Text of pestilence in nineteenth century in calcutta pdf
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Explanation:
Keki N. Daruwalla is a famous Indian Parsi poet in English who has been noted for the vigour and immediacy of language and his indignant cynicism about the predicament of human society. 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 .