The Age of Pandemics in India and the World with Chinmay Tumbe
Episode 42 - December 29, 2020
Chinmay Tumbe (Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad), talks to Merle and Lee about his new book, The Age of Pandemics, that reveals the story of how three pandemics – cholera, plague and influenza – have significantly affected India over the course of the long 19th century, resulting in episodes of mass mortality. He first discusses some background on all three pandemics and then turns to why they have not had significant historical scholarship on them over the last century. Chinmay then offers thoughts on new ways to approach the history of pandemics moving forward. At the end, he turns to the process of writing the book during Covid.
Further Reading
- Tumbe, C. 2020. The Age of Pandemics, 1817-1920: How they Shaped India and the World. Noida: Harper Collins.
- Tumbe, C. 2020. "Pandemics and Historical Mortality in India". IIMA Working Paper 2020-12-003. [A statistical and bibliographic appendix to the book- The Age of Pandemics]
- Arnold, D. 1993. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Arnold. D. 2015. "Disease, Rumour, and Panic in India’s Plague and Influenza Epidemics, 1896–1919’, in Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, ed. Robert Peckham (Hong Kong University Press).
- Harrison, M. 2020. "A Dreadful Scourge: Cholera in Early Nineteenth-Century India", Modern Asian Studies, 54 (2).
Our Guest
Chinmay Tumbe,
Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.
