The plague as a metaphor
Aknight called Antonius Block returns home from the Crusades to find that his country is reeling from a plague epidemic. He, too, is about to die. But he challenges Death to a game of chess, believing that he will survive as long as he can stave off a checkmate. Such is the central conceit of The Seventh Seal, the 1957 film directed by Ingmar Bergman, which The Guardian in 2007 described as “an untarnished gold standard of artistic and moral seriousness”. The film, which was also the first collaboration between Bergman and his favourite actor Max Von Sydow, ends with the Danse Macabre.
At once frivolous and terrifying, the Dance of Death, which depicted popes, emperors, children and labourers all dancing to their death, was an allegorical memento mori, reminding people of the fragility of their lives. The Dance of Death also graces the cover of the book under review, a collaboration between Berlin-based historian Julia Hauser and graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee. A blond-haired woman, wearing black, can be seen being dragged away by Death in his hooded costume. But instead of the usual sickle that the Grim Reaper carries, here he is shown bearing a stringed instrument, something like a banjo. The effect is similar, scary and ridiculous.
The Covid-19 pandemic not only forced the world to press the pause button, sparked economic and political crises, and aggravated social inequalities, but it also led to an outpouring of books. Among the notable ones are Intimations, a collection of six essays on the quarantine by Zadie Smith, and Orhan Pamuk’s novel Nights of Plague. The book by Ms Hauser and Mr Banerjee is a suitable addition to this list, bringing together robust research, an engaging writing style, and some gorgeously created illustrations. It is an accessible history of how societies around the world have responded to pandemics throughout history, such as inhaling musk and rosemary in 14th-century Florence or beating their utensils and crying “Go, Corona Go!” in 21st-century New Delhi.
In the prologue, Ms Hauser, whose previous works include a history of vegetarianism, recollects reading Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, collection of short stories inspired by the Black Death, during the first outbreak, in 2020, of Covid-19 in Berlin. “I read the book mostly for pleasure, but also with an ulterior motive,” she writes. “I had been wondering if, and how, Covid would change societies around the world.” A little earlier in the book, in an author’s note, she writes about how plagues that had affected people around the world had been studied mostly from a Eurocentric perspective. “(E)ntire continents, especially Africa, had been forgotten,” she writes.
To correct this perspective, she takes her readers on a roller-coaster ride “from sixth-century Constantinople and fourteenthcentury Europe,
Islamic Spain, seventeenthcentury London and Aleppo in the eighteenth century, to Hong Kong, Bombay, San Francisco and South Africa”. It is a typical Global History perspective that abjures nationalist historiography and seeks “the connectedness of the world as its point of departure”, in the words of German historian Sebastian Conrad, a pioneer in the field.
Some of the stories that Ms Hauser collects are humorous, such as English diarist Samuel Pepys’ erotic adventures during the Great London Plague of 166566. But most reflect the paranoia and circumspection with which humans responded to epidemics throughout history — a reminder, if any were needed, of the callousness with which many have behaved in our times. An example that might appeal to Indian readers is the “Dirt in My Ghee”, in which Ms Hauser records the history of the Bombay plague in 1896-97. Divisions of class, caste, and race are heightened as death lurks in the streets of India’s western metropolis. While the disease is universal, it is more common in the slums where mill and dock workers live in unsanitary conditions.
Laxmibai Tilak, a contemporary writer, recounts how plague camps, where patients were quarantined, were “kingdoms of the god of death”. When bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine invented vaccination for the plague, many orthodox Paris and Brahmins refused to take it because the bacilli were sourced from the bodies of people of low repute and caste. Then, as now, people’s choices on how they would fight a mortal disease depended more on reasons other than science.
While the stories, with their contemporary resonances, make the book immensely readable, Mr Banerjee’s illustrations elevate the book. His interest in the macabre and the uncanny, evident since his early books such as The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007) and The Harappa Files (2011), must have made the plague an ideal subject for him. His depictions of humans make no attempt at verisimilitude. Instead, the physical features of the characters reveal their psychological states — fear, desire, wickedness. They perfectly capture how a pestilence can also be, to borrow from Susan Sontag, a metaphor. For both the physical and moral decay of human societies, entrapped in a dance of death.