Pandemics have always revealed the weakness of the Indian state

Ideologically insular, culturally singular, economically inconsequential, modern India has been of little world-historical moment. Indeed, its historic set pieces have a bathetic quality. Potentially spelling the end of empire, the Revolt of 1857 ended in failure. Compared with the events in, say, Haiti or Ireland, India's protracted decolonisation was a rather dull affair, the product of half a century of constitutional wrangling. Partition? With some 12 to 15 million displaced, the Subcontinental tally was on a par with the number of Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia and Poland at the end of the Second World War. Across Europe, the figure stood at 60 million, and in China alone 90 million. Ideologically speaking, postcolonial Indian currents were sui generis, steering clear of exportable archetypes. Tempered by altruism, Nehru's socialism was too idiosyncratic to be properly socialist. Absent state capacity, his daughter's Emergency regime was too sickly and sensitive to the popular will to be properly authoritarian. Straitjacketed by precedent and pluralism, Modi's India is still very much a work in progress for it to be deemed properly theocratic.

Medical history, however, is another matter. There, India's pre-eminence as the sick man of the world is difficult to dispute. The staggering death tolls in David Arnold's Pandemic India speak for themselves. Of the 72 million pandemic deaths worldwide in the century to 1920, India accounted for 40 million. Spanning two hundred years, Arnold's reflective study expertly reconstructs the dilemmas and decisions of India's ruling classes in trying conclusions with those four horsemen of the epidemiological apocalypse: cholera, plague, flu, coronavirus. His strengths evidently lie in social history, which forms the core of the book, so it's a pity that he first treats us to a ponderous excursus on decoloniality, complete with obligatory nods to empire's "pedagogic pedestal" and "heterotemporalities". Pandemics, we learn, "served, in Western minds, to delineate the temporality of the modern, 'civilized' world from the imagined medievalism of Indian minds and bodies." More prosaically, Raj apparatchiks were a self-absorbed lot – but we must presumably be too stupid to discern this without Arnold's vehement editorialising. Writing in 1872, a colonial administrator observed how a "squalid pilgrim army of Jagannath" could, "impregnated by infection, … slay thousands of the most talented and beautiful of our age in Vienna, London, or Washington," to which Arnold adds: "Was there no one 'talented' or 'beautiful' among India's own cholera dead?"