Pandemics and diseases like plague, smallpox, influenza and cholera have always destroyed towns, ruined families, and left people scarred and scared. Havoc caused by outbreaks has impacted many major writers across India giving birth to poems, short stories and novels. In this paper I will address the devastation caused across India by the 1918 Spanish Flu, which claimed an estimated 18-20 million lives in India and between 50 million and 100 million globally. Literature of course cannot justify or resist things such as pandemics, but it can definitely provide an insightful record of the events. In this article I address the devastation caused across India by the so-called Spanish Flu as it appears in two Hindi works. The great Hindi poet Suryakant Tripathi Nirala’s auto/biographical account Khulli Bhaat (‘Nirālā’ 1983) narrates how the writer coped with personal tragedy, as he lost half of his family in the 1918 influenza outbreak. In his short story Vibhats, Pandey Bechan Sharma, a Hindi writer noted for his provocative satire and known by the pen name ‘Ugr’ (extreme), uses the backdrop of the influenza pandemic in order to investigate the tricky relation between economics and ethics in the context of a health-related crisis
The Great Influenza in Northern India through the Lens of Hindi Literature: Suryakant Tripathi Nirala's Kulli Bhaat and Pandey Bechan Sharma 'Ugr''s Vibhats
Consolaro Alessandra
2024-01-01
Abstract
Pandemics and diseases like plague, smallpox, influenza and cholera have always destroyed towns, ruined families, and left people scarred and scared. Havoc caused by outbreaks has impacted many major writers across India giving birth to poems, short stories and novels. In this paper I will address the devastation caused across India by the 1918 Spanish Flu, which claimed an estimated 18-20 million lives in India and between 50 million and 100 million globally. Literature of course cannot justify or resist things such as pandemics, but it can definitely provide an insightful record of the events. In this article I address the devastation caused across India by the so-called Spanish Flu as it appears in two Hindi works. The great Hindi poet Suryakant Tripathi Nirala’s auto/biographical account Khulli Bhaat (‘Nirālā’ 1983) narrates how the writer coped with personal tragedy, as he lost half of his family in the 1918 influenza outbreak. In his short story Vibhats, Pandey Bechan Sharma, a Hindi writer noted for his provocative satire and known by the pen name ‘Ugr’ (extreme), uses the backdrop of the influenza pandemic in order to investigate the tricky relation between economics and ethics in the context of a health-related crisis
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