Covid-19 in India, Disease, Health and Culture

This book is a cultural exploration of health and wellness, with a focus on impacts of Covid-19 on the population of India. The chapters in this book present original research, systematic reviews, theoretical and conceptual frameworks, encompassing multidisciplinary, inter- and intra-disciplinary fields of study, in the context of how culture and disease sufficiently unpack and inform each other. The book includes contributions from the social sciences and the humanities and analyses issues that range from smallpox to the history of vaccine, indigenous healing practices, the Macbeth paradigm, Zizekian encounters, mental asylum, and marginalised genders. Using the theme of intellectual interconnectedness in the times of self-isolation and social distancing, the book is a collaboration of critical thinkers who identify and visibilize the hidden global issues related to 'disease' and 'health' that have divided the world into narrow binaries - individual/society, poor/rich, proletariat/bourgeoisie, margin/centre, colonised/coloniser, servitude/liberty, powerless/powerful. By doing so, the book emphasises the potential of holistic wellness to improve human life and humanity across the globe. A novel contribution on the cultural factors that played an important role in contemporary times of Covid-19, this book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Cultural Studies, Health and Society and South Asian Studies.

Anindita Chatterjee is Associate Professor and Head in the Department of English, Durgapur Government College, India. Her research interests centre on British Literature of the Romantic and the Victorian Period, Indian Writing in English, Films, Gender Studies and Popular Culture, and she has published on Socialist Ecofeminism. She has also co-edited Re-theorising the Indian Subcontinental Diaspora: Old and New Directions. Nilanjana Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of English, Durgapur Government College, India. She is the author of Reading Jhumpa Lahiri: Women, Domesticity and the Indian American Diaspora (Routledge, forthcoming). Some of her ongoing projects include work on Angami Kire's formation of digital ethnic identity and on women and natural resource management in Naga folktales and stories. She has co-edited Re-theorising the Indian Subcontinental Diaspora: Old and New Directions.

Chapter 1. Can Wellness be Far Behind?: Disease, Health and Culture Section I. Social Science Perspective Chapter 2. Colonialism and Disease: Smallpox in the Aboriginal Population; Chapter 3. Vaccine Nation and its Miserables: Bodies and Bio-citizenship in the Empire; Chapter 4. Spaces of Cure or Confinement? Inside the walls of the Mental Asylums of the 19th Century; Chapter 5. Zizek's Pandemic!, the 'New Normal' Dilemma and Some Indian Perspectives; Chapter 6. Livelihood of Internal Migrants of India during Covid-19 Pandemic: Concerns and Measures; Chapter 7. Federalism and Intergovernmental Coordination during a Pandemic: A Special Reference to India; Chapter 8. Hate in the Times of Covid-19: Can we Blame the Print Media in India?; Chapter 9. Neo Liberal Turn in The Domain of Health Care: The Emergence of Corporate Health Care Sector in India Section II. Cultural Perspective Chapter 10. Disease and the Desire for Health in Shakespeare's Macbeth; Chapter 11. Their Mother's Gardens: Epidemic, Healing and Motherhood in Year of Wonders and Hamnet; Chapter 12. "stand aside death...today is my day": Contextualizing the Naga Esotericism in Easterine Kire's Novels; Chapter 13. Dis-ease, Dis-order and the Refugee Experience: Appraising South Asian Partition Narratives; Chapter 14. Always in Search of her Ithaca: Women's Spiritual Wellbeing in Journey to Ithaca: A Pilgrimage in Search of Identity and Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything; Chapter 15. Disjunctured Subjectivities and Corporeal Well-being: Issues of Mobility and Health in Select Transgender Life Narratives from India; Chapter 16. Sustainable Eating and Wellness: Examining Nutrition Strategies in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year Of Seasonal Eating and Ruth Ozeki's A Year Of Meats; Chapter 17. Disease, Wellbeing, and the Idea of Health in Select Cinematic Representations of the Macbeth Metaphor