I was looking for pandemic references in literary works on India throughout the year. Enjoyed reading these six books in 2020. 1/9

J G Farrell's Booker Prize winning "The Siege of Krishnapur" (1973) was a delightful satire on the British Empire set amidst the 1857 revolt and the raging cholera pandemic. Is cholera waterborne or not? A debate played out in the dialogues of 2 British doctors in Krishnapur.

Ashoke Mukhopadhyay's novel "A Ballad of Remittent Fever" (translated by Arunava Sinha in 2020) looks at 4 generations of a family of physicians in Calcutta. Cholera gets a prominent note. Longlisted for the JCB Prize this year. Racy. Fun to read.+ Learnt a new word: Necrophilia!

@AmbarishSatwik's "Perineum: Nether Parts of the Empire" (2007) is a Kafkaesque take on several medical episodes in colonial India, real, imagined and often really really imagined! Plague and Haffkine make an entry as also a medical vocabulary that is simply brutal!

U R Ananthamurthy's classic novel 'Samskara' translated by A K Ramanujan revolves around plague in a south Indian town in the early 20th c. Powerful writing. Great description of the rats as well, likening, at one place their coming out of the rat holes to a wedding procession!

Suryakant Tripathi Nirala's memoirs "A Life Misspent" translated by Satti Khanna in 2018 captures the 1918 Influenza pandemic in chilling detail when he lost his family in the "blink of an eye." He also observes the evacuation camps of the plague pandemic. A simple short book.

Smritichitre is the other memoirs, translated recently by Shanta Gokhale, so rich with detail on a variety of themes (including plague and influenza) that its a must read for historians of 19th c and early 20th c. western India. Tweeted about this y'day. https://twitter.com/ChinmayTumbe/status/1343476189399142400

I should add that I did not know about the connection between these books and pandemics when I tweeted a book list on 'epidemic fiction' earlier in the year on March 15, 2020. That list is here: https://twitter.com/ChinmayTumbe/status/1239011191705309189

Another list was compiled by @Unudurti in this article in March 2020. https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/pandemic-coronavirus-covid19-fodder-science-fiction-6322221/