As COVID-19 upturned our world, it felt like it came out of nowhere. As Chinmay Tumbe’s brilliant new book, Age of Pandemics, shows, these cataclysmic events have been a significant part of India’s modern history. Part of the reason for this amnesia, Tumbe argues, is that the world hasn’t experienced a catastrophe of this scale since the influenza pandemic. Even …
In ‘The Age of Pandemics’, Tumbe specifically focuses on the period between 1817 to 1920, which witnessed nearly five percent of the mid-point global population —or 70 million people — being wiped out by pandemics. But for an epidemic to become a pandemic, both time and space are equally important, that is, the disease has to spread across a sufficiently …
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