In India, when the pandemic arrived – purifying the blazing rot of communal violence in the national capital – a journalist had tweeted to the chagrin of all and sundry, “What is left for a virus to kill in a morally corrupt nation[?]”.
The swaying prospect of death, an attendant feature of pandemics, has always induced meditations on morality. Caught between the questions, ‘What did we do to invoke nature’s rage?’ and ‘What are we doing to dissipate it?’ are human reactions to a powerful phenomenon.
‘The Moral Contagion’ by Julia Hauser and Sarnath Banerjee, HarperCollins, 2023.
In The Moral Contagion, Julia Hauser and Sarnath Banerjee find in history a home for the years we lived with COVID-19. In the course of nine chapters, illustrated by Banerjee, the smallness and the bigness of collective disease travels through time. A history lecturer, Hauser tells the stories of forgotten and enormous suffering in Constantinople, in Florence, in Granada, in Aleppo, in Mumbai, in Hong Kong, in San Francisco, and in Johannesburg in a sage, conversational way. It acts as succour. It makes our current age feel less wretched.
The book offers lightly that administrative politics that thrives on the disavowal of the plague appears to unite plagues across the ages. As does the discomfort of rulers and emperors with disease. Having pronounced themselves god’s own chosen ones, an event requiring them to step up – with very little cooperation from that very god – is a brutal reckoning of their own incapacities. Faced with fevers and deaths, rulers’ powerlessness is direct mockery of their pronouncements.
But this, too, is not spun as a grand folly – it is only human, the book says. The full strength of something as all-swallowing as a pandemic is often too much to take, too enormous to comprehend.
Hauser cites various rulers who declared the end of a plague by royal decree only to suffer three more decades of it – like Byzantine emperor Justinian. Indians under Narendra Modi’s rule will be familiar with the celebrations of late 2020 and early 2021 – just before a crushing second wave hit. It is this temporal enormity that Hauser doffs her hat to, in the book. She draws a line through histories she is familiar with or has pushed herself to be familiar with – offering no grand philosophy to justify diseases and death but only graspable stories on their effect, impact and the petty cruelties they inspired.
Hauser’s is not the only book that has done it in recent times – Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague also serves the same purpose – but its grand sweep through time sets it apart.
Also read: Why I Don’t Believe it’s Time to ‘Move on’ From Covid
It is a book entirely built of resonances.
An illustration from ‘The Moral Contagion’ by Julia Hauser and Sarnath Banerjee.
Remember the frantic disinfecting of vegetables? The 17th century British diarist Samuel Pepys was ready to eat a bezoar if that would save him from the plague.
Remember Dalgona coffee? Hauser says its 14th century counterpart in plague-ridden Florence was a dry biscotti favoured even by Giovanni Boccaccio while he wrote the Decameron.
If there is an opportunity for levity in this danse macabre, then it is not left underutilised.
Sample this paragraph:
There was even a fear of buying a new wig, so fashionable for men at the time: how could one be sure that one wasn’t wearing the hair of a festering plague victim on one’s bare head?
Some chapters drive home more home truths than others, thrusting the title of the book to greater prominence. As a reader, you nod when you learn of Pepys taking social distancing to mean distancing himself from the poor of the city.
Any reader, similarly, will be driven insane by the banality of how similar reactions have been to minorities – often religious – across time and place, during disease outbreaks.
To illustrate the universality of this wretchedness, Hauser uses words like ‘superspreaders’ which were clearly not in vogue in Restoration England, but jolt something in the reader – urging her to admire the ridiculousness of the term in the age in which it belonged as well. It is somehow never the rich (and later, the dominant community members) who are superspreaders.
And so it is that in the prologue, Hauser presents the pithy heart of the book, “How did morality transform and what consequences did this have for social groups considered to have caused or increased the risk of contagion?”
An illustration from ‘The Moral Contagion’ by Julia Hauser and Sarnath Banerjee.
The book also presents the history of science with a firm eye on the role of colonial practices – placing laconic credit for the spread of the disease to the British and their commerce wherever due.
Banerjee’s art is the jester traipsing through the expanse of the book.
All pages have illustrations – so the total number of drawings is close to 130. The text – never dry but certainly more serious than the art – scooches to a corner to make way for it. Banerjee harnesses his telltale style – crayon marks visible, faces dour and experiences muted on one page and viscerally exaggerated on the next.
A sick man in Bombay stretches comically as two policemen drag him away by the legs, almost bored. Things happen to people he draws, but not acutely enough to rob his characters of humour. It is minimal, so whenever it is opulent, the details take you by surprise.
The illustration on pages 82 and 83 from ‘The Moral Contagion’ by Julia Hauser and Sarnath Banerjee.
Pages 82 and 83 (above) are something of a triumph. Here, a body is seen lurching into the sea from a ship instituted as a plague hospital off Hong Kong by the British. The night is dark and the enormity of the ship is perhaps a testament to how stuffy, how claustrophobic such an exercise must have felt to Chinese colonial subjects suffering from an exhausting disease. The drawing occupies almost one-and-a-half pages.
Despite the ubiquitousness of injustice, some details are particularly sobering. Like the fact that the plague came back to Hong Kong every year for three decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and yet there was no interest in investing in the health of the workers who ran it. While those suffering from long COVID continue to remind us of the crushing after-effects of it, while those who lost loved ones in disease and also thanks to harebrained policy decisions surrounding it, are unlikely to ever forget it, it will not be exaggeration to say that the pandemic lies forgotten now.
In her Conclusion, Hauser says that even this is common. Even more chastening, often it is ‘bigger’ political concerns – like that forever friend to civilisation, war – that necessitates the ‘end’ of disease.
