A century of disease

St. Louis, (Missouri) Red Cross Motor Corps on duty during the Spanish Influenza epidemic, 1918. Photograph shows mask-wearing women holding stretchers near ambulances. Pic Courtesy/Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

When the Coronavirus pandemic eventually is under control, we will remember this moment in time as an unparalleled one something that didn't happen before, and hopefully, won't occur again. This is how personal memories review history. But, Chinmay Tumbe's new book, The Age of Pandemics, 1817-1920: How they Shaped India and The World (HarperCollins India) will remind you that our history has been dotted with the horrors of many infectious diseases that killed in droves, devastating communities and severely dismantling economies.

Chinmay Tumbe

While the first recorded plague pandemic was reported in the sixth century, Tumbe, a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad who previously authored India Moving: A History of Migration, focuses on the one century, known otherwise as the ‘Age of Pandemics,' where the outbreak of cholera, the plague and influenza, left its deadliest impact on the Indian sub-continent. The worst was the influenza pandemic of 1918-20, the deadliest in history, which wiped out 40 million people half of them were from India, he reveals.

Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810), was an Urdu poet of the 18th century Mughal India. He was a pioneer of Urdu poetry and of Urdu language itself

What was the story behind these pandemics, and what kind of crippling effect did it have? Tumbe begins by revisiting the graves at the South Park Street Cemetery in Kolkata, established in 1767, where the median age of the 2,000-plus who were buried there was 29. Most of them were victims of the 1817 cholera pandemic. It's these stories, which are a grim reminder of the fact that pandemics are recurring.

Anamika (born 1961) is a prominent contemporary Indian Hindi poet, social worker and novelist from Muzaffarpur, Bihar

The tragedy is that an old disease will replace a new one and soon. There is but one good news-as Tumbe says in the opening lines of his book, "We began to live longer, when we… learnt how to control the spread of disease. Between 1920 and 2020, death rates in India fell consistently from 45 deaths per thousand to seven deaths per thousand people."
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Art history lesson on St John the Baptist

Thane's St John the Baptist church is steeped in history. The foundation stone for the church was first laid on the banks of the Masunda Lake in 1581, which means that this structure has been witness to changes, both cataclysmic and insignificant, over the last four centuries. But what makes St John's most remarkable is its rich art history, which got a fitting tribute in the 2018 book, Witness, edited (and contributed) by Dr Fleur D'Souza, former HOD-history department and retired vice principal (Arts), St Xavier's College. The parish's Instagram page is now bringing chapters from the book to life, with interesting vignettes and facts about Thane, the church and the Parish in alphabetical order. From the story of Santo Antônio, the patron of the church depicted in a statue holding baby Jesus at the church, to the Baroque extravagance witnessed in the "profusely carved retables or reredos, the ornamented panel screens or backdrops to the altar tables" and the swirly-curly architectural ornamentation of the doorways inside the church (known as Manueline), there is loads of trivia to keep the heritage-lover hooked.
@st.john.the.baptist.church, Instagram

Crowning queens of science

Barkha and Kshitig

In an attempt to inspire young girls, a novel website (www.thescientificwoman.com) not only shares the stories of women achievers, but also offers a mentorship programme to students who can seek professional guidance from them. "I often wondered why there weren't more girls in the hysics class. You'd find them in larger numbers in the biology class, and many went onto to opt for medicine than physics and engineering. And so, the positive response we have received is heartening," says Barkha Seth. In an independent survey conducted by with her brother, she found that of the girls planning to pursue STEM, only 25 per cent wished to take up engineering (75 per cent for medicine and allied fields). "I have been passionate about science and learning that millions of girls don't have the opportunity to experience it was shocking to me" Kshitij says about the birth of The Scientific Woman.
www.thescientificwoman.com

Read Faiz in English

Sripriya and Avichal Chaturvedi

Poetry in Indian languages is under-appreciated globally, say Sripriya and Avichal Chaturvedi, a couple passionate about all things verse. They believe that the genius of Rumi, Pablo Neruda and Wislawa Szymborska would have gone unnoticed, had someone not translated their works into English. "Translations are an effective tool for readers to access art and cultures different from their own." This is what compelled the couple to start A Nation in Translation, an Instagram page dedicated to translations of Indian poems. "The current status of Urdu in India is unfortunate. It has been wrongly stereotyped as a language of Muslims. People don't realise that just like Prakrit, Urdu was actually born as a language that was a bridge between the royal courts-which were conducted in Persian-and the masses, who spoke a slew of dialects that were not always codified. And, it is syntactically and grammatically indistinguishable from Hindi." The page has covered a diverse cross-section of poets-from Ghalib, Faiz, Bachchan, Mahadevi Verma, to saint-poets like Tulsidas, Kabir, Guru Nanak, Bulleshah, and even modern Hindi poets and lyricists, like Gulzar, Irshad Kamil, Varun Grover, and Piyush Mishra.

Curated by Jane Borges and Prutha Bhosle