on the pretext that cholera was somehow coming from the air, from environment
#
And so it's really Jon Snow, who's the hero in this whole fight against cholera, who in,
#
you know, 1840s and 1850s figures out that, look, hey, this is not about air, this is
#
And that's the big discovery on cholera, that cholera is a waterborne disease.
#
And yet, even though Jon Snow kind of proves it in the 1850s, he's not very famous in his
#
You know, he's now very famous today, but he was not very famous back then.
#
People maintain to this airborne theory of cholera transmission for literally more than
#
And the Indian guys, the Indian Medical Service, which are British officers, they were scientifically
#
trained and so on, were so proud of their science of the airborne theory of cholera
#
that they rejected Jon Snow's theory, right?
#
And so for until 1900s or so, it was a complete global embarrassment because these Indian
#
Medical Service people were hell bent on showing that it was the environment.
#
Because they figured out, look, cholera happens only in some parts of the year.
#
So it can't be just waterborne, otherwise it would be affecting you all through the
#
So there must be something with the environment.
#
So they had their reasons.
#
They had their own sense of scientific reasoning based on the position they were taking.
#
But on hindsight, they were clearly wrong, cholera is mostly a waterborne theory.
#
Of course, there are new transmission mechanisms found today, but it is generally a waterborne
#
And it's only once they figured out transmission that people could start working out on prevention,
#
So that has to wait the truly great scientific revolution called as bacteriology, you know,
#
and so the great bacteriologists like Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, after everyone who gets
#
up in the morning, you know, drinking milk, knows about pasteurization, pasteurized milk.
#
This is all the great work of, you know, certain French and German and a few British scientists
#
in the late 19th century.
#
And it's only with that that you can see a dramatic divergence then in medical systems.
#
So that's really what takes Western medicine ahead, because they start this idea of experimentation
#
They kind of understand what is the idea of the germs creating disease and so on.
#
And then that, of course, you know, helps in controlling cholera eventually.
#
But the overall progress is very slow.
#
You know, the case fatality rates of cholera finally fall down only in the 1910s and 1920s.
#
And luckily for the Indian Medical Service, it's one of, you know, our or their people
#
And it's a guy called Leonard Rogers, who finally figures out that the way to, you know,
#
stop a body from dehydrating is rehydrating it.
#
And so what he's pioneered was this IV method intravenous method of injecting fluids, saline,
#
high saline sort of portions into the body, worked it out in Calcutta, took five years
#
of experimentation, but finally he got it.
#
And that reduced case fatality rates from 50% to less than 20%.
#
And today, of course, you know, people say this is the greatest invention in medical
#
history that is ORT, you know, oral, oral rehydration therapy, because so cost effective,
#
It's just a bunch of salts in your mouth and you're ingesting it.
#
And yet it kind of protects you against diarrhea, it protects against an important class of
#
diseases that historically claimed a lot of lives.
#
So today, cholera, even if it happens, we know how to fight it, unless the strain kind
#
of mutates and again becomes very deadly.
#
But at least the lead time on bacterial diseases today is very good.
#
So we can, you know, quickly fight, but as you pointed out, 1817, very primitive, no
#
real advantage offered by any medical system.
#
So I have a couple of follow up questions, but we'll save them for after the break.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break.
#
Now we'll be back in just a minute.
#
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#
As many of you know, I'll soon be coming out with a four volume anthology of the Seen
#
and the Unseen books organized around the themes of politics, history, economics and
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Welcome back to the Seen and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Chinmay Tumbe about Age of Pandemics, this wonderful new book on,
#
you know, 1817 to 1920 and the three pandemics that shaped our nation profoundly during
#
that period and yet we don't remember them as we should and they hold a lot of lessons
#
So just a phenomenal eye opening book.
#
You know from what he was saying just before the break I have sort of a couple of follow
#
One is you refer to Jon Snow, right?
#
And that whole narrative is very interesting where in 1849 he comes out with a book called
#
On the Mode of Communication of Cholera and no one pays any attention to him.
#
Then in 1887 you speak about MC Fennell who comes out with you know this paper called
#
Cholera and Water in India stop quote and what I found fascinating about that is you've
#
reproduced a map in the book like you know people who've been following COVID would notice
#
that there are all these studies of how COVID can spread through droplets in a restaurant.
#
So you'll have maps of restaurants and where everybody is sitting and you know with arrows
#
to where the droplets are going and MC Fennell did a similar thing where he mapped the spread
#
of cholera in a village and he had like two wells which he marked out and then showed
#
the kind of spread proportional to the two wells and therefore concluded that it's obviously
#
a water borne disease which you know despite what Snow had done four decades earlier no
#
one yet believed and you know advocated things like instead of these wells we should have
#
mass produced hand pumps and all that just remarkable scientific work and yet no one
#
took him seriously in much the same way that for example that you know so many lives were
#
lost because people ignored you know Semmelweis when he spoke about the importance of hand
#
washing and all of that.
#
Why do you think like it seems to me that always within any establishment in pretty
#
much any context even outside the context of medicine there is this arrogance there
#
is this lack of humility you know there is an accepted way of doing things of thinking
#
about things and you imagine that this is right and you know anything new that comes
#
up new truths new revelations can often take decades to spread even in something which
#
literally can you know affect lives so and it's not just in medicine it's in economics
#
it's in governance in so many different fields you find that you know authorities are sticking
#
by the wrong way of doing things for ages while you know the truth is out there.
#
So is this something that you've you know kind of thought about?
#
Yeah I mean in social science we say you know paradigms go away one death at a time you
#
know it's only when the guy dies finally that his disciples his you know cellars across
#
many PhDs you know lineages who kind of propagate this guy's views throughout but the thing
#
with science is that this such thing should not happen you know I can imagine economics
#
you're a Kineshi Narayana Friedmanite and you know these kind of ideologies pass on
#
through PhD students but in science the whole idea of science is fairly objective if it's
#
bad science it gets figured out very quickly and it goes so John Snow had kind of figured
#
it out very well Europe started implementing that you know they started having better water
#
supply systems they kind of started accepting it was controversial but some kind of evidence
#
based approach to understanding cholera was on in Germany one of the heroes of the sanitation
#
policies guy called Max von Bettenkofer and Bettenkofer interestingly you know did not
#
believe in the waterborne theory and almost till his death he committed suicide finally
#
the 1890s he maintained this view that you know it's the environment and not he in fact
#
actively looked down upon bacteriology and so on even Florence Nightingale had to be
#
shown a microscope to say look this is the new science and this is what is causing diseases
#
and then finally she accepted so often you have to demonstrate you know this revolutionary
#
ideas which are coming back there in the case of MC Fernand very interesting you know is
#
a low-run sort of bureaucrat in the Indian Medical Service but completely ignored by the
#
top brass and by some accounts even lost his job because he was actively propagating an
#
idea which would have saved millions of Indian lives you know if people had started getting
#
good water supply systems that was all it was needed to prevent muscular outbreaks interestingly
#
the Maharaj of Travancore you know wrote to him saying that you know I would like to hear
#
more about your ideas and so on so there were people there was a particular audience who
#
was willing to experiment but the IMS Indian Medical Service hell-bent in fact they looked
#
up to Petticoff they said if Petticoff is saying this you know we believe Petticoff is hearing
#
so this is an interesting kind of thing even in science because both the IMS and John Snow
#
coming from a particular scientific tradition but in science we would say you know one thing
#
has to be right and one thing has to be wrong eventually in this case these guys held on to
#
this position for far too long and eventually you know it was kind of demonstrated clear cut
#
that it was a waterborne disease and it's only much later that these water supply systems came
#
in fact in Calcutta cholera started and overall mortality started falling majorly after 1869
#
when the pipe water supply was introduced in the city so even that was actually a clear-cut example
#
of success in how one can prevent cholera so you're absolutely right you know these paradigms exist
#
and it's very tough sometimes for a revolutionary idea to make its way across the board and stuff
#
which today we would take for granted you know that if this is what scientists are saying by
#
you know using a particular process of experimentation and so on there's much
#
more credibility today but back in late 19th century when the first ideas of bacteriology
#
were coming in it received a lot of pushback and you know the people were very very skeptical
#
of the claims that they were making it really but it's only with the 1900s when without a doubt
#
you know the ideas of pasture, cock and many others were finally holding sway.
#
And you know another thing that kind of struck me when I was reading this book was
#
how you know we look back on those times with hindsight and the accumulated knowledge that we
#
have and look at it through that prism like I sometimes feel I cannot possibly imagine what it
#
would be like for me to live in the 19th century because whatever knowledge I have I would have to
#
assume it does not exist I would have to strip it away and all those sort of the certainties kind
#
of vanish for example we speak about how you know in one sense you know the god of religion is really
#
the god of the gaps there are so many things you can't explain so you bring god as an explanation
#
you are in prehistoric times you don't even understand you know the sun the moon the rain
#
so you have gods for each of them and so on and so forth. Now in modern times the only things
#
that can't be explained is perhaps the things that will never be explained which is
#
or which will never be confronted like what is the meaning of life and obviously one could just say
#
that look rationally speaking there is no meaning it is random and all of that but that's a little
#
hard to accept but a lot of these other questions have been answered like you know Douglas Adams
#
once famously said when speaking about natural selection that give me the awe of knowledge over
#
you know whatever or religion kind of might invoke. Now I'm kind of thinking back to the 19th
#
century when this shit is happening all around you people are dying and you have no clue why
#
some random person is saying it's because of water but other people are coming up with various
#
explanations and some of these are stunning explanations like for example you write in
#
your book quote one Sanskrit scholar from that region mused that there were three types of
#
disease in the world for sins committed in past lives for sins of the current life and for
#
accidental sins and that an epidemic like cholera came under the second category which is sins of
#
the current life obviously similarly you talk about how there are cholera deities all over the
#
place including one called Harlul Lala in Bundelkhand and at one point you know one of the
#
British dignitaries of that time who was leading them against the Marathas in fact in the third
#
Anglo-Maratha war Francis Rodden Hastings you write about how his men are blamed for killing cows on
#
Lala's grave which is why he is effectively now taking revenge and he is a cholera deity
#
you also speak about how in the Konkan region on the west coast witches and sorcerers are being
#
blamed for cholera and as late as 1943 BR Ambedkar writes quote it was reported from Nasik on 1st
#
September that the Hindus of a village attacked an Achuth which is a term Ambedkar used attacked an
#
Achuth family tied the hands and feet of an elderly woman placed her on a pile of wood which was
#
subsequently set on fire all this because they thought she was a cause of the cholera in the
#
village stop quote and and these narratives are crazy of course they're not like propagating at
#
whatsapp speed like they do today but you know and today you could argue that despite the fact that
#
we know so much more these narratives are still so commonplace like around Sushant Singh Rajput's
#
death when he recently dies and all the mad conspiracy theories that came up then some on
#
news tv and some even on twitter and so on and so forth and again you've spoken about how back then
#
people used to resist vaccination when it came about when it you know started becoming sort of
#
popularized in the late 19th century because they were like it'll make us important and just today
#
i saw on twitter that people are talking about these current vaccines that i think somewhere in
#
central india there is this rumor that the men start behaving like women and the women start
#
behaving like men which if you ask me is not a very bad thing so there is a sense of overall
#
bewilderment so and as a historian who is kind of going in there doing the complete opposite you
#
know making sense of everything but everybody in your stories in the histories that you tell
#
most people are just completely bewildered all the time so you know what is your sense of
#
this and you know whether this kind of reveals something about the human condition and the
#
progress of science will not affect it this is a very deep question because you mean this idea of
#
panic fear you know conspiracy rumour mongering we've seen so much of that this year itself you
#
know in 2020 maybe not as deadly as the rumors back then but of course the rumors travel much
#
faster now than back then for example you know in march there was this thing about indian immunity
#
and a lot of people said no this will not come to india because we have such strong immunity you
#
know these people live in clean environments and so that's why they get covid whereas we kind of
#
grow up in these bad environments and we it's almost like this pride that you know we can have
#
our own water and food and the foreigners who come here fall sick now this is not something
#
to be proud about this is we have bad quality water and you know we are kind of immune to it
#
but that's only one part of immunity there's nothing like full blown you know immunity to
#
anything that's how we kind of fool ourselves you know we fool ourselves with these nice stories
#
which vegetarianism you know this huge thing but indians but there was one you know what's up
#
forward this year india has never been the source of pandemics and the subtext being you know because
#
they are mostly like the the argument being because india has a lot of vegetarians and so on
#
but cholera was i mean like the world blames china today for us nearly a century india was seen as
#
china is seen today and originator of pandemics you know so this sort of classic emotions of fear
#
that will not stop but i think here's what collective memory can do you know if collective
#
memory is there it's a built-in we know we can see the markers and quickly react to that so you know
#
nobody is in europe is blaming the jews for poisoning bells this was happening in the 14th
#
century plague i mean of course it was happening in different ways in the early 20th century but
#
today that's not happening and so that sort of you know collective memory is useful to understand
#
i think the thing with pandemics is that when it strikes it happens so rarely that when it strikes
#
people have no clue how to react to it or any new epidemic and that is why you know building this
#
collective memory through different generation passing that information on to each generation
#
is very important so that people realize that there are certain patterns you know pandemics
#
will happen and you know there's no need to kind of completely go into panic and rumor-mongering
#
mode one needs to trust scientists and hear out at least what they're saying and so on so this
#
you know in the 19th century world given the kind of you know the world of witches and sorcerers and
#
so on you can just imagine the amount of crazy things i mean ambedkar is reporting stuff in the
#
1940s you know of people burning uh people literally putting people on the stake so to speak
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crazy things happening in the name of epidemics in a castred in society is india you know where
#
today the word is social distancing historically india used to i mean it's a different concept but
#
untouchability right and in the world of epidemics of course uh that you know took on a huge meaning
#
because often the segregation in villages and cities meant that the lowest ranking caste example
#
were confined to the worst amount of food the worst kind of water and highly sensitive so
#
influenza for example you know the death rates for in plague influenza especially influenza
#
was so much higher you know among social certain social groups of india compared to the rest
#
so diseases acted differently you know on you know different sets of social groups in the population
#
and thus there was the thing so if you escaped one plausible hypothesis that you know say the
#
so-called untouchables of that time had a much much more higher death rates because nutrition was so
#
poor right so they're really poor and could not withstand these diseases but yet the perception
#
that so many people were dying of plague influenza belong to these social groups leads to a new
#
perception that it's them who are causing these diseases and so that becomes like a self-reinforcing
#
stereotype and what modern science does of course to kind of you know tell that this is not cause
#
and effect there's a different set of reasons why this is why when cholera first struck london
#
and uk in a big way it hit the poor parts you know of this thing and the poor actually thought
#
that it's the way of the rich to get rid of so that's an interesting story another of the
#
interesting things that i found you know while reading your book is that typically we think of
#
a pandemic as an event that happened and then in a year or two it's over and it's done and all of
#
that but you know cholera pretty much for the whole of the 19th century and even beyond uh you
#
know plague does and as i shouldn't use the term plague does cholera does and and some people
#
treat it as six separate pandemics but you actually point out that quote the six pandemic
#
should be considered as being nested within one large pandemic extending over a century
#
stop quote tell me a bit about sort of why you come to this way of thinking about it until like
#
15 years back you know the standard way about nobody would talk about one cholera pandemic
#
there was always the first cholera pandemic the second one from like 1829 to 33 the third
#
one from you know 1840s fifth one sixth one seventh one uh and so on and this was partly
#
because of the way cholera was characterized by writers of those times in the late 19th century
#
and the early 20th century when they started recording cholera as an event in history the
#
first writers in cholera and all of them argued that it all started in india and what they were
#
trying to do is like point out each and every outbreak say in mexico can be linked to it starting
#
in india a few years before that right and this was a chain of events so this idea was that every
#
you know outbreak in the west happened because of some start in india and then it got transmitted
#
by some mechanism the problem with this theory is that oftentimes there was no clear mechanism
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linking into india you know uh so japan for example you know it had outbreaks in many years
#
in the 19th century but often there's really no connection so connection could come from ships
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you know from people getting off and then contaminating waters and so on so this mystery
#
was actually clarified only in the last 15 years where people realize actually cholera vibrio can
#
become endemic which means it can sustain itself in certain water systems so you don't need like a
#
continuous transmission once it settles down in certain maritime systems it can kind of lead to
#
outbreaks nested from those systems themselves so the key is how does the 1817 strain move around
#
the world and so plausible hypothesis is that it moved around in the first 10 or 20 years and then
#
it settled down and became endemic in certain parts and it kind of grew out from there so in
#
such a reading then you don't get multiple pandemics you're really talking about one
#
you know large pandemic in the sense that there were outbreaks in certain times of the year and
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only in certain years it could be activated you know by by reasons concerning the survival
#
prospects of cholera vibrio but beyond that you know to point out each and every wave of the
#
pandemic to india was seen to be faulty so you now have a research paper in japan which basically
#
shows that actually all those outbreaks were not linked with india especially in the later part of
#
the 19th century it was more endemic it was completely happening within and so this new
#
research actually is overturning earlier research which showed cholera in terms of waves of pandemics
#
and so there's a good one biography of cholera again focusing mainly on the west which basically
#
now makes this very strong case of not calling it six different pandemics but calling it one
#
pandemic so i'm in a way following that line it's really very cutting edge research of the last 10
#
years which is actually showing new kind of it's shedding new light on cholera and how cholera can
#
transmit and become endemic in certain parts so that's what that's the kind of line which i take
#
in this book that is not all of this was linked with india and this new strain of cholera which
#
exists in the world today started roughly in the 1860s and most people point out to again a mutation
#
which happens roughly around indonesia you know and it's now this strain which is found across the
#
world nobody talks about cholera today it's still there you know it still hurts some people because
#
it's so easy to treat it today you know so that's why it's no longer an important disease for us to
#
kind of be worried with but the strain mutation the two big ones happen in 1817 it looks like
#
and one in the 1960s yeah and in fact you speaking of indonesia you pointed out about how as it
#
spread across asia 17 000 people died in what was then called batavia now jakarta and you know is
#
spreading through east asia is spreading through west asia where you speak of 15 000 people dying
#
in basra and you also sort of talk about and this again struck a chord of you know in terms of how
#
it must have been for a common person to what someone in his family just died where you write
#
quote in boats and caravans and in deserts and plateaus people washed in horror the passing of
#
rice water stools and the subsequent deaths stop quote and i guess that once you know mentally
#
you've connected the two it must be such a feeling of terror when someone close to you gets rice
#
water stools for the first time like you know it's almost beyond imagination the other sort of
#
interesting thing that you speak about was that look there were four big diseases of the 19th
#
century as you say cholera plague smallpox typhus and cholera actually took much fewer lives than
#
malaria so and yet it dominates a popular imagination in a much greater sense you know you
#
have love in the time of cholera you don't have love in the time of anopheles mosquito so why is
#
that is it because the way that people just it happens and they just die and much more sort of
#
viscerally shocking you know what are the reasons behind that yeah i think it's to do the symptoms
#
though i should you know correct you we do have nanoparticles dialogue eight much
#
you know so we do blame the mosquito at least for some reasons but uh but you're right you know there
#
is we don't see malaria kills so many people even today you know uh we don't call it a pandemic
#
it's because it's endemic in certain regions but there's no real clear evidence of it transmitting
#
itself across time like how cholera plague and influenza did that's why we don't call it
#
pandemic it's it's far more deadly in terms of you know actual deaths taken even in this age of
#
pandemics they're saying 70 million people died because of these pandemics but malaria actually
#
killed more people so malaria was always the number one sort of uh killer so the difference
#
between cholera and plague and some of these other epidemics is precisely the symptoms you know with
#
plague it was this bubo which basically got these big sort of boils on your on your body uh and in
#
cholera it was these rice photos too so there's no doubt that there's certain kind of horror
#
attached with cholera and plague which did not happen with malaria i mean the symptoms of
#
the millennial high fever you know uh that is a decipher you don't you didn't start growing stuff
#
in your body or you didn't you know have to go to the toilet a thousand times like in in the case
#
of cholera so there's no doubt that this added to this you know this fear of cholera uh throughout
#
and when it started transmit you know transmitting as you said basically if you see a guy you know
#
suffer with this uh it really became a talking point and so it became a very uh you know very
#
quickly people started hating the whole idea of getting cholera rather than getting malaria
#
yeah and i guess you know the basic symptoms of malaria like fever shiver also happened for many
#
other things and therefore you know you know you can recover from a fever but can you recover from
#
loose motions this is not a question we would ask ourselves today and and you know among the many
#
sort of historical consequences that you point out the one that kind of struck me was the one
#
about the 1857 rebellion or the first war of independence or whatever one calls it and chapatis
#
what do chapatis have to do with cholera just tell me about that it is a debate among historians
#
you know but what did the circulation of chapatis convey and one line of reasoning is that it conveyed
#
the incoming of epidemics so what this so just to tell you the system basically a village would
#
send out this let's call him a postman you know postal person uh and this person would give
#
literally a box of chapatis you know to the next village and so on and so it's like a relay network
#
of chapatis and this was it's a historical fact that this was observed in 1857 you know a few
#
months before the actual outbreak began and there's actually a research paper now which connects
#
the dots and says that towns which got this chapati circulation basically as a proxy for
#
impending cholera you know heightened the kind of prejudice of people against the british and made
#
them act more so it's an interesting line of causation but this idea of chapati circulation
#
as an interesting traditional knowledge you can call it to warn others that you know cholera has
#
come cholera is in town right is a very interesting and attractive proposition but i should say that
#
it's contentious not all historians agree there are different interpretations of what chapati
#
circulation meant but i take in this book i take this idea that it was actually connected very
#
closely with cholera and coming to that you know 1857 such an important year in history
#
nobody really thinks of it as cholera here you know but it is a fact that cholera preceded the
#
outbreak and a lot of people died more people died in from cholera rather than arguably the
#
the massive uprising in that year oh i know many hipsters on a gluten-free diet who would
#
argue that chapatis are a problem in and of themselves now you know the tell me a little
#
bit about the toll of this and also i was intrigued by something that you've pointed out when you're
#
talking about the toll that you know you have estimated that 40 million indians died due to
#
cholera between 1817 and 1920 which works out to you know 300 000 deaths every year five percent
#
of all deaths in the indian subcontinent during this period now sort of one you've pointed out
#
that this is your estimate secondly you know later when talking about influenza which we'll
#
also chat about you've pointed out about how for the longest time people believe that the figure of
#
the number of people dead was one of the early figures that were cited at that time which is
#
six million but actually 20 million people died so some of the work that has gone into this is
#
actually your original research looking at the numbers and figuring this stuff out so tell me a
#
little bit about how did you do this what was your methodology and so on and so forth yeah this is
#
like the training in economics and also demography you know i mean the connecting theme between the
#
first book and second book is actually demography demographers basically study three things
#
fertility mortality and migration and my first book is about migration and this book is about
#
mortality so the connecting theme is demography and i've been exposed to a lot of demographic
#
research methods how do you estimate death with you know very few data points and so on so our
#
death statistics in fact this is a side note it's precisely because of the cholera pandemic
#
that we actually started recording deaths systematically in india so this process starts
#
in the early 1860s after a series of devastating cholera outbreaks in the years following that
#
and the british started the system mainly to monitor the health of their army right so they're
#
not really doing it for the native population but very quickly they realized there's a need to do
#
that they need to sort of document systematically what's happening the native population so india's
#
death registration system like we have today the origins of it are the 1860s and from the 1870s
#
annually province-wise sometimes even district-wise the british systematically collected deaths
#
and the causes of deaths now obviously they're huge problems you know the person who's reporting
#
these deaths was not a well-trained medical doctor it was often the village patwari or the tax person
#
you know at the village level so a lot of you know issues around that but the general trend
#
that you will see kind of mimics what is happening so in some years if there were a lot of plague
#
cases you would see a spike in plague cases so what i have on a spreadsheet now is a province
#
level database of all the deaths between 1870 and 1940s so that's what 70 years data now if that's a
#
great database for plague which starts in 1890s that's a great database for influenza which is
#
recorded under fevers which makes it slightly complicated but for cholera it's tricky because
#
what do i do this period 1817 to 1860s where there's literally no database right so they're
#
just guesstimates and so on what basis does one make guesstimates so i then look at all the records
#
i look at you know the south park cemetery records i look at different records and there's these
#
projections they're not perfect numbers but on average there were 300 000 people dying by of
#
cholera between the 1870s and 1910s and that number is going up and so what we can say for sure on the
#
basis of that rough number 250 000 to 300 000 deaths is a certain number of millions of deaths
#
of indians the thing with cholera of course was that it was partly endemic which meant that a
#
certain number of people died every year irrespective if it was virulent so in calcutta
#
and eastern india where it was endemic in those maritime systems some people always died of cholera
#
how do you make a distinction what is endemic and what is epidemic so i kind of look at only
#
those years where clear case of epidemic which means it spread all across india was recorded
#
and so my you know final numbers are eight million deaths in india in this whole period
#
uh which is epidemic but actually 31 million people you know which is endemic and so there's
#
so many more people who died in the average year itself and so that so this 70 million global figure
#
that i have in this book actually does not count the 31 million deaths of endemic cholera in india
#
if you add it to that 70 million then it actually goes up to more than 100 million so a lot of this
#
death accounting and it's a really morbid task you know i mean even for a person trained in
#
and trained in statistics like me you know just to when you look at those numbers i mean just
#
think about 300 000 deaths due to just cholera in one year at a time when the population of india is
#
one-fourth of what it is today so today we are kind of unnerved by 150 000 covid deaths on a
#
population which is four times larger so those death rates themselves are so unbelievably high
#
uh back then so a lot of this book as i said the starting point of this book was a statistical
#
database to try and understand which parts of india had more mortality and then in the case of
#
cholera you know i have this on page 70 of the book uh it's probably the first time somebody is
#
given global estimates of cholera because it's kind of tricky how do you estimate cholera deaths
#
you know across time so people have done for some individual countries what i've just done
#
on that table is to kind of aggregate it uh again using certain methods of uh years for which we
#
don't have data but it turns out that russia had a lot of deaths uh one famous casualty being
#
jackovsky the famous composer uh even his mother actually died of cholera uh then you have you know
#
uh spain hungary france germany uk all of them about a few hundred thousand uh but egypt you
#
know and egypt is spectacular in terms of i mean the estimates that i have is you know about more
#
than a half a million people out of a population of nearly six million so that's about 10 percent
#
of the population kind of getting wiped out due to just one disease cholera you know so that's
#
kind of a really spectacular kind of strike rate of cholera in egypt so that's one part of this
#
project is to just understand who is dying and where is it that's aided by british maintained
#
colonial statistics i should add we actually don't know much about cholera plague and influenza
#
in places where we did not record statistics for example the princely states in india so we know
#
much more about madras presidency bombay presidency mongol presidency or up or united
#
provinces but we don't know much about nizam's hezbollah we don't know much about meso we don't
#
know much about rajput and that's because these statistics were never really connected so i need
#
then need to project for them so then you know i use some other methods to kind of project for
#
them based on basic population counts and so on yeah and and lay people often think of statistics
#
as very dry and the eyes glaze over when you look at big numbers but numbers are people and i guess
#
part of the task of a skilled historian is to sort of turn those numbers into stories and you know
#
you've written about as cholera traveled across the world how it was changing history everywhere
#
like in france you talk about how 300 000 people died and in 1832 there was actually a rebellion
#
out there in spain you speak about how the monarch had to come out on the streets to
#
console the people and tell them don't worry we are on top of it you speak about you know the
#
religious revival in marcel which was catholic at the time and interestingly you speak about
#
you know rabindranath tagore's grandfather dwarkana tagore donating money to france
#
you know how much pride something like that would give our nationalists today tell me about the
#
consequences of cholera on india i mean not just in terms of deaths but politics economics society
#
itself tell me a little bit about that because it lasted such a long time and took so many lives
#
40 million people yeah i think two very clearly discernible one is of course 1857 so we should
#
start talking more about how the pandemic was a backdrop under which the revolution took place
#
one is on health you know there's definitely a you know greater demand from the people to improve
#
public health it's not a big demand but that's you know one important aspect of how it's starting
#
and death registration statistics the whole idea of tabulating death is a consequence of the band
#
that's existing with us even today you know what we call as a sample registration system it's a
#
40-year history but the real roots of recording death in india start from the 1860s the cholera
#
pandemic a lot of interesting you know of course some important people are killed by it you know
#
even in 1857 some british generals are killed uh there's this guy in calcutta young 22 year old
#
guy hendry devorio and uh he's basically sort of uh he dies at 22 but he's a staunch anglo-portuguese
#
person who is criticizing british rule you know and unfortunately his death his death he dies at
#
a very young age because of cholera raja ramo and roy who has a very interesting thing about cholera
#
and this is a larger thing about epidemics he says obviously epidemics are horrible because
#
they kill a lot of people but when you have so many people like in india in a labor surplus kind
#
of country could that actually improve the lives of people who are left alive you know and that's
#
the whole reasoning between the black death and it kills so many people that those who survived
#
actually worked with more capital and productivity increased and raja monroy has this argument but i
#
couldn't find too much of reference with cholera i found more with plague and influenza that it
#
had positive consequences for those who survived for cholera not so much it kind of you know in
#
europe the impact was very clear they had cholera riots so you had like violence attached with
#
cholera i mean i write you know the cholera outbreaks in europe coincided with you know
#
europe's revolutionary war of year of 1848 the crimian war in the 1850s the overthrow of the
#
german confederation 1866 the end of france's second empire in 1871 and also in russian poland
#
in 1892 so important events in history which actually coincided you know important political
#
events in both european and indian history we talked about 1857 which coincided the other part
#
is that cholera coincided very much with famines because what would famines do is you know famines
#
also classic starvation kind of deaths it would drive people outside in the search of water
#
because what is a family in india it was basically by lack of rainfall and in that process people
#
would congregate towards certain centers where they would find water and that is how with
#
contaminated water basically cholera would you know just rip through those populations
#
so india's great famine years like 1899 1900 or you know 1877 38 those are the years that cholera
#
really shot through the roof so cholera also in interaction the famines made it much worse
#
and so the public health officials had to really you know uh scamper around the biggest implication
#
of course of cholera was who itself that it is because of cholera that you had this first
#
conference in 1851 it is the first example of a global health surveillance system though of
#
course it was pretty much european imperial powers plus the ottoman empire trying to understand how
#
to prevent cholera but that is really they had a series of conferences 1851 then you know another
#
one then 1866 series of conferences that turns out then later once the league of nations was
#
formed it's the same set of conference people who make a kind of a department and that is the
#
genesis of the world health organization in 1948 and the who which call it a pandemic in 2020 so
#
you can see this unbroken kind of you know line connecting cholera and the first conference of
#
1851 and who announcing it because it's all linked you know it's all part of that same thing how do
#
we spread our disease from traveling globally yeah and what was also fascinating to me was
#
i thought this will be like uh you know a linear recounting in the sense that you have three
#
chapters cholera plague and influenza but they all kind of overlap you know by the time you get to
#
say something like 1918 all these are happening plus there is a monsoon that has been disastrous
#
and everything is just haywire like you speak about how the previous year there was too much
#
rainfall which was a problem and and the next year there is too little rainfall and you know
#
everything is just happening at the same time along with imperialism of course let's kind of
#
move on from cholera now as in in fact you know humanity is done because it's pretty much it's
#
virtually a problem that we have solved and talk about the plague now the plague's been sort of
#
around for much longer in the consciousness like i love this quote with which you started this
#
chapter which is from you know about 1615 from iqbal namai jahangiri and i'll read it out quote
#
when it was about to break out a mouse would rush out of its hole as if mad and striking itself
#
against the door and the walls of the house would expire if immediately after this signal the
#
occupants left the house and went away to the jungle their lives were saved if otherwise the
#
inhabitants of the whole village would be swept away by the hand of death stop quote which is you
#
know the hand of death is also a striking phrase it just you know and this was written before adam
#
smith's invisible hand and this is also a kind of invisible hand what a morbid thought so tell me a
#
bit about how sort of plague is looked at in india and how it comes to india and and in fact
#
plague at the end of the 1890s didn't even necessarily originate here like you point out
#
it's happening in hong kong it's happening in china tell me a little bit about this and how it is
#
is kind of different from you know cholera which came before and all of that yeah firstly this you
#
know plague is history's greatest disease if you had to put an honor on the like you know the great
#
in terms of you know this sheer sort of glamour value attached to it in terms of what it can do
#
and so on why because the black pet was about the plague right so that was one third of europe it
#
was a big moment in european history evidence of plague attacks in indian history it must have
#
happened you know because we're saying plague is also endemic among rodents and so on again so for
#
those who don't know plague is we now know that plague is about a bacteria yersinia pestis as
#
it's called discovered in the late 19th century but until 1890s nobody knew what really causes
#
plague you know and as you pointed out all people knew was that rodents and especially rats or mice
#
started dying in large numbers and if you saw that happening just get out that was the sort of
#
standard operating procedure regarding play i do note in the book and you know i want to
#
claim this as my little small contribution that the artashastra has certain references you know
#
which seem remarkable about rats and rodents and they also talk about rat tax and so on
#
and all of these things came into play in the 20th century and i make this argument that maybe i
#
speculate that maybe what the artashastra was referring to was the plague outbreak this is
#
something medical historians have not yet really latched on to but plague has sort of always been
#
there in the subcontinent but it never became so big as if you don't have evidence of it becoming
#
so big as it did in the late 19th and early 20th century and the fundamental way it kind of works
#
we now know is from it comes from rodents to humans via the bite of a rat flee but this
#
transmission mechanism and just unraveling that mechanism itself is you know one can write books
#
on that it is so fascinating that whole debate but in the 19th century it's not that you know in fact
#
my understanding of plague was that it comes to india out of nowhere in 1896 but even in india in
#
the 19th century you know it hits emdabad in 1814 i think you know early early part of the 19th
#
century it hits emdabad in their gruesome accounts of plague and the thing with plague even more than
#
cholera so in cholera the bad things you keep going you know you have to go to the toilet
#
in play you can see it you know there are these large black lumps which develop in your body so
#
this is almost a bit like leprosy in the sense that this is a disease which kind of leaves this
#
mark on its victims and of course there are different types of plague there's also mnemonic
#
plague which is you know which does not leave such marks necessarily but the principle the classic
#
you know plague leaves these marks and they stand out and that's why it's also recorded by
#
travelers and they have more evidence of plague in history than many other diseases so it really
#
breaks out in a big way in china the way historians have classified is three pandemics so the first one
#
is called the justinian plague and new research is suggesting that it was not as big as it was
#
previously thought kind of affected the mediterranean world you know so this place around you know egypt
#
turkey today and this is we're talking about you know the sixth century ce the time of emperor
#
justinian of the byzantine empire right so that's one the first plague pandemic as it's called
#
the second plague pandemic is in europe in between 1348 and 1353 but there are repeated plague
#
outbreaks throughout europe you know until the 1700s so london for example most famously was
#
ravaged first by the plague and then by fire and this is in 1660s or so but plague kind of stops
#
you know it hits i think the last time it hits europe in a big way is marseille if i'm not
#
mistaken 1720s but after that it doesn't hit here after that it's pretty much china you know and so
#
that's where the accounts of play come it's pretty much egypt interestingly and also india and so
#
when it breaks out in a big way in china in in the 1850s and 1860s and 1870s it really captures the
#
imagination of a lot of doctors but it becomes a global issue when it reaches hong kong in 1894
#
and that's when we kind of start saying you know the third plague pandemic really begins because
#
from hong kong then it goes around the world because hong kong was a major trade center
#
it also you know exported a lot of food grains and food grains was a classic sort of storage point
#
where rodents would go and that is how you know that's the association between food grains rodents
#
and the spread of plague which is a classic transmission mechanism and so from china the
#
most accepted theory is that it came to bombay from hong kong and from bombay it spread everywhere
#
but that doesn't mean that there's no plague before that there was plague in garhwal it was
#
called actually mahamari mahamari is the word today we use for pandemic the word epidemic by the way
#
in you know in indian language it's either mari or mari okay used in different contexts for at
#
least more than a thousand years i think more of mari in north india more of mari in south india
#
but mahamari which is really pandemic you know in today's palan was used to describe plague in the
#
garhwal region in north india and this is you're talking like 1850s and so on this is in british
#
reports but 1896 it comes to bombay and that's when you know all hell breaks loose yeah and it's
#
fascinating how the numbers are like you you've written about how when it hit canton in 1894 there
#
was an 80 case mortality rate 80 and interestingly people in upper stories were surviving because
#
obviously you know a little further away from rats and those pesky little rat fleas that they carry
#
and and they're you know canton lost 40 000 people in a day and and you know you've quoted this
#
wonderful poem wonderful because i enjoyed reading it it's not a wonderful wonderful poem per se
#
but it's very enjoyable called the plague of bombay by bf patel about mandvi in 1896 so i
#
will just read it out for the amusement of my listeners quote i stand in mandvi all around
#
with cries of woe the streets resound this quarter crowded at the best first falls a victim to the
#
pest the jans and bhatia sat to tell first in alarming numbers fell in every home a death or
#
two meets a bewildered gazer's view these sects seemed as picked out to bear alone the burden of
#
despair the other races as yet free could not the lurking danger see half callous to their
#
neighbor's woes the plague disturbed not their repose but soon all and deceived they stand
#
the ravager with scythe in hand scouse every corner of the land stop quote and you know apologies
#
to all the jans and bhatias who must have you know reacted with alarm when i read these words
#
out these are not my words this is from the plague of bombay by bf patel and there's even
#
you know a touch of nai molar about this in the sense that you know the other races as yet free
#
could not the lurking danger see now you've pointed out it early on the numbers are not crazily
#
alarming like in 1896 you know 3 000 people are recorded as dying then 50 000 the next year 100
#
thousand the next day pretty bad but not yet a kind of you know hysteria or pandemic levels
#
and most of these are in bombay presidency so tell me a little bit about you know what's
#
going on with the plague in the popular consciousness at this point in time yeah the
#
first you know that's why i have a whole section called prices in western india 1896 to 98
#
uh the government of india british india goes bonkers you know and they're doing this because
#
they don't want plague to reach europe you know so that's the the fear they've been battling
#
cholera all these years they've got a grip on cholera cholera is no longer important in europe
#
but plague invokes this memory of the black death you know so and again it's the collective memory
#
that's what i'm talking about in this book it's that collective memory which is driving them to
#
say at no cost shall plague enter europe and their principal point of interest is bombay
#
and of course hong kong and so they you know this epidemic act which we are living under today is
#
the creation in february 1898 where this viceroy elgin basically rolls out they basically say we
#
have to control this and they they impose these most draconian measures which most public health
#
experts will say is you know not right not because i mean for the simple reason to combat any epidemic
#
you need to win the trust of people if you don't win the trust of people nothing can work
#
and so that's exactly what happened they went around with search operations and on hindsight
#
completely wrong signs they thought it was just poverty and filth which led to plague if that was
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true you know calcutta people said calcutta got cholera because of its filth but calcutta rarely
#
suffered from plague it was really about the rats and fleas and the particular nature of rats and
#
fleas and this got known only after 1905 in a big way so for the first seven years of this pandemic
#
they were going on through disinfectants you know what what will disinfectants do they're not i mean
#
this is idea again of some sort of an airborne transmission just still somewhere there in this
#
medical service so they went around so the cover of the book for example shows a flushing you know
#
engine used to kind of use it looks a little like a fire and you know fire situation when you think
#
of how actually it gets transmitted through rodents and fleas that it's all completely wrong prevention
#
measures and what this meant was massive clampdown on individual liberty and huge pushback you know
#
and pushback came in interesting ways people were people were scared and hurt gas tablets for example
#
like how can you touch me you know so how can you inspect my wife at the railway station so there
#
were opposition coming from all sorts of you know ways how can you let how can you put me in a
#
hospital next to a person of another caste for example they had these strict segregation laws
#
so if you got played you had to go to the hospital there was no and you would be separated from your
#
family and this you know this is important because this is the first time the british state really
#
intervenes in indian lives in a major major way and the pushback is tremendous you know this is
#
i would say like 1857 though we didn't have an uprising you know we got certain reactions
#
in puna there was an assassination walter rand was assassinated by the sapika brothers because
#
they thought that you know this guy is breaching all limits into a society and it's the birth of
#
tilak as this massive star you know tilak goes to jail ganpati is banned you know ganpati festival
#
is banned interestingly ganpati you know has his rodent on the side so that's the side story
#
of the plague but you know when he's released from jail tilak is a star so it's literally the
#
plague you know which launches him onto the national stage in a big way it makes gokhale
#
a big star later on gokhale becomes you know the head of puna municipality so it's also the birth
#
place the plague is this backdrop especially in western india because the british government
#
goofs up so spectacularly that the pushback is tremendous and but the paradox is a lot of what
#
even i had heard of the plague you know before starting on this book was of this period 1896 to
#
98 and i thought this was when plague really hit and this was the intensity it turns out that
#
afterwards actually the british kind of said you know we need to change track we need to be having
#
a different approach but plague really starts hitting india after 1900 and that's where the
#
numbers start going through the roof and you know they'll be talking like in one year a million
#
deaths just because of plague uh and uh and it's not bombay city it's really places like dharwad
#
belgao satara you know a lot of these places in bombay presidency which can affect it uh and a
#
lot of it was because of basically 20 years later they realized the best way to prevent plague was
#
ratproofing you know if you could keep the rats out you wouldn't get plague and that is why
#
throughout the plague pandemic soldiers in the indian army you know very few of them died due
#
to the plague why because they're staying in cantonments cantonments were nice pucca structures
#
you couldn't get plague in the cantonments but you could get plague in basically you know what
#
we call as kacha structures and that is where it had its greatest intensity but for playing you
#
wanted the correct kind of rat and the correct kind of rat flee so the distribution within india was
#
not because in certain places are more dirty than others it just so happened that some places had
#
particular kind of rat fee so in south india the rat fee was not the this ex-geopist variety
#
the different variety so it was not an efficient transmitter of plague from rodents to humans so
#
that is why south india kind of escaped plague pretty much but in panjab up and you know bombay
#
presidency they had the perfect kind of rat and perfect kind of rat perfect for you know plague
#
transmission and that's why it kind of got ravaged and that's why arguments on sanitation again fell
#
flat because people are pointing out you know for a hundred years you've been telling us that
#
calcutta has cholera because calcutta is dirty and yet calcutta kind of escaped plague so here
#
was a paradox and it's only you know such kind of questioning which led scientists to really find
#
out the roots of plague optimal rat plus optimal rat flee i'm going to come back to rats later
#
because there is much about rats in the book as well but first this question that strikes me and
#
and and it's almost resonant in a way that when i think of current times you know one of the first
#
things that struck us in march at least in india is that this is a very alarming situation that is
#
developing and even if we don't have collective memory at least we can see what's happening in
#
italy in spain and everything and can take it as seriously as it requires but but you know there
#
is limited state capacity and therefore there is no option for a state in a country like ours but
#
to resort to blunt tools which in our case in india was of course a blunt tool of the lockdown
#
and with its various costs and benefits and you know when i was sort of reading about what the
#
british government did at the time of the plague it seems that what you have is a bunch of blunt
#
tools which also arise from a time of epistemic uncertainty in the sense that you don't know what
#
the hell is going on really i mean today we have a much better idea from the start in fact despite
#
all the uncertainty about masks and you know whether it is surface borne or whatever at least
#
we had a much better idea than those guys back then did and i will just like i'll quote from your
#
book about some of the blunt tools that came into force at one point you write quote as part of the
#
plague prevention measures thousands of buildings were cleared out citing unsanitary living
#
conditions property was destroyed and burnt and drains were regularly cleaned tiles were removed
#
from the roofs of houses and dwellings with reported infections were marked with signs
#
outside them and treated as if they were on fire they were flushed with water from fire engines and
#
flushing pumps mixed with disinfectant such as cressol of phenyl based potassium permanganate
#
houses were also lime washed and sulfur was burnt inside and at one point you talk about how the
#
poor are panicking because they are often being left homeless because their dwellings have been
#
targeted they rise up against the government and you know one of the slogans of that time is mar
#
dallo goreco mar dallo goreco which i don't need to translate and in puna you you know speak about
#
walter rand quote walter rand went in for the harshest containment measures anywhere in the
#
country with intensive house searches conducted by european troops to identify sick people and
#
transfer them to the hospital in the event accusations of forced examination and misconduct
#
especially with women flew thick and fast rand was shot on 22nd june 1897 by brothers from an
#
outreach family with the surname chapikar stop quote and as you pointed out this has repercussions
#
tilak becomes a superstar gokele you know becomes involved there in 1907 which is when as you point
#
out a million people die uh you know the congress is sort of split between the moderates led by
#
uh gokele and the extremists uh read by tilak and it's kind of fascinating like again i'm quoting
#
you'd go during the peak of the plague pandemic in india more than inoculation or sanitation
#
it would be quarantine and evacuation that would become the norm so in general when you think of
#
the state's response to events uh like this and also then the pushback against the people to the
#
state you know how sort of are there patterns that emerge in terms of you know overreach and
#
so on and so forth what are your observations so one was you know clearly a big issue while trying
#
to enforce some sort of a lockdown then is of course what do we do with migrant workers you
#
know that's a big issue of course which happened this year where i think you know we clearly got
#
it wrong in my view uh and you know we had a migration crisis earlier this year uh interestingly
#
the british had a very different view you know they they took this view that look whatever we do
#
these guys are going to go back if we have a harsh lockdown these guys will walk back if we shut down
#
the railways they will walk back so interestingly for all their other faults the british actually
#
allowed these people to go home you know uh now did that lead to a spread of the pandemic there's
#
no evidence of that because there's no there's no spike in deaths you know immediately after that
#
but what it enabled was that so bombay half of bombay 400 000 people actually left bombay you
#
know and they came back just like this year people are coming back now to the cities but that's a
#
classic response in a pandemic that is returned so migrant workers will want to go back you know
#
the same voices that we heard this year were heard back then that is
#
the psychology that you know if you want to die we will rather go back home
#
and die so that's one classic response clearly which we saw back then and what we saw today
#
the other which is really interesting is that the best strategy was actually evacuation
#
and this was traditional knowledge this was passed down from generation to generation you know started
#
off that quote uh that is if you see these rodents coming out spinning and dying the best thing to do
#
is move out and you know this traditional knowledge also had many aspects to it so entire villages
#
would vacate and stay out during the night there was some implied thing that there's something to
#
do with night time and later on science actually showed that it's you know a lot of this is
#
transmitted at night that is these rat fleas actually really work best at night so aspects
#
of traditional knowledge were embedded the british kind of you know did not heed to it
#
and later on started respecting so by the even you know by 1905 1910 the british showed us the
#
best strategy actually is to let villagers camp out of villages and let this season pass off of
#
plague and then come back that became the most cost effective strategy right in the absence of
#
any powerful vaccine or inoculation in the absence of any breakthrough in you know in like a antibiotic
#
which was not existing back then the only thing that people could do was what people were doing
#
for centuries that was evacuation and i estimate you know easily 30 million people must have
#
evacuated at some point or the other in this terrible sort of decade and i've now come across
#
you know first-person accounts of people who lived on the edges of their villages not just
#
village entire towns you know observers there's a reference in this book bijapur which is not a
#
small place you know it's got tens of thousands of people the entire town would camp outside
#
so it would be a town completely locked with everyone living outside uh purely in order to
#
escape this thing the way to beat play was of course to was to build good buildings good
#
quality buildings but there was no demand for that and there was no supply for that so that
#
never really you know came apart the learning from that is you know massive state overreach
#
in the first phase the british learned from that eventually the plague manual basically started
#
off pretty much by saying respect people and you know like you know that if you have to take into
#
people in confidence and that has kind of persisted all public health manuals will tell you that you
#
know you have to win the trust of people the second thing that the sort of plague did was of
#
course reorganize urban governance now this had its pros and cons there were some long needed
#
things like sort of revamping the sewerage systems because that's where a lot of the rats were
#
breeding so all of that were good things but in this process of course mass scale displacement
#
as you pointed a lot of the poor people you know had to come out on the streets and so in those
#
terms huge negative repercussions one of the consequences of course of playing is today you
#
know in every city there's a development authority board okay so you have like this mmrda in bombay
#
or dda delhi development authority the roots of that line the plague you know it's the first the
#
bombay improvement trust is formed as a response to the plague the hyderabad improvement trust
#
is formed as a response to play and so though our cities i think you know not really you know the
#
best examples of cities in the world but whatever basic semblance of urban governance came into
#
account was precisely because the plague prompted you know things shivaji park most famously in
#
bombay you know was created as a response to having roomy airy flats these are theories as
#
to how plague transmit and so a lot of these sub-organization more broadly started in a big
#
way in india thanks to the plague yeah that's fascinating and you know you referred the guideline
#
of how the state should treat the people i'll read out this line that struck me from the panjab plague
#
manual in 1909 and it says quote the cardinal principle of all plague administration must be
#
that no pressure or compulsion in any shape or form is to be brought to bear on the people
#
encouragement persuasion and the provision of facilities for carrying out the measures advocated
#
are the only legitimate means of influencing and guiding public opinion in the direction desired
#
stop quote and you know another resonant part was about sort of the quarantine circumstances like
#
recently again just today on twitter i came across this sort of disturbing piece about harsh mandir
#
about he got covered and got himself admitted to a hospital and things were so bad that
#
you know he lost his memory for 10 days effectively and kind of lucky to get out of there and as he
#
pointed out despite all the privilege and social capital and all that so think of what's happening
#
to others and you know again you can read an echo of it in the book you've quoted from
#
you know the shantagokhale translation of laxmi by tilak smithi chitre so i'll read that bit out
#
and you know this is from more than a century ago but it need not be quote the cottages were
#
ventilated by openings about a span long running along the top and bottom of the walls the walls
#
were made of tin they got so cold at night that we felt we would freeze over we were surrounded by
#
the sick they screamed and beat on the tin walls at times a patient would climb onto a wall and
#
jump with a loud thud into the neighboring room the floors of the cottage had not been leveled
#
when you walked pebbles bit into the soles of your feet there was no food in our stomachs and no sleep
#
in our eyes tara is her daughter tara screams were heart-rending i thought if yama had a kingdom
#
anywhere it had to be here the place was terrifying the night was terrifying the surroundings were
#
terrifying and the state of my heart was terrifying uh stop quote and uh you know again i thought i
#
should read this out for the benefit of the listeners and i'm just going to go right out and
#
sort of buy you know smithi chitre and to go back to what we said earlier about people forming crazy
#
narratives there were all these uh you know you've mentioned a bunch of rumors that came about such
#
as you know the british are collecting indian bodies to extract momai a fluid to save themselves
#
this was one rumor another rumor was about how uh you know for vaccination the needle was a yard
#
long you died immediately after the operation you survived the operation just six months and
#
then collapsed men lost their virility and women became sterile the deputy commissioner himself
#
underwent the operation and expired half an hour afterwards in great agony stop quote unrelated
#
question why does this shit spread like i had pratik sinha of alt news on my show uh you know
#
more than a year ago and you know we were discussing those crazy rumors on whatsapp where
#
people are talking about uh you know children being kidnapped by strangers and those rumors were
#
constantly being modified with you know whichever area they were meant to reach out to that area
#
being put in and as a consequence people were believing that rubbish and they were actually
#
lynching strangers who happened to pass through their uh village now i understand that uh you
#
know we are a species which explains a very complex world uh through simple stories but why
#
these kind of stories why this sort of morbid fascination uh that exists i mean i know that
#
this is not related either to the book or to economics or history or whatever but what are
#
your thoughts on this i think there's something about death itself right i mean death being the
#
most natural but also something which everyone obsessed about that really sparks off all sorts
#
of conspiracy theories uh i would say not just epidemics you know even the suicide like we saw
#
earlier this year or there's something about death which makes it very easily pliable to gossip
#
i think that's that's really the root now you combine that with a general atmosphere of fear
#
and panic like in a pandemic and what you get is quite a lethal sort of mix of you know fake
#
information which either this year or especially you know during the plague transmitted like
#
wildfire i think also what matters is the credibility of the state you know and because
#
british india came down so harshly that they kind of did not gain the trust of the people
#
for a really long time and so even on vaccination you know later on there's a quote in this book it
#
says the same vaccine where people were almost causing a riot because the vaccine was introduced
#
later on there was literally a riot for the vaccine that people saw the benefits of the vaccine
#
and then wanted that vaccine so the whole mindset shifted in the span of about 25 years
#
but getting this idea of inoculation vaccination took so much time and often these doctors and so
#
on had to literally inject themselves and show like what joe biden just did you know sort of take
#
that first shot and say that you know this is this is fine so i mean i'm not expert on psychology
#
but i would imagine that under you know heightened situations of stress it's definitely
#
you know something to be said about the exponential rise in you know rumors and spread
#
and so that's why you need a credible state and a government which will give you good information
#
from time to time the interesting thing about these kind of stories is that they don't just
#
happen during heightened stress or you know we are just surrounded by so much crazy conspiracy
#
theory all around that it's a little bizarre but there is also in the middle of all this
#
superstition and blind faith there is also some great science happening i was especially struck
#
by the science around rats and cats which simultaneously evolved during this period
#
like you've spoken about how there was this municipal commissioner of bombay pch snow
#
who charted in your words quote charted the migration path of rats within the city from
#
the east to the west and then to the north and emphasized that rat migration and mortality
#
impeded local efforts to contain the plague among humans in newer regions stop quote so my question
#
is how is he charting the migration of rats yeah they're literally taking samples you know they're
#
taking samples i mean this is a really amazing story you know this 25 year period where people
#
are really studying rats at you know multiple levels and also cats you know as i pointed out
#
at one place and what snow is doing is you know they're taking samples of rats found dead and
#
they're kind of literally tracking so they have these monitors of rats to see how many dead rats
#
are we getting from different locations and so they they draw these charts and rat i mean putting
#
the number of rats found dead or even caught alive you know this becomes a statistic for almost 25
#
years a hotly looked up statistic during the playing years believe it or not is you know how
#
many rats died in your locality and this whole phenomenon of rat catchers you know becomes a big
#
deal so yeah in this particular case you know before the migration of humans it actually starts
#
by looking at the migration of rats and how they are they're going and again the science is not
#
clear it's even today we don't know exactly how rodents because you know they can go fairly long
#
distances even just by foot the rat fleas can't go you know so there are two vectors right so there's
#
a rat and there's a rat flea the rat flea has to be embedded in the rat but so the rat flea can't
#
go very far unless it's nested in say shirts or cotton which is a classic you know transmitter
#
or the rats themselves but the rats themselves can sit in these storage and they can go by train
#
wagons and reach you know panjab for example and then you know infect other other rats and so on
#
but one thing you know you should talk about is also that more rats died than humans you know
#
this is the thing about play that people you know blame the rats yes we blame them but actually
#
it's the rats at the receiving end you know and it's only when rats die that actually what happens
#
is the the flea gets hungry and then bites humans that's the science behind play transmission so the
#
unfortunate saga of in fact rat migration is a sign or rat death they are kind of helping us
#
by pointing out that look stay away there's something wrong happening if rats are there this
#
is again just a joke but you know if rats are there it means that there's no play if rats are
#
surviving for long periods that means there's no playing and you know you're relatively safe but
#
it's amazing the kind of stuff people did with rats eventually the science came to be that
#
once it was confirmed that rats were the source rat fleas were the source rat catching became an
#
occupation and even today the bombay municipality i think it gives you know 18 rupees for rat or
#
something like that that's the going rate today but this whole occupation of rat catchers took
#
on big time and you know they they were given these incentives to catch rats there were objections
#
for example the gen said you know this is against our religion so you should not touch animals and
#
so on so they would project upset but the mechanism is very simple they would keep these
#
instruments these objects to catch rats and they would lay these sort of poison sort of bread in
#
these cages and then the next day they would have to report now once these rats come to the
#
laboratory imagine these scientists at you know these plague research laboratory they're basically
#
studying if these rats have plague or not because by then they discovered the germs that you know
#
need to play so all literally i think there's something thousands of rats landing up at this
#
laboratory every day just imagine this economy you know of firstly paying people to catch rats
#
then somebody analyzing the rats then they built like a rat scorecard they have a chart you know
#
how many cats are dying and so on and then you know then they say that the and because plague
#
was cyclical you know why was it cyclical because the rat flea could survive only in certain seasons
#
of the year and it transmitted so in different parts of india the cycle varied but you could
#
say that it became seasonal which meant that people could observe just like how we know the
#
monsoon is coming and going you could see over time when the plague is coming and then going
#
you know which was not known in 1897 1898 but by 1905 1906 it became so seasonal that this rat
#
scorecard was very important because the rat scorecard you know as it started tapering out
#
you knew that plague is ebbing out so just like we look at this covid chart numbers and you know
#
now it's on the downward track in india the track the number that it was seeing even more
#
than human beings was actually rats no and it's completely crazy because you've written a lot
#
about this so you know i won't quote all of it but one of the things i was struck by is how it was
#
estimated quote that there were as many rats as humans in england and vales that is about 40
#
million and using a similar ratio 1 million rats were estimated to live in the city of bombay
#
stop code which is just nuts and what happens after this is and by the way what you were saying
#
earlier about an incentive to catch rats it strikes me was also an incentive to breed rats
#
but you know i'm was there ever a scam like that where people were breeding
#
there was uh there's a scam in vietnam for sure so we don't have evidence in india but i'm quite
#
sure that you know this economy this is a classic perverse incentive kind of problem but it did lead
#
so there's a there's a historian who's documented this in vietnam it's called the hanoi rat catchers
#
and you know there's a whole economy which started on breeding rats so that you can you know catch
#
them absolutely yeah the scene and the unseen indeed and and also the directions in which it
#
goes like one of the ways to get rid of rats is to have cats so there is a dude called andrew
#
Buchanan you write about who actually carries out a cat census and then you write quote in 1910 he
#
staged demonstrations in a room with glass doors of how cats killed rats to create visual awareness
#
his enthusiasm was supported by luminaries such as robert cock and uh esky tasato however he found
#
few takers for his proposals in india and stringent opposition from a few scientists abroad who argued
#
that cats themselves could harbor uh the plague some even argued that non-venomous snakes were
#
a better option since they did not attract rat fleas top quote and i can imagine a home keeping
#
you know non-venomous snakes instead of cats for the rats and and then i found i i love this para
#
as well quote in the middle of this fascinating mammalian and reptilian debate cats were introduced
#
in plague prevention policies in british-ruled hong kong and in german-ruled togoland and japan
#
a small business of cat rearing and trade also developed on the side in 1909 japan imported
#
4 000 cats from the usa and still noted a shortfall of 10 000 felines uh cat breeds were compared on
#
their efficiency in killing rats in japan kitasato praised the rats sent to him by buchanan
#
as exquisite rat catchers and of a better race than the ones found their stop quote which is
#
all of it is sort of completely nuts uh and now you know before we move on to influenza
#
you speak about how the main legacy of the plague as such can be traced alongside you know four
#
kind of different arcs law politics labor and urban governance so you know can you elaborate on
#
these for me because it seems to a certain extent the consequences of all of these uh you know good
#
or bad are with us today yeah definitely i think if you ask me between cholera plague and influenza
#
which has the greatest impact which still lives with us today it's plague first so the legal
#
aspect is the law which is called you know this epidemics diseases act of 1897 i mean covid
#
prevention today is under that act right so that's the that's the real big legal kind of i mean the
#
legacy in terms of law comes from that uh interestingly i also write about inheritance
#
law and so on because so many people died so quickly that people had to start writing bills
#
and so on and it gave a little fill up to that industry as well so that's the law part that is
#
the architecture of countering pandemics in india the legal architecture was born out of this third
#
global play pandemic called play pandemic of india which started from 896 the other part is
#
you know about political movements so one part is still up go clay right so that's a huge part of
#
western indian politics but then it's also about uh the cooperative movement you know the history
#
of the cooperative movement so we talk about amul today and so on so there's some successful
#
cooperatives a lot of them have failed but interestingly a lot of that organizational
#
bandwidth to run a successful cooperative you need to be able to get a lot of people
#
for your cause so indeed organizational skills leadership skills and that came about often
#
in people handling these plague evacuation camps so imagine if you have to evacuate an entire
#
village or an entire town again and again certain kind of cater of people who can emerge in this
#
system who basically you know were then the leaders of the first cooperatives of india
#
which were emerging in 1905 and so on uh so the servants of india society of go clayo uh is a
#
classic example of that which were into plague relief and then became a big social work kind
#
of society and then you know we mentioned the year of the plague which was really 1907 one million
#
deaths the worst year in indian history from playing uh was the year of this congress split
#
you know and so that was it's not the defining reason you know i'm not arguing that these
#
epidemics were the main reason but an important factor you know the fact that how was the government
#
responding to this was a big deciding point uh between different factions of the national
#
congress right and then in emdabad where i'm based you know valapai patel valapai patel you
#
know the satar patel's starting point in politics was really being this head of the sanitation
#
department of the emdabad municipality and his first big job was a 1917 plague outbreak in emdabad
#
emdabad camp survived plague until then not no major outbreak 1917 bad year for emdabad a lot
#
of people left emdabad and patel kind of you know went on the ground try to understand the situation
#
so patel's political career also you know kind of starts off with this there's an economic impact
#
you know can't ignore the fact that economic activity is constrained like we know this year
#
is a recession here now think of a pandemic striking india from year to year it's a kind
#
of lesser known part of economic history of india that pandemics curtail india's growth story you
#
know in the 1980s 90s 1910s in a huge way and so i give examples there are clear examples of gdp
#
falling in some years by five percent and so on it kind of aggravates some of these other impacts
#
and business houses everywhere are complaining you know they're saying we can't do business
#
in in epidemic times like these workers get some bargaining power you know this is the classic
#
thing of epidemics when enough people die the guys surviving can get good wages and so there's a
#
labor shortage in many sectors which drives up wages so that's one thing and then urban governance
#
which i've already alluded to which is these improvement trusts so the roots of urban planning
#
but urban let's say urban development really uh you know take us back to the plague and so the
#
bombay improvement trust is really the first one uh they're that starts in 1898 Mysore in 1903
#
Calcutta in 1911 Hyderabad it happens literally a few months after Hyderabad is knocked out
#
and you know you literally you cannot talk about the urban history of India because so many cities
#
of India plague was a huge part of their history for at least 20 years you know in Hyderabad you
#
know between 1911 and 1920s or so was continuously ravaged by plague you know Hyderabad's population
#
collapsed completely we talk of the the Musi floods you know in Hyderabad which for Hyderabadese
#
people know about the Musi floods but actually the plague killed many more people than the Musi
#
floods but nobody remembers the plague as we do the Musi floods and that's again coming back to
#
this point that floods earthquakes big calamities war are better remembered than epidemics because
#
epidemics are not destroying you know capital stock and so on so this is how i see the legacy
#
of the plague on politics it so you know it's interesting if you see the full arc of Indian
#
freedom movement the way i'm looking at it now is cholera and 1857 uprising plague and the rise
#
of the congress and influenza and the rise of gandhi that's the three major sort of markers in
#
our freedom movement can be pinned against the backdrop of you know a major pandemic then mahadma
#
gandhi also kind of plays a side role even in plague hitting south africa because as you point
#
out when he's in south africa you know that sort of slogan of his cleanliness is next only to
#
godliness perhaps has something to do with that and we also talk about how because south africans
#
white south africans would blame outsiders for this in a sense it was also a contributing factor
#
to apartheid yeah so that's definitely the case you know we've talked so far about plague in india
#
but plague when we say it's a pandemic it really reached many parts of the world it didn't kill
#
many people you know the estimates i've put until 1920 13 million deaths 12 million in india but
#
there were 1 million deaths outside india a lot of it in china but south africa got hit brazil got a
#
little bit of plague not too many deaths but a huge scare some parts of europe indonesia got a
#
lot of play and in south africa there's no doubt that you know it contributed it's not the main
#
factor but it contributed towards these very strict segregation policies that started because
#
like with galera plague was associated with filth and dirt so how do we keep playing playing away
#
from us don't let these people who carry play come near us and so segregation policies were
#
you know very strongly put into place in south africa so you know so so as a historian has noted
#
on plague myron eschenberg is within a book on plague points he says it contributed to the rise
#
of nationalism in india the great fire in honolulu which is you know in hawaii the persistence of
#
anti-asian prejudice in the u.s so one of the though it didn't hit the u.s their immigration
#
laws became extremely racist after 1905 precisely because they associated with immigration the
#
disease and so that's how this anti-china anti-indian sentiments rose the rise of apartheid
#
in south africa and the growth of public health service in brazil interestingly brazil one of the
#
leading scientists in the world you know was appointed at a very young age to be their public
#
health expert and he did a great job he created people say he's a kind of you know the pioneer
#
of public health in brazil and i'm pointing this out because brazil today is on you know one
#
spectrum with the government of brazil is on this literally an anti-science spec if you plot the
#
governments of the world today brazil is on one end where the president of brazil continuously
#
says you know that this is not even a virus it's done to any harm and taking blatantly sort of
#
anti-scientific positions and more than a hundred years back it was the brazilian government who
#
got in the best scientists possible to handle the outbreak it just shows you you know how things
#
have changed for brazil over that 100 year period yeah that's that's great let's move on to talking
#
about influenza now where you know the way it strikes seems to be like much more dramatic like
#
you have a quote at the start of your chapter from the famous preliminary report on the influenza
#
pandemic of 1918 in india which is a report from which that six million figure comes as you point
#
out later and this quote goes quote the hospitals were choked so that it was impossible to remove
#
the dead quickly enough to make room for the dying the streets and lanes of the cities were
#
littered with dead and dying people the postal and telegraph services were completely disorganized
#
the train service continued but at all the principal stations dead and dying people were
#
being removed from the trains the burning hearts and burial grounds were literally swamped with
#
corpses while an even greater number awaited removal the depleted medical service itself
#
sorely stricken by the epidemic was incapable of dealing with more than just a minute fraction of
#
the sickness requiring attention nearly every household was lamenting a death and everywhere
#
terror and confusion reigned stop code and a stark picture and also for if any of my writing
#
students are listening to this an excellent use of semicolons like they work much better than
#
full stops here in terms of the accumulation of effects and the impact that they have on you
#
and and and while these are sort of general and abstract you know the the writer surekan tripathi
#
also known as nirala wrote about how quote my family disappeared in the blink of an eye
#
in whichever direction i turned i saw darkness stop quotes so tell me a little bit about influenza
#
you know how people react to it what are the theories at the time that hey what is causing
#
this which as you point out till eight decades we didn't know for sure what was causing it so what
#
was that like because by now this is no longer like cholera which is spreading slowly in a country
#
where the railways aren't there and all of that this is just weeping through populations tell me
#
a little bit about this yes firstly because you know this idea of flu most people think of it as
#
a cold right i mean the common cold is also part of this what they call as rona you know rhino
#
viruses as they're called but the flu comes from influenza they had people heard of influenza in
#
1918 yes because there was something called as a 1890 influenza pandemic so the 1918 was not the
#
first one in fact historians kind of note down many pandemics but they were not as needed as
#
the 1981 and in indian medical circles they were aware of what had happened in 1890 and it was
#
called nice heavy bukhart you know so when it had first come it said that it was nice at the bukhart
#
so the difference between you know influence and the other two diseases cholera and plague is that
#
it's not as glamorous and that's because you don't have to go to the toilet or you know you don't
#
have to nothing boils don't come on your body you just get a fever and some chills and so on
#
the reigning medical knowledge at that time was bacteriology in fact virology was not even you
#
know uh i was nobody knew about what are what are viruses and so on and so people thought that
#
influenza is called by something called as phyper's bacillus phyper being the name of a scientist
#
and bacillus being bacteria and this was the so 1893 i think is you know when he kind of
#
noted this and so 1918 the medical establishment thought that this is just another strain of
#
phyper's bacillus and so all the vaccination efforts which did take place but they're
#
completely futile was on the basis of thinking that the flu is nothing but bacteria so it's as
#
so it was they got that quite wrong you know in the sense it's like saying coronavirus today is
#
not not actually a virus 50 years later somebody says that it's actually not a virus it was something
#
else so that's what people are working with the premise it was bacteria but it was not it was a
#
virus so that was one big unknown right and that's why nobody really knew how to deal with this
#
1918 influenza the virulence was kind of unprecedented most people would say it has
#
never happened since then also it spread so quickly around the world uh it you know it reached villages
#
in remote alaska you know it reached like you know islands in pacific ocean just some human contact
#
was enough but you required human contact you know and that is why the scientist fred hoyle
#
who's a famous astrophysicist he in fact pointed out that how can it be so viral you know so he
#
argued much later many decades later that this had to do with some sort of a meteoric dispersion
#
that some meteor was coming from outer space and think of it dispersing the virus of the you know
#
and that by then they knew it was a virus across the world right but we have evidence of influenza
#
not touching certain islands of the world and it's precisely where no ships landed there
#
right so it's precisely those islands which said we are not going to take any ships coming in
#
which got that early warning notice which completely escaped influenza so there were
#
literally a few parts of the world which you know were without influence at all it was not only
#
virulent it was lethal right and so case fatality rates varied around the world in india it was
#
unusually high but typically in the range of you know three to five percent which is very high
#
combined with that virulence and it devastated you know half a million deaths in the u.s back then
#
literally hundreds of thousands of deaths in europe the context is also important it came
#
during world war one right and it eventually killed many more people than the war itself
#
so the war ends in november 1918 but the bulk of the influenza deaths happened between september
#
1918 let's say august 1918 and december 19 so this is really a pandemic which lasts for three months
#
though most people today classify that from 1918 to 1920 and that's why this book's title also
#
takes 1920s yet but most of the deaths happen in a two or three month window that is september
#
october november of 1918 where did it start it's a it's still a mystery most people would call it
#
you know we would say america and kansas that's what the reigning theory suggests but it's
#
famously called as a spanish flu nothing to do with spain it's just the fact that you know spain
#
happened to be neutral in world war one and so it had its press was reporting about the disease
#
and so more people heard about the flu in spain and that's how it earned the the world it i mean
#
it's a complete misnomer spanish it should actually be called the american flu if you want to call it
#
you know a particular name it's more accurate to call it an american flu but we now know it as a
#
spanish and of course one should not i call it the influence of 1918 i don't think we should be
#
giving you know geographic descriptors to diseases it comes to india and it's in two waves okay it
#
comes in two waves the first wave is mild the second wave is devastating and interestingly
#
kills off people in the working-age group so unlike covid which is you know high mortality
#
among the old people or even plague which also killed a lot of infants apart from working-age
#
people influenza had this unique w-shaped signature it killed a lot of very young people
#
then its mortality impact was lesser in the 10 to 20 age group 20 to 40 age group it really sparked
#
up then it kind of went down so if you see this mortality across age groups it was w-shaped and
#
that's the signature of the virus because that w-shape was observed around the world right so
#
a lot of theory as to why the scientific theory as to why it happened and what did it do it really
#
attacked your lungs so influenza was also directly linked with pneumonia right so in a sense it
#
attacked and then you know the kind of pneumonia took over and kind of destroyed your body and so
#
literally people's lungs would fill up with fluids it would one way to think about influenza and
#
death is your lungs completely giving way and so many of these deaths eventually people have
#
turned blue and so on like cholera but for a different reason so that's the ghastly nature
#
of influenza at the end of the day it's a flu and even flus are not supposed to be so lethal
#
but this particular strain was and you know we can talk about why it was so devastating in there
#
and so on but the mortality estimates at that time globally were placed at about 20 million
#
that number has been revised upwards and only upwards since then and the most i would say the
#
best estimates put it at about 40 million worldwide we still don't know the exact numbers for china in
#
terms of mortality so that's a big blind spot but there's some papers which say 50 million plus
#
you know and so on i think there's only one paper recently which is pulling down the number but
#
40 million is the go-to number now global deaths due to influenza pandemic and i argue in this in
#
this book i have taken up the estimate for india uh in a way back to 20 million you know kingsley
#
davis was a democrat for he had kind of back up the envelope calculation he said 20 million
#
in 1951 then that number was brought down so in 1918 when this report came out called the preliminary
#
report the number in normal white the health commission of that time gave was six five to six million
#
this was only british india so not princely states okay so if you added say one million to that you
#
get maybe seven million it's really the census of india you know when they enumerated the census
#
in 1921 that really the enormity of loss stood out because the census officials said look it was not
#
five to six million because that is not the number we're getting because when they went to the villages
#
they found villages just decimated so it's interesting that it's about two or three years
#
after the event that actually the enormity of loss came in because remember how do you even get this
#
information on loss you know you have to have a newspaper system you need to have news agencies
#
the point is even those guys died so even reporters died so it was not really covered as an event
#
it got covered only when the census officials went and you know said how many guys at the end
#
the village and you compare it to the previous census and then you find this staggering gap
#
right and so how do you explain this gap is it because of influenza or plague or other reasons
#
so there are certain methods to discern this but there's no doubt that the influenza had a huge
#
impact and so the numbers the estimates range between i would say 14 million siddharth chandra
#
has an estimate of 14 to 15 million and i basically put it upwards more because i have found
#
that actually mortality was much higher in hyderabad state and rajasthan and that has never
#
been accounted for till now so this is my research claiming higher mortality for these states and so
#
now the number is about 20 million for india so these are my estimates for the mortality
#
and what is absolutely nuts about all of this is you know we are thinking of 2020 as this horrendous
#
year it's almost a meme that somebody dies and you know people will tweet oh no 2020 when will
#
it get over but you know 1917 and 1918 were almost like a perfect storm of horrendous events
#
like as you've pointed out in the book a quote india went from being abnormally wet in 1917
#
suitable conditions from malaria and plague to being abnormally dry in 1918 a classic condition
#
for famine so you've got malaria you've got plague you've got famine you've got influenza
#
hitting and killing 20 million people plus you have all the political discontent the roll attack
#
you know jalyanwala bagh it's all kind of going to hell i mean and in a sense it's therefore you
#
know not that surprising that you know with all those glamorous events happening the influencers
#
kind of been sort of overlooked and i'll come back to that i was also struck by one thing here
#
like one of course the common theme in all these pandemics including the current one
#
is the essential state failure like you quote the historian bridula ramanna saying
#
quote confusion and inconsistency seem to have marked the response of the authorities
#
throughout the presidency but what was heartening then and is similar now in a sense is the response
#
of civil society like you write about how quote there were appeals in newspapers to send people
#
from voluntary service organizations in bombay city to affected rural areas these organizations
#
would emerge as a saving grace of the pandemic across india and then later you write quote in
#
bombay city the organizations aiding in this effort were an eclectic mix of the hindu medical
#
association the social service league led by nm joshi and its influencer relief committee
#
community-based hospitals for the jans lohanas marwaris boras and parsis saint george's nursing
#
association young men's muhammadan association bombay humanitarian league teleguru free library
#
japanese and shanghai peace goods association and dozens of others they distributed food medicines
#
and often ran traveling dispensaries top quote almost like you know a secular uprising of the
#
people helping each other in times of need when the state has failed somewhat similar to what even
#
happened here during the migrant crisis or during the lockdown in general where it was civil service
#
groups in delhi and in mumbai who fed so many thousands of people and helped them out and help
#
them get home and all of that what's your take on sort of this aspect of what was going on and
#
you know is it something that we only notice during a pandemic that only comes up in these times of
#
emergency and otherwise we chill out and most of us we are like hey you know the government is there
#
to do all this is not my work but suddenly when there's a major sort of tragedy like this and
#
you realize the state can't handle it then you go out and get the job done yourself yeah i think
#
you know it's a big question i think state failure is obviously an obvious prompt for civil society
#
to wake up but i think there are many aspects of state failure where civil society does not
#
respond to but pandemics as you rightly pointed precisely because it affects all of us collectively
#
and we're all in it together that is what kind of gets it you know much more prominence and so
#
like you said like you know like this year 1918 was unprecedented in the amount of outpouring i
#
mean literally everyone was in it to help others because you could see i mean if you want to think
#
of like you know some of these zombie movies of people walking around dead people walking or
#
people falling off dead something like that i mean when you say 20 million people dying in a few
#
months this is literally like that you know first quotes of the book of this chapter says people
#
literally getting off railway stations and their dead bodies around little people dying on the
#
streets you know it's that horrific and so there are two possible responses people go back into
#
their houses and say i'm not going to come out or actually basically try and help others in certain
#
ways so the mice of government example you know they started these dispensaries they would have
#
this unique medical system the doctors would go to houses take a note of what are you eating or
#
what is your diet and they had some basic prescription because what they realized was
#
with some amount of nutrition you could sail through it and so as long as you're well nourished
#
you could get through the flu but if you were not that well nourished the mortality rates were just
#
uh you know an absolute killer so that's kind of realization that people uh you know found out and
#
what it meant was that you could then as an individual cut down mortality not based on
#
science but just based on a reasoning that when you saw uh you know a person get the influencer
#
it caused some pain but the person didn't die right but when the person was not that well
#
nourished the person was dying and that sort of idea that we need to get basic food and water out
#
there you know a massive response and so the public health commissioner in a guy called Norman
#
White uh as I say he would later sarcastically equip that the outpouring of support in large
#
numbers from the educated towards the poor in times of distress was unprecedented perhaps in
#
the history of India I mean you know he uses his words to say that this was an interesting
#
episode whether rich actually cared for the poor right uh and uh you know it was truly a remarkable
#
effort was it successful all we can say that it must have prevented you know millions of more
#
deaths so it must have helped stop it it was really herd immunity which kind of stopped it
#
eventually right in the sense it just ripped through the population and it's still a bit of
#
a mystery as to how it goes out maybe it mutates to lesser forms or was it you know a complete
#
herd immunity but whatever it is the loss was just immense and uh as Alfred Crosby the historian
#
says the single largest demographic shock ever received to the human species you know so when
#
we say 40 million people dying in a few months globally and in that india being 20 million this
#
was a shock of like no other you know there's an oral history dr yogesh kolkonde who I cite in the
#
book who was on covid duty this year he asked in his village in you know Vidarbha region rural
#
Vidarbha saying you know are the instance of this in the past and interestingly the memory lingered
#
on you know of influenza and this particular tribal leader from the leader from the gold tribe
#
stepped up and said you know my father in our family they tell us the story of a time when so
#
many people died that a person had to be given alcohol to drive the bullock cart to dispose of
#
all the bodies you know and just this site of bodies stacking up is one of the defining images
#
of influenza at this time they you know Nirala talks about the ganga being stacked with corpses
#
oral history is pointing out to bodies being thrown off the cliff really staggering number
#
of deaths you know which which took place out here and one of the reasons the sub stories of
#
this is that it kind of came on the back of a drought you know and so that was an important
#
part of the story that the drought had led to a lot of undernutrition which kind of influenced
#
action upon and there's also sort of the unintended consequences or an unseen effect as it were
#
where at one point you write and this is from body spilling up and at one point you write quote
#
in the hilly areas of kumao corpses were thrown into the jungle and according to the writer jim
#
corbett led to leopards developing a taste for human flesh and thus being labeled man-eaters
#
stop quote and and you know to think that we blame leopards and pass judgment on them and
#
you know it's not their fault what are they to do a similar unintended consequences that you know
#
you point out how godrej move like godrej was founded in 1897 to make security equipment and
#
in 1918 they moved to manufacturing washing soap bars which is a classic example of incentives
#
let's kind of now you know before we move on to our final section and we'll keep it brief because
#
i know i've held you long enough let's move on to sort of the aftermath and the consequences
#
of you know the influenza pandemic over here because as you point out it's not just a debt
#
toll you know at one point you say it is possible that in 1918 40 to 60 percent of the indian
#
population contracted the flu this has consequences even on those who survive you estimate that the
#
gdp that year you know went down by 10 and all kinds of things are happening because more women
#
than men are dying the birth rates also go down and all kinds of shit is playing out over the long
#
term there's a supply a side shock you know when it comes to labor supply there's a demographic
#
impact all of these things are happening so tell me a bit about what these kind of impacts of
#
that particular pandemic were yeah i mean the economic loss was massive yeah partly because
#
the drought but also because simply this is the classic supply side shock as economists would call
#
it and simply there are no people and hence there's no production you know and so they say the gdp
#
fell by about 10 it's in fact instructive right that in india's recorded macroeconomic history
#
from 1901 to now the two years in which india saw a negative 10 kind of fall were both pandemic years
#
right and that's why i feel you know economic students who often know a lot about what the
#
great depression did to the u.s economy should be taught in india about what pandemics can do to
#
your economy because they've had such a big importance in indian history uh so you know
#
agricultural unions fell that particular year uh the big impact was on labor you know and what a
#
big argument i'm making in this book is that influenza gave birth to india's labor movement
#
in a big way right and i use this i show this using you know the spike in articles on like if
#
you look at the times of india database the number of times the world unions or labor is kind of
#
mentioned spikes up dramatically after influenza and there are tons of documents from the royal
#
labor commission variety of sources which tells you it's that particular three months which changed
#
the game for labor simply because if you don't have 20 million people what are you know people
#
who are going to employ these people they get tremendous so the guys who were left behind get
#
tremendous bargaining power and so wage rates start going up so some amount of labor the conditions
#
of labor tend to improve but more important for the freedom movement these guys now see of course
#
i mean influenza is a rallying point you see so many people dying it's very clear that the
#
british are not these so-called benevolent rulers there's there is massive calamity which has
#
happened and there's a lot of opposition to the british that's coming out of this and then of
#
course you know stuff like jail and war by tragedy and so on so that's you know a huge part of the
#
story the idea that public health i mean it was you know the leading official in health norman
#
white at that time they were called the sanitary commissioners of india you know it's after
#
influenza that they called the public health commissioners of india so the word public health
#
itself comes into a consciousness really thanks to influenza you know there's some improvement not
#
much improvement but there's some improvement in the uptake of medical colleges because people
#
realize that when wherever there was some amount of medical facilities offered people could survive
#
the flu and so one obvious you know counterpoint was that if you increase medical facilities
#
then it would be good it did not get so much international opinion you know criticism like
#
the bengals happen for example much later but the americans you know i mentioned there's a there's
#
even in the american politics people are pointing out to what's happening in india saying how can so
#
many people be allowed to die at that point so emphasis on public health slowly sort of
#
improves the labor movement starts off in a big way again like the cooperative movement and playing
#
the cooperative movement also starts rising but the biggest impact is that the death rate of india
#
finally starts falling and that's why influenza bookends india's you can say millennia worth of
#
you know mass mortality and 1920 is when the death rate starts falling and uh that's two reasons one
#
is both all three cholera plague and influenza start ebbing you know because there's better
#
understanding of cholera and plague and influence is kind of a one-off but influencer kills off so
#
many people who would have otherwise died of cholera and plague in the you know next years
#
right so in a strange way it kind of knocks out so many people with the people who are left there
#
then kind of surviving or living for longer time periods so india's demographic transition begins
#
at the end of uh influence why because once death rates start falling over time birth rates start
#
falling and that's when india's population growth really starts to grow so you know when how we
#
became a billion people i mean toward history we had high death rates and high birth rates
#
and our population fluctuated between you know most estimates between 100 and 200 million people
#
it's only after influenza that actually death rates started falling substantially and the
#
indian population started growing steadily you know from 300 to 400 to 500 and today we have
#
you know 1.2 billion people so india's falling death rates really that journey starts off from
#
the end of influenza and so that's why it marks the end of an epoch of mass mortality i like the
#
way you point out that if they hadn't died of influenza they would have died of cholera
#
or the plague you know if one guy doesn't get you the other guy will so where you're gonna run so
#
we are indeed you know those of us who are still here in 2020 so incredibly fortunate that we just
#
have uh you know two enemies to contend with two dangers to ourselves one is covid 19 and the other
#
is uh the flailing state uh now my next question is sort of you know you have a chapter at the end
#
where you look at covid through the rearview mirror you look at the lessons of the past for covid
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and one of the things that you point out is about the incentives of politicians about how what we
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see nowadays is that politicians actually have an incentive to downplay pandemic deaths and they can
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do this by under reporting them or they can you know file something under pneumonia or they could
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simply not test in fact you know donald trump famously said that one way of getting the covid
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numbers down is uh you know test a little bit less and the logic there is of course impeccable
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except that he was making it explicit and and these incentives work on all politicians so one
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you know there is this because i think one of the truths that modern politicians have figured out
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that to a large extent governance doesn't matter narratives do i mean obviously if you go to the
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extreme then governance will also matter if people are dying in the streets but otherwise it is really
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the narratives that matter and your incentive is towards you know looking after the narrative and
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not actually doing anything about the problem quite often it will come from denying the problem
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and another aspect of this is in you know the tail end risk for example you point out that
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you know all of these things are foreseeable you know bill gates famously said you know five years
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ago that the next pandemic is going to be vicious and it seems to me that a politician's incentive
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will always be to downplay the tail risk because your bandwidth is limited there are only so many
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things you can do and talk about so if something is an extremely low probability event with extremely
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high costs despite the high cost the probability is so lowered at your best of ignoring it and
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when people do talk about you know tail risk such as you know every time there is the warning of a
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pandemic which doesn't quite become a pandemic like bird flu or swine flu or whatever then you
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know it seems like what was a fuss all about and wasn't at a false alarm so how does one then think
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about the incentives of politicians like i completely get your point that collective
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memory is important that is in fact what helped you know southeast asia deal with this current
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pandemic because they've been through those previous scares and they kind of got their act
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together you know kerala dealt with nipa which is why they were a little more efficient here
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but having said all of that it's also true that you know the incentives of politicians are
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in a different direction and so on so what are your thoughts on this
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i think you know politicians have to claim you know that they are doing a good job that's the
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basic objective of every politician whether it's trump or you know any any politician
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going to try and sell this idea that we're doing a great job now can we objectively say that
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somebody is doing a great job what i say in the book is actually no what we can objectively say
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if somebody is not doing a great job you know it's asymmetric in the sense that if you know
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if you know pakistan has very few debts and you know the economy is not tanked as much as in india
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you know does that mean pakistan has managed it much better i don't know right but i can definitely
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say that u.s has managed it badly because they've got you know debts per capita is very high on the
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global spectrum and so on so the way i'm looking at this is you know uh don't celebrate people like
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new zealand is the classic poster child right now of you know good pandemic management i would say
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don't do that you know i don't think this one has done a great or bad job all we can say is that
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some countries have messed up big time and u.s is probably the classic case of that india is i mean
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not really if you look at any objective measure it's not that bad but in our neighborhood we are
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the worst that we can say for sure uh so the politics of pandemics is you know first is how
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much to intervene you know that's the big question how much should be locked on and the decision we
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took for example was on this probability that you know suppose it goes out of hand then we are the
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loss will be too much for us now on hindsight of course maybe some would say it was too harsh
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it was definitely not well thought out because we got a migration crisis unnecessary out of it
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but but i think this is this tension between economics and epidemiology which was also there
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in this age of pandemics kind of replayed very classically this year interestingly there's
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already a research study which shows countries which are closer to elections you know did not
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intervene that much and so u.s had an election this year and they did not do much why because
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the economic losses are so massive right that it will basically hurt your electoral prospects
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so that's one theory that is countries which were closer to elections actually did not intervene
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that much so that's one way to look at it on a more grand scale of course you know between the
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last age and this age of pandemics that time they were imperial powers and britain did not really
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invest as much in public health to control cholera in india vis-a-vis with what they were doing in
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britain so obviously democracies have so that's the working hypothesis that democracies are going to
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be better off at understanding pandemics because the information base will hopefully be you know
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more timely and so on in any case the death reporting hopefully is much better like today
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if you ask me how many people died of you know covid in china i don't know what is the number
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you know there's a stated number but nobody really knows what is the action of all in iran
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but you can be quite sure of the numbers in the u.s in many of these other countries and so that's
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one thing that you know democracy really gives well the other thing about pandemics as i said
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is about this the regional variation of deaths and we saw that very starkly in india you know
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every now and then so kerala was this model then even today kerala is leading on the most you know
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indicators of covid deaths and so on but it's changed you know from what kerala was six months
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back to now things have slightly changed in the pecking order and what pandemic history tells you
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is that this will happen you know at some point some regions will have more than some other regions
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there'll be some reasons which science will tell us you know five years down the line
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as to why covid mortality was much higher in some parts of the world than others and so what the
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kind of influence i'm taking as a starting office is that good pandemic management you know the state
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has an important role to play but there are a variety of other factors right including the
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disease you know etiology and so on just like why you know plague hit bombay and punjab but not so
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much eastern and southern india it didn't really have much to do it had more to do with the nature
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of the rats and fleas and so there is this role of the disease itself the unique characters of the
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disease itself and the impact it's having and politicians of course will always try and as i
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say compare losses with somebody doing worse than them right and so that's why in india we're
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comparing ourselves with u.s if you compare ourselves with other country in south asia you
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know we're the worst off so this sort of uh who are you comparing against is you know every
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politician sort of choice to make yeah and you know one of the heartening things at least is
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how far the science has progressed and and not in an incremental way but almost exponentially in
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the sense that you know when uh influence are hit in 1918 you know people promise that there'll be
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a vaccine soon and they only started work on a vaccine in the 1940s and regardless while they
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found vaccines for other kinds of the flu there's never been a vaccine for the coronavirus before
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this i remember you know epidemiologists saying this year that they may never be a vaccine for
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covet 19 because while you know there have been other flu vaccines nothing for a coronavirus look
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how long the hiv vaccine has been in the making yet here we are and this is like so incredibly
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remarkable now that your book is out and now that we've kind of discussed some of the
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lessons in terms of governance and the way people react and the importance of collective memory and
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all that but the other factor in this is of course the science which is advancing massively
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but you know nevertheless it could be said that you know viruses and bacteria have always kind of
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had the upper hand against us if not colonized us entirely in a much deeper way than the british
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could manage so when you kind of look at the future you know when the next pandemic comes
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will we have learned the lessons of this one you know is there a sort of given everybody's incentives
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and the imperatives is there a classic road it'll go down on like at one point you talk about the
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stages of a pandemic and the you know the way you have classified it is between denial confusion
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acceptance and erasure which you know i found quite enlightening in light of all that you
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write in the book and in light of all that sort of happened in this year so do you think that
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we'll at some point you know learn from the past and nail the correct response to something like
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this i think it's possible as i say you know pandemics cannot be eradicated but pandemics
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can be curtailed and that is all that you can do i mean there will be epidemic outbreaks in the
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future but it's about how you respond to it and i think first obviously trust science and trust
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what the scientists are saying but i think what this pandemic has also shown that this classic
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recommendation of a lockdown while obviously very useful you know in a country like india
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has massive social costs because the impact of a lockdown varies across different occupational
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groups those who can't work from home simply put are simply you know getting poorer by the day
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and so hopefully some of these learnings so having a good social security net for people who are
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going to lose out you know in this place like for example the migration crisis was completely
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anticipable at least for those who study migration hopefully when the next pandemic comes we don't
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have a migration crisis i think that's the learning you know that that can happen and that's what past
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pandemics tell you that is you know you have to anticipate migration so you either ensure that
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there's enough social security given so that people are not thinking of going back or you
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allow them to go back first up and then do the lockdown you know it's one of these two but you
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can't do neither of them as we saw earlier this year so there are lessons to take from this
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pandemic into the next there are lessons to take from past pandemics and as i said the lesser we
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erase the more likely or the less likely we are going to deny when it next comes so these four
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stages of you know denial confusion acceptance and erasure and if you don't erase the memory
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you know then we are less likely to deny and we are we are more likely to move on to that acceptance
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phase in a way of smart science that is you look at the best technologies available to combat a
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pandemic and then move on so clearly i mean i'm convinced that there's a role to kind of
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memorialize certain events especially in the medical community which is the front runner to
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kind of contain a pandemic so you know one of the things i'm getting from the medical community
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is that if only they had known about this migrant world for example then some of the recommendations
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would not because the guys who recommended our government in march who almost all doctors which
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is good right but nobody had really thought about migrants right and this is a complete sort of
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blind spot which it seems to have been there so hopefully i hope there are many books written
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on covid and different angles of code i think we would i think learn a lot about nurses and
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doctors and how people actually live you know especially the lives of frontline workers which
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i think needs to be documented there should be awards for people doing great work uh you know
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we've had 150 000 deaths due to covid but in the past mortuary workers you know when when you think
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of millions of deaths literally just imagine people burning these people or burning the bodies
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so many people involved in the pandemic and we need to start recognizing the labor and value
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you know of of that work so that in the future it's going to happen but hopefully we kind of
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sail through the next one comfortably on these words of hope i think we might as well sort of
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end the episode here chinmay thanks so much for giving me so much of your time and and giving
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so much of time to writing these wonderful books both this one and india moving which i think are
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just remarkable books which anyone interested in india or pandemics in the case of this latest one
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should certainly pick up thanks man thank you so much for having me
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode head on over to your nearest bookstore
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online or offline and pick up age of pandemics by chinmay tumbe you can follow chinmay on twitter
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at chinmay tumbe you can follow me at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of
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the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n stay safe and thank you for listening
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