India, Disease, and the Past and Future of the World
Covid-19’s deepest impact will not be felt in the US or Europe, but in India
I have two rules of thumb when I think about global history.
They’re fairly simple rules. The first is that human societies are fundamentally similar because they are made of humans. You can understand aspects of one society through the lens of the other. When I look at pictures of Teotihuacan’s Avenue of the Dead — an urban centre that developed in the Americas, totally independent of the ideas of the Afro-Eurasian world — I can still intuitively grasp that the enormous structures lining it must be temples.
I can expect that there must have been priests, social stratification, economic specialisation, administration. I can expect all this because I know that societies in similar material circumstances managed to maintain urban complexity using those means, even if they were doing it completely independently, on the other side of the world. And I can confirm all this with evidence from Teotihuacan itself depicting daily life, religious rituals, myths, art, and so on.
The second is a question of scale, and this is where it gets a little more complicated. What do you think of when I say “knight”? This?
What do you think of when I say “king”? This?
But what is a knight? An individual who derives income and social status from a king in return for military service and political support. What is a king? A sovereign meant, on paper at least, to rule righteously, to protect and tax his subjects, to conquer their enemies. That is almost exactly how medieval Indian epigraphic and textual sources describe both kings and knights. And it is reasonable to expect that with more geographical diversity, with a political system encouraging diffused sovereignty, with a larger population, must have had far more knights and kings, riding around on pumped-up war-elephants and leading armies in the tens of thousands.
And yet, when we think “medieval”, we think “Europe”. Modern media has an Anglophone bias in the way it sees the world, usually relying on American fantasies of a distant European past to paint vivid pictures of medieval societies a la Game of Thrones. Until relatively recently, I found it quite literally impossible to picture a medieval Indian society with anything approaching that level of vividness. I also began to realise just how little publicly-available and reliable information is available about India’s history.
The end result of this scarcity is that the Indian view of our own history is a boring list of kings of varying qualities in a timeless, orderly, suffocatingly religious society. That’s nothing like the chaotic, constantly-evolving and often-irreverent picture that emerges from contemporary evidence. Instead,m our understanding of our history is driven by political mythmaking first, Eurocentric mass media second, and open-minded appreciation of the evidence third.
(If you want to get a sense of what ancient and medieval India might actually have looked like, I’ve taken a stab at it as the host of the first Indian-produced Indian history podcasts, Echoes of India and Yuddha).
This problem with the understanding of India’s past is not confined to Indians alone, and this is where things get worrying. For the average consumer of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar, or really any of the entertainment services that the world’s wealthy and powerful might consume, there is practically no awareness of what India is actually like. (And no, I’m not talking about shitty shows like Beecham House made by rich diaspora who think all that Indians want to do is make white people feel guilty, sleep with them, or sit around and wait to be manipulated or saved by them).
As far as the world is concerned, medieval India was two or three funky temples and some invasions, and now India’s all about cowdung, Bollywood, and crowds. Ha. Ha.
Pogroms? Fascism? Genocide? Millions at the mercy of a totalitarian system run by PR guys with posh degrees from Harvard? Detention camps being built for Indian citizens who have to prove to their own government that they’re Indians? Oh, haha. Never in India. Just a little eccentricity. You guys will be fine, say the wealthy peoples of the world. Just be poor, don’t pollute, don’t be powerful or assertive like China is, and we’ll continue to ignore you.
I apologise for the profanity, but open your fucking eyes, world.
Through most of global history, India and China have been among the most densely populated regions in Afro-Eurasia. Global history cannot be understood without understanding both these regions and how their peoples and their ideas and their calamities changed it. In fact, I’ll one-up myself and say that humanity can’t be understood if most modern humans don’t understand how most medieval humans lived. And where do most modern humans live? In India and China. And what do Indians know about their medieval history, what do they know of how India fits into the world?
Ask the innocent Muslims who died in Delhi barely a month ago because some peoples whom they have nothing in common with might have destroyed a temple five hundred years ago.
So, world, what happens when an enormous chunk of you — a part of you that made you, that continues to make you, that you need to keep your economy going — what happens when you leave this part of the world to a fascism greater in scale, longer in the making, ruling over a fragmented political economy more reminiscent of the Weimar Republic than a 21st-century state?
What happens when you leave this part of the world to a fascism greater in scale, longer in the making, ruling over a fragmented political economy more reminiscent of the Weimar Republic than a 21st-century state?
What happens when the political regime of that chunk of the world doesn’t have a plan for the millions of informal workers who are now stranded without pay? What happens when a moribund healthcare apparatus that even normally is riddled with poor equipment, attendance and funding is forced to deal with thousands upon thousands of new cases a day? I’m looking at you, John Oliver. It’s very convenient to do a show on India and get woke points with the English-speaking kids, to make white people think India will be okay after all, so they can keep feeling guilty about voting for Donald Trump.
Stop using us as TRP bait. We’re as human and complicated as all of you. And we have WAAAY bigger problems on our plate.
When will our millions start to starve and die on the streets as they have for so many thousands of years with not a finger raised to help them as the better-off peoples of this enormous and complicated subcontinent attempt to secure their own interests through social media-enabled political messaging? I suspect that it won’t be long. And you know what kills me? I know that no Indian politician will face electoral consequences for this disaster, for their profiteering and underreporting and cover-ups of the situation. I know that no news outlet will. And I know how little has changed from the time that India was a colony of an extractive, racist imperialist power.
But even worse than that is the feeling that the weak have been left to save themselves, whereas those lucky enough to be born well-off will do just fine. We will go back to our lives sooner or later, or we’ll work from home. Meanwhile, as the public health system collapses under the strain of new cases, as supply chains grind to a halt, as livelihoods are destroyed, people will die. After the outbreak is over, there will be few jobs left to go to. Who picks up the pieces? What comes next?
Will we, as a society, ever hold our rulers to account, or seek to cozy up to them while leaving everyone else to fend for themselves as best they can?
How many deaths must this land see before we say: no more?
Indians. this is not a problem the world will help us with. The world does not realise that India is the world, the world does not realise that what changes India, changes the world. It has forgotten about Buddhism, mathematics, art, linguistics, philosophy. It has forgotten how India responded to every great movement of global history — climate and disease cycles, the rise of Islam, the tidal movements of Central Asian people. In every one of those cases, India’s reaction determined the course of the world: what would have happened if, for example, India never became part of the broader Persianate world? Would the global economy as we know it even exist if Indian craft production, urbanism, and social complexity were not reacting to demand from China and Europe? Nope.
I am drawn, again and again, to the haunting shadow that the Black Death left over European art and society in the centuries leading up to the Renaissance. I don’t think that COVID-19 will have as transformative an impact, because healthcare systems have improved, and it’s not going to last as long or be as difficult to cure. But it will change things. It will kill young people with their entire lives ahead of them, grandparents with wisdom to share. It will leave scars. It will leave resentments as the poor watch the rich withdraw into gated societies, as they are left to die while hospitals are booked for those who can pay. It will strain healthcare systems, social security nets, and as we can already see, lead to half-baked responses, miscommunications, and abuse of power by petty bureaucrats and policemen with authoritarian wet dreams.
Over the course of the century, as India’s moribund state and political systems prove increasingly incapable of dealing with the challenges of pandemics, climate change, and mass migrations, who will channel the social unrest that will follow in its wake, and for what?
A historian’s responsibility is simple: point out the patterns. Warn of the futures that lie ahead. And prepare.
Today, March 25th, 2020, in the city of Bangalore, India, I know what the ancient Trojan seeress Cassandra must have felt as she watched the court laugh off the very idea that the Greeks could take Troy.
