Krishnendu Bera
Assistant Professor, T.P.M. Mahavidyalaya, Cooch Behar. Email: krishnendu.bu@gmail.com
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020
Abstract
From the days of religious interpretation of diseases to the development of modern medical science, human beings overcome a lot of hurdles but some of the human actions regarding COVID-19 also force us to reconsider how far the outlook of the people has changed. People have always feared diseases but fought back resiliently against all odds and one very crucial and common element in this fight is the love and care that they have shown in the face of a catastrophe. The present paper tries to understand the evolution of human response to diseases by studying a selection of films and plays namely Oedipus the King, Moner Manush, Ben-Hur, Ganashatru, and The Japanese Wife in the context of COVID-19 pandemic.
Keywords: epidemic, COVID-19, thanatophobia, religion, healthcare, stigma, love.
A new disease like COVID-19 is not only a new challenge to the medical scientists but it also makes all to reconsider the status of human beings concerning nature as it shows how helpless human beings are. Despite their boast of achievements, they are brought back to square one by an invisible virus. However, this is not something new. Epidemic is a phenomenon feared and abhorred in all ages. There have been constant attempts at understanding and getting rid of them. From the days of complete ignorance of the root and reasons of diseases to the development of modern medical science, the tiny unseen bacteria, virus, and protozoa have tormented the race. While human beings have been able to find antidotes to many diseases, nature has kept on asking new questions. Besides, history shows that inventing medicine is only one step in the struggle as there are many other psychosocial, cultural, even economic hurdles to cross to achieve victory over a disease. The ways of interpreting diseases have evolved but what remains constant is the resilience with which the human race has faced this challenge. This paper tries to understand the evolution of human response to diseases through ages by studying a selection of films and plays namely Oedipus the King, Moner Manush, Ben-Hur, Ganashatru, and The Japanese Wife in the context of COVID-19 pandemic.
Before the advent of medical science, diseases were attributed to gods or supernatural powers, and a remedy was sought in appeasing the gods. So in the absence of doctors, helpless people approached the priests. Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King can be read as a case study. The city of Thebes appeals to their king Oedipus who approaches the seer Tiresias and the priest of Delphi, the shrine of Apollo, the god of healing when the whole city suffers from a plague that caused death and barrenness. One thing is clear from the reaction of the Thebans. They had no clue about the disease, let alone medication or prevention. Though recent research argues that ‘the most probable cause of the plague in Thebes is B. abortus’, in the course of the play, the reason of the plague is shown to be moral pollution and the people get rid of the plague, a divine retribution by fulfilling Apollo’s oracle in the form of banishing Oedipus, the polluter (Kousoulis 155). As a reason behind the plague, Ares, the god of war is also blamed. Interestingly, however, it is not stated whether Thebes got rid of the plague as a result of this banishment. Though the play began with the plague, gradually it was sidelined and the mystery of the protagonist’s life took center stage. Though it is not stated, still it is easy for the audience to assume that the city healed. So, Sophocles very cleverly conforms to the religious mindset of the society without explicitly showing if it helped. The days of Sophocles look ancient indeed and so is the mindset of the people of Thebes. Modern medical science has resolved the mystery of many a disease but the religious approach to understand and explain the diseases has not been completely gone even in the twenty-first century as can be seen in unscientific claims of finding a cause of COVID-19 in meat-eating and a remedy in cow urine, as reported in The Hindu or even in camel urine (Arab News). On the brighter side, such claims are rejected and busted by the governments and believed by only a few people, and most look forward to scientists who are working on finding a remedy with whatever limited knowledge they managed to gather.
Elementary knowledge about a disease may not cure a disease but it may go a long way in checking the spread of it. Though no vaccine or medicine of Covid-19 is available yet it is known that it is contagious and this knowledge helps in developing strategies like social distancing. Past-experience definitely helps. Transmissible diseases like now globally eradicated smallpox had tormented human civilization for centuries before the vaccine was invented though the pestilent nature of the disease was known long before vaccination started. Isolating or abandoning the patient was a practice in such a situation as shown in Goutam Ghose’s film Moner Manush. Young Lalu who would later be famously known as Lalan Fakir is abandoned on a raft floating on the Ganga when he develops the symptoms of smallpox. Though he is accompanied by Kabiraj, a traditional healer, he gives up as smallpox is beyond medical ‘shastra.’ Smallpox was believed to be caused by the goddess Shitala and Kabiraj called it ‘mayer doya’ or kindness of the mother. The fear of catching this deadly disease from the patient was so intense that it was not properly checked whether Lalu was dead and his last rites were performed when he was still alive. Even none agreed to touch the body except for the dirt-poor ragamuffins who were more afraid of hunger than of the possibility of a disease. Though the treatment of Lalu seems unfair, their thanatophobia was nonetheless effective in keeping them safe from the contamination. A little knowledge reaped from experience couldn’t save Lalu but it helped in checking the spread of the disease in his companions who were shrewdly generous in paying the kids for risking their not-so-important lives. But a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, as the saying goes.
The absence of remedy and fear of infection result in stigmatisation and ostracisation as can be seen in the severe fate of the patient of another disease named leprosy. In the movie, Ben-Hur, directed by William Wyler, Miriam, and Tirzah, mother, and sister of the eponymous protagonist become lepers after years of imprisonment in a tiny, unhygienic cell. The fear of the disease can be seen in the face of the Roman prison guard when he first encountered them. Even after release, they cannot go back to their house for the fear of transmitting the disease to their dear ones. A beggar refuses alms from a leper. Common people throw stones at them. The disease is feared and the patient is abhorred. They are forced to live in the lepers’ colony, an isolated, horrible prison-like world that depends on mercy for bare survival. However, at the end of the movie, they are miraculously healed just after the crucifixion of Christ adding to the ‘Christian dimension’ of the film (Lord-Kambitsch 244). Today people don’t need a miracle to get rid of leprosy as effective medicine has been invented but the practice of stigmatising lepers continues to date. A similar strain can be seen in the treatment of not only the patients but also the health workers associated with the treatment of COVID-19 in different countries as there are cases of attack and abuses against them. ‘In Mexico, Colombia, India, the Philippines, Australia and other countries, people terrified by the highly infectious virus are lashing out at medical professionals — kicking them off buses, evicting them from apartments, even dousing them with water mixed with chlorine’ (Sheridan). As stigmatising the patient and the health care providers adds to the stress and troubles in combating the problem, WHO, no wonder, issues instruction against it: ‘It is important to separate a person from an identity defined by COVID-19, in order to reduce stigma’ (1).
In Oedipus the King, Moner Manush and Ben-Hur, people looked up to religion when science did not provide a remedy but science and religion are not in conflict. But in Satyajit Ray’s film Ganashatru, religious sentiment comes in the way of scientific understanding and prevention of disease. While the research of Ashoke Gupta, a doctor, finds out the reason for the outbreak of jaundice in the town to be the polluted water of the temple, the municipality authority is against the doctor’s idea of the closure of the temple as it would hamper the temple-centric economy of the town. Besides religious sentiment, economic considerations help in spreading the disease; an issue to be taken into account seriously not only in the context of COVID-19 pandemic but for any problem regarding public health. In Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People on which the film is based, the source of contamination is the very secular spa baths but Ray adds a religious dimension by turning the spa into the temple in his film. This is a very apt adaptation in Indian context as religious sentiment often clashes with scientific outlook here and contamination from a temple is also not unheard of. A decade after the release of the film, Charanamrita or holy water of Tarakeswar temple of West Bengal ‘failed pollution test’ (Telegraph). In the context of COVID-19 in India, a very controversial religious congregation worsened the situation as news reports show ‘How Tablighi Jamaat event became India’s worst coronavirus vector’ in March 2020 (Bisht and Naqvi).
Another problem in the context of India is inaccessibility of medical facilities. Even though a disease is curable, it turns out to be fatal in certain remote pockets of the country where people depend on traditional healers or other unqualified medical practitioners. In Aparna Sen’s film, The Japanese Wife, Snehamoy dies of pneumonia as the medicine cannot be procured from the town due to the closure of ferry service, the only mode of transportation in deltaic Sunderbans, because of inclement weather. It is almost ludicrously tragic that Snehamoy surviving three bouts of Malaria, a common phenomenon in the Sunderbans during Monsoon would have to die of a disease that can be cured by a medicine waiting on the shelves of a temporarily unreachable medicine store at Gosaba, a boat ride away. Even his old aunt knew a traditional remedy of the disease, rubbing old ghee on the chest; not that it worked though. Ironically, he is survived by his Japanese wife, a cancer patient for whom he tried to find medical help and contracted the fatal disease in the process. He did his best by consulting all sorts of medical practitioners, be it traditional or modern, to cure his wife living in another country of a rather new and almost incurable disease but when he fell ill of a very old and curable disease, a river could not be crossed. While scientists are working incessantly to decipher the new enigmas of nature like cancer and COVID-19, it is a pity that common antibiotics discovered long ago would not be available to everyone and it shows how inventing a medicine is as significant as making it accessible to all.
People have always feared diseases but fought back resiliently against all odds and one very crucial and common element in this fight is the love and care that they have shown in the face of a catastrophe. In all these films and plays, interestingly, a woman figure takes the role of caregiver during ailment or a bad time. In the case of Oedipus, though the play ends before Oedipus leaves Thebes, it is known from other plays of Sophocles that Oedipus was accompanied by his daughter Antigone when he went into exile. In Moner Manush, Bina, the maid of Kabiraj’s wife takes care of Lalu unconscious with fever throughout the night. Even after he was abandoned in the river, Rabeya, a Muslim midwife saves his life despite knowing Lalu is a Hindu. Even though her husband and her neighbours reproach her for bringing a smallpox patient in the house risking the lives of all, her motherly instinct overpowers her fear of an epidemic or communal tension. In Ben-Hur, Esther, Ben-Hur’s beloved, provides Miriam and Tirzah in the lepers’ colony with necessary supplies but after coming to know of the fate of his mother and sister, Ben-Hur too helps them defying the stigma against and fear of the disease. In The Japanese Wife, Sandhya, the widow takes care of ailing Snehamoy as his aunt did during his past illnesses and the illness of Sandhya’s mother. Miyage, the Japanese wife won’t come to India to get married formally or to meet her husband even after fifteen years of their epistolary marriage as she had to take care of her old and ailing mother. But the desperate and earnest struggle of Snehamoy to help his ill wife from a distance also shows that men are capable of being equally loving and caring. This film shows the triumph of a chain of love over a series of diseases.
Society at large might have been cruel to the sufferers but at least a lone figure always dares to love the affected without caring for her or his life. Physical distance, lack of money, religious orthodoxy, fear of death or death itself, for that matter, failed to bog down the power of healing love. Death anxiety and helplessness bring out the desperate devil in many but at the same time, this fear facilitates the discovery of a new medicine. Before the discovery, what helps is love and care. In the modern world, the spirit of Antigone, Bina, Esther, Rabeya, Miyage, Sandhya, or Snehamoy can be perceived in the dedication of the self-sacrificing doctors, nurses and other health care providers and there lies the ray of hope.
Work Cited
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Prof. Krishnendu Bera teaches in the Department of English at Thakur Panchanan Mahila Mahavidyalaya, Cooch Behar, West Bengal, and is a research scholar of Visva-Bharati. His areas of interest include Irish literature, Modern poetry and ecocriticism.