Question

Summary of pestilence in the 19th century

Answer 1

Pestilence in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta is about a tragic event , an outbreak of Cholera which occurred in the history of Bengal. He takes us through the responses of the different communities to the horror of painful death. According to Bijay Kumar Das , "Social satire , an awareness of the contemporary situations , the illusion about myths seem to be some of the favourite themes of Daruwalla". In this poem the poet speaks about the tragic suffering of the people in Calcutta when it was stricken with cholera during the 19 th century,

In the first stanza the poet introduces us to the tragic situation in which the people were painfully dying due to cholera. The poem begins with a barber’s comment to his white Sahib 'Black fellow die, much' which is totally ironic. The line sarcastically reminds us of the servile attitude of the colonized to the white colonizer. The people in the ghettoes died a horrible painful death and the funeral pyres burnt incessantly.

In the second stanza the poet paints the picture of a typical colonizer who is equally trapped along with the natives in suffering the ravages of the epidemic. The sahib is totally shocked. The whole land he felt was pregnant with the germs of cholera. What terrified him was the way it affected the whites. They died like skittles, and were buried in the same strange land in which the natives were buried .

In the third stanza the poet tells us how nature had also turned against humans and abetted their death. The hot climate gave way to sudden rains and the exhalation of the earth rapidly spread the fever and the fluxes which was soon followed by death. What was tragic was that the deaths were sudden and unpredictable. One may lunch with a person in the afternoon by evening the news would arrive that he had died.

In the fourth stanza the poet tells us how the epidemic affected the whites and how they reacted against it. The poet feels it affected the white colonizers more than the natives. They were so frightened the poet tells us that they carried the fear of death like a “slipped disc through their lives”. They tried all sorts of medicines and treatments to protect themselves from the epidemic. The poet sarcastically draws up a list of the remedies they sought. They paid one mohur for a visit to the surgeon. They had to pay one rupee for an ounce of salts, two rupees for an ounce of bark, They had to pay extra for being leeched and to be blistered with hot irons, They also fed on opium and mercurous chloride to prevent themselves from cholera.

In the fifth stanza the poet takes us back to the sahib. The sahib reflects about the long years he had spent in India working in the John Company. All those years he had never thought of death. He had always felt that Death came with his scythe only in the ghettoes where the natives lived. He had never thought that s uch horrible diseases could also affect the whites until the barber told him that day about the ravages of cholera and how it was affecting the natives. Ten days later he went to Hooghly for his winter tour. That day he learnt that the Sardar who had served him during the bara hazri was stricken with cholera. By evening he died. The White sahib was moved. He offered to meet the funeral expenses of the Sardar. Next day along with his breakfast he received a bill which made him blink “It read,/
"Five rupees for roasted Sardar”




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