Amid reports of people ‘self-isolating’ themselves in tree-houses, we may be reminded of the way some decades back, in the wake of another catastrophe of historic proportions, the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto brilliantly captured the existential disequilibrium wrought by the Partition in his story Toba Tek Singh.

The psychological cost of mass dislocation was his theme, condensed in the metaphor of the ‘lunatic’ who challenged the premise of division and resultant collective displacement and trauma, indeed the rationality of the entire exercise.

Saeed Jaffrey eloquently portrayed the anguish of many undergoing unprecedented suffering at the time while playing the character of the inmate who refuses to descend from a tree in his speech, ‘What have you done to my world?’ in Ken McMullen’s 1987 film Partition, based on Manto’s story. The story still resonates for us on account of Manto’s sensitivity to the situation of those making futile efforts to make sense of vast perturbations, seemingly inexplicable, especially to the most vulnerable.

Lunacy seems to reign outside the asylum, indeed becomes a contagion of divisiveness, resisted only by ‘mad’ inmates like Bishan Singh. We may well wonder what a contemporary Toba Tek Singh might make of social distancing as prescribed in today’s context, or the impact of the pandemic and such accompanying measures as the lockdown in institutions where the mentally ill are being treated.

Balachandran Rajan in his novel The Dark Dancer resorted to more conventional treatment, describing the outbreak of plague in a refugee camp during the partition years, which is also overtaken by the contagion of communalism, running its parallel course, as a psychic epidemic. This image and association were likely influenced by colonial epidemiology.

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As Deepak Mehta has argued, the rhetoric of disease was invoked often by the colonial state to account for ‘outbreaks’ of rioting, and inflammation of communal passions. Quarantines were imposed on affected areas, where the ‘cordon sanitaire’ was meant to contain the spread of communal violence, a strategy that persisted into later times with varying results. This instance of the way public medicine-inflected discourses of the colonial state reshaped everyday reality and language may have a bearing on our times as well.

Many have noted afresh the significance of Albert Camus’s The Plague, and his focus on the multiple levels at which the plague (metaphorical or otherwise) wreaks havoc; the novel, set in French Algeria, has been read as an allegory about the advent of fascism in Vichy-era France. Edgar Allan Poe’s little masterpiece of the macabre, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ depicts the horrific irony of unequal access to ‘immunity’ during times of spreading pestilence. One of the major authors from the realm of science fiction, J. G. Ballard, was forced to spend crucial formative years during childhood incarcerated in the Shanghai International Settlement after it was turned into an internment camp by the Japanese during World War II, described in fictional form in his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun.

Subsequently, Ballard repeatedly returned to the theme of catastrophic change, whether on account of a persistent drought (The Drought) or the slow crystallisation of the natural world, beginning in the deep African jungles (The Crystal World), or the inexorable impact of global rise of the oceans (The Drowned World). Indeed, in the annals of New Wave SF J.G. Ballard’s attempt to map the psychological consequences of life-altering cataclysms, whether in terms of traumatic deformations of time and memory or deep-seated mutations in human nature remains quite unique.

In the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Roadside Picnic (in the new translation by Olena Bormashenko), a visitation by an alien species leaves behind debris (described as a junk left behind after a picnic by one of the characters) that has both beneficent and malevolent effects on humanity. This leads to areas being cordoned off (termed the Zone), due to fear of unknown repercussions, breached on occasion by clandestine visitors known as ‘stalkers’ who collect items that may have value.

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, based on the book, the Zone is described by the eponymous Stalker as a complicated system of mortal traps, constantly reconfigured by the conscience of the visitor. Today it is as if the whole world seems to have become such a system, with the spread of SARS-CoV-2, with each object we encounter harbouring the potentiality of being a trap, although the danger no longer has anything to do with our conscience, as in Tarkovsky’s spiritual allegory. That role has been appropriated by the state, which determines the ‘safe’ areas in conjunction with experts from the domain of epidemiology, with as yet unpredictable consequences.

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Indeed, the changes wrought by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic are likely to have reverberations akin to those brought about by geological processes, seismic in proportion. The long term effects on society and culture may only be visible with time, even as the structure of what constitutes the normal is deranged. Writers continue to reflect on processes afoot, as the world slips into a dystopian reality perhaps exceeding any envisaged in pandemic literature.

I conclude with a brief reference to a poem by Bangladeshi poet Kaiser Haq. In his speculative poem 2020-nKarV, Haq subtly plays on the meaning of the scientific term ‘coronavirus’, while envisaging the future advent of a ‘karuna’ (compassion) virus, named ‘2020-nKarV’. In this ironic reflection on our times, the poet depicts the assiduous attempts by states to quarantine this new virus, whose spread (among animal lovers and others) must be neutralised.

We find here an ethical meditation on the absence of this key civilisational value in today’s world, as well as on the insidious effects of such a disaster on language and expression. Perhaps it is such imaginative resistance to the advent of banal forms of authoritarianism, often buttressed by purported science – in the guise of aiding the public good – that may generate hope for the future to come.

Tarun K. Saint, an independent scholar and writer. He is the author of Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction, based on his doctoral dissertation.

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