I’ll go ahead and admit it: during the pandemic, I snacked on an unhealthy dose of true crime podcasts and longform writing around the Coronavirus. While the gory, gruesome murders had happened a million miles away, their details were always crystal clear and conclusive. On the other hand, the virus surrounding us seemed more and more amorphous each day.
The scientific details were a slow but steady drip, the crazy antics from drinking disinfectants to bathing in cow dung overflowed, the villainisation of minority communities gushed, and we were flooded with reports of government mishandling, of misinformation and misjudgement of the situation. Much like the other plague of our contemporary times — main character syndrome — I assumed all of this was happening for the first time in human history. Fine, I assumed it was all happening to me alone; and it was my debut.
In reading The Moral Contagion (HarperCollins), written by Julia Hauser and illustrated by Sarnath Banerjee, I was firmly but gently reminded that COVID-19 was yet another significant chapter in our collective handling of disease. Hauser, a historian of the 19th and 20th centuries and a senior lecturer at the University of Kassel in Germany, employs a precise yet punchy writing style that makes journeying from 6th century Constantinople to Bombay in the 19th century, and everywhere else in between, a thrilling yet thought-provoking ride through the influence of the plague on ideas of self and society. But substance never seems to be sacrificed at the altar of storytelling at any point. Through the prologue, nine chapters and an epilogue running a little over a hundred pages, Hauser, in her text, and Sarnath, in his images, illuminate our understanding of the many ways that contagions over the centuries have shaped our contemporary.
Julia Hauser | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Sarnath Banerjee | Photo Credit: Debasish Bhaduri
Familiar images
While the breadth of influence of the many pandemics is far-reaching, Hauser uses the concept of morality as the loom through which to thread these many stories. In 6th century Constantinople, she paints a picture of the horrors of seeing mass graves of entire populations afflicted with the plague — an image shockingly familiar to us — and the first response of the people being to turn to religion for an answer. Hauser writes, “At first, people recited the names of saints and sought solace in the churches. Then one man who, as if by a miracle, had convalesced, claimed that the plague could be stopped by throwing earthenware from the windows. People followed his suggestion and rapidly, pots and pitchers were thrown from houses in all parts of the city. No one could walk in the streets for days for fear of being hit.”
I laughed out loud at the end of that sentence because Hauser’s writing has this dry sense of humour that Banerjee cleverly echoes in his illustrations: like the one with a big foot coming out of the clouds to stomp the city of Constantinople. “There’s no way I could profess to the illustrations being accurate,” says Banerjee. Instead, he has sought to infuse his drawings with empathy, attempting to hit the sweet spot of “bringing out the history of how it might have felt to actually have a boring afternoon in Byzantine Rome” and hoping that readers are able to connect “to people far removed from themselves” through these everyday experiences too.
“First off, I’d recommend my own people in the Indian comic and graphic novel scene because this is such a specific art form, we should be consuming more Indian graphic novels. But I’d also want to highlight the works of Ikroop Sandhu’s ‘Inquilab Zindabad’; Ita Mehrotra’s ‘Shaheen Bagh’; Yoshiharu Tsuge’s ‘The Man Without Talent’; and one of my all-time favourites Ben Katchor’s ‘Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer’”Sarnath Banerjee
An illustration from ‘The Moral Contagion’.
In order to arrive at this place of empathy, Banerjee found himself consuming visual culture from across the centuries, drawing from multiple histories about these times to fuel his illustrations. “The contradicting knowledge felt like hearsay, which was rewarding for this project because instead of looking at the entirety of the materials, I looked diagonally at the corners and backgrounds of these images, zeroing in on the details that tell stories of that period,” he says.
An illustration from ‘The Moral Contagion’.
Targeting minorities
In The Moral Contagion, we are shown fear of disease leading to the locating of unsuspecting scapegoats to blame, another reverberation seen in our own contemporary responses in the pandemic. We learn that religious and ethnic minorities were the first to be blamed; in medieval Europe, Jewish communities were accused of poisoning public wells and therefore causing the plague. In India, during the 19th century in Bombay, the plague was seen as a “native” disease leading to entire working-class neighbourhoods being bulldozed completely to get rid of the plague. Another strategy was to bring in the bacteriologist Waldermar Haffkine, a pioneer in vaccines, who bred the bubonic plague bacteria with the help of ghee — because it was considered the purest substance to upper-caste Hindus as the plague bacilli was extracted from the sores of lower-caste victims to create the vaccine. But despite this process of purification, many upper-caste Hindus refused to be inoculated. And even then, there were leaflets distributed with the headline: “Cow Dung, Not Serum”.
Hauser’s excellently researched and written text and Banerjee’s empathetic illustrations play off each other without ever seeming preachy or pedantic. It does the hard work of focusing on little things to power the bigger story, the bigger picture, clearly a nod to their process. This path has led to The Moral Contagion being an enlightening, entertaining book on disease and death without sidestepping the sadness of living through these times. Seems gauche to say it, but it was more than a pleasurable and enlightening book.
The author is a Bengaluru-based poet and writer.
