The Disease Called Fear: Reading Narayan Ganguly’s Short Story "Pushkara"

The fatal shadow of an all-pervasive epidemic may have become a distant memory for our generation because modern medicine and therapy have progressed and our longevity is blessed. Along came Corona virus and the proverbial world of our knowledge went through chaos. We witnessed a new threat along with the microscopic virusthe banality of posttruths. This fear rapidly gets transmitted into the psychology of everyone. And how that fear can infiltrate the common judgement of populace, is the focus of this paper through reading Bengali novelist Narayan Gangopadhyay’s short story, Pushkara. The story is set against the cholera epidemic in rural Bengal, where a priest prepares for a midnight Kali Puja at the cremation ground to ward off the evil of Cholera. The offal offered at the altar is consumed by a local vagrant woman, but the intoxicated and hyper tensed priest and his acolytes assume the woman in the dark to be the corporeal form of the goddess itself. Out of abject psychosis, a divine myth is born. Death and disease mark our existence as Susan Sontag called our duality as realm of night and realm of well-being. To attain the realm of well-being, we are often seen to give in to sad repercussions to mete out our existential dread. This essay will show how that fear is no less powerful than the disease itself. KeywordsEpidemic, Existentialism, Psychoanalysis, Fear, Divinity. “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” (Poe, 2006, p.42) The entire corpus of human history shares a common thread. Whenever our civilization is threatened to be extinct, be it an epidemic, a war, an apocalypse upon us, all our existence is laced with a certain fear and fear knows little logic. Similarly, in this celebrated short story by Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death, the fateful Prince ordered his castle to be shut from inside, so that the notorious ‘Red Death’ may not claim lives at its whim. But his impressive plan fails miserably with the definitive victory of the epidemic and the subsequent death of all the known living beings. But why does the prince partake in such endeavour to lock his flock in isolation, and not trying to find a cure for the dreadful disease? The answer is probably that fear, abject and hopeless fear which the Pestilence stirs in us, making the mind muddier and judgment cloudy. The situation we witnessed now, inside this virus pandemic in 2020 A.D., is a torrent of fabricated information to be poured over us, helpless and anxious wait for a possible cure, extremely polarized debates over the use of preventive measures, failure of governmental policy in wake of such an unforeseen global catastrophe and the rise of a new threat along with the microscopic virusthe banality of post-truths. That fear grows and the idea of posttruths gnaws at our better judgment slowly and steadily. And how this fear affects the creative imagination of a gifted story-teller, is the focus of this paper till the end. 51 NEW LITERARIA, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2021 . Mary Midgley (2001) writes, “As is well known, fear is ‘natural’ in the sense of having plain, substantial psychological causes” (p. 80). This is quite simple observation that fear for anything or anyone is firmly implanted in our psychology than we try to comprehend. Fear is a powerful impetus and often unknowingly we attribute kind of a negative sense to our fearful actions. But according to Midgley (2001), “In short, if somebody presses the crude question whether fear is a good or bad thing, we can only give an indirect answeran answer which may look evasive, but is absolutely necessary in dealing with such a crude question” (p. 81). Our own dilemma is quite similar to her delineation of the psychological evaluation of fear. But she further makes an important observation on the fact, Fear is all right in moderation. There should be neither too much nor too little of it...It involves fearing the right things, not the wrong ones, and fearing them as much as, not more than, their nature calls for. It involves understanding what are suitable objects for fear, and what kind of fear is suitable for them. (Midgley, 2001, p.81) Now, coming back to our present question, where a threat like an alarming epidemic is precariously closing in, how far the people can be afraid of? Literature has no dearth of examples where the footprint of epidemic is still afresh. From Defoe’s prominent work Journal of the Plague Year (1722 A.D.) to C. C. Humphrey’s more recent historical thriller Plague (2014 A.D.), both of them etch out the vivid horror of the Black Plague in London during 1665 A.D. But look at the year of publishing for these two books, almost three hundreds of years between them; still they are connected by one common thread of fear, the fear of death. Now, epidemic and literature are not two distant relatives but neighbours who share the common quarters. Our history is laden with terrible examples of worst epidemics, like the Plague in Athens (430 B.C.), Plague of Cyprian (250-271 A.D.) or the Black Death (1346-1353 A.D.). Frank M. Snowden (2019) writes, A second reason for concentrating on epidemic diseases is historical. Since our interest here is history, it is important to stress that, throughout human history until the twentieth century; infectious diseases have been far more devastating than other categories of illness. Indeed, globally they remain leading causes of suffering and death. One of the goals of Epidemics and Society is to explain this feature of the history of human disease. (pp. 2-3) And he further asserts the indelible mark of epidemic on our psychology and shows how it is remarkably different from the other chronic diseases, To have severe heart disease, for instance, can be a frightening, even lethal, experience; however, it is qualitatively different from being diagnosed with HIV/ AIDS or being stricken with smallpox, polio, or Asiatic cholera. Correspondingly, major chronic diseases such as cancer have a devastating effect on health-care systems, on the economy, and on the lives of millions of people. But unlike some epidemic diseases, heart disease and cancer do not give rise to scapegoating, mass hysteria, and outbursts of religiosity, nor are they extensively treated in literature and art. Diseases, in other words, are not simply interchangeable causes of morbidity and mortality. Epidemic diseases have left a particular r legacy in their wake. Their singularity merits attention. (Snowden, 2019, p. 2) The ‘singularity’ that revolves around epidemic is the reason behind such large-scale representation of literature which deals with the empire of fear among us. Snowden talks here about the reflection of staunch religious and sociological beliefs to infiltrate as well as compromising the normalcy of the behaviour for the masses when an epidemic sets in. Literature has portrayed that corruption of body and soul throughout ages. Even Bengali literature consists of many examples of epidemic creating havoc and wreck in the lives of individual as well as society. To begin with, we can mention Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s eponymous novel Anandamath which begins with the inhuman descriptions of rural Bengal lying in complete waste in the wake of infamous famine in Bengal (year 1176 in Bengali calendar) during1876-78 A.D. But the famine resulted in gross The Disease Called Fear: Reading Narayan Ganguly’s Short Story Pushkara malnourishment in the underprivileged section of the masses. Small pox epidemic spreads like sweeping-broom wafting away the last brittle of dust from existence. Udaychand Das shows us that Bipinchandra Pal wrote in his autobiography, Sottor Bochor (Seventy Years), that every year during the month of Chaitra and Baisakh (April-May, according to Gregorian calendar) Cholera is a recurring phenomenon in Srihatta (Sylhet, now in Bangladesh) (Das, 2020). Even Rabindranath Tagore in his autobiography, Jiban Smriti (My Boyhood Days) replicates the fear of Dengue epidemic, where he wrote that they had to escape to Chatubabu’s country house at Penety (Panihati, a sub-urb on the northern fringes of Kolkata) when the dengue epidemic broke out in Kolkata. (Thakur, 1989) In Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Shrikanta we also observe the advent of small pox epidemic in Rangoon (now Yangon in Myanmar). The protagonist Shrikanta undertakes the journey to Rangoon by ship and after embarking there he finds that the whole city is in the grip of plague. Insanitary and congested housing quarters (‘bustee’ or slums to be precise), lack of food or medicine and helplessly waiting to be dead in convulsionthey all constitute the ghastly details of macabre death in that particular episode in Shrikanta. Sharatchandra himself went to Rangoon in early days of 1903 A.D. where he took a job in Burma. So, it might be not far-fetched if we assume that the incident of Shrikanta’s futile nursing of Manohar Babu could be the author’s own tragic experience there (Das, 2020). Dineshchandra Sen who wrote Brihat Banga (Greater Bengal), a monumental work on the history of Bengal, showed us the effects of Cholera epidemic in Dhaka during 1881 A.D. Only the dismal and sudden cry of Bolo Hari (in the name of Lord Hari or Vishnu) along with wailing and intermittent shouts of orphans fill the streets of the city. The sweet chant of the name of Lord Vishnu seems like roll of thunder to the ears (Das, 2020). The British Raj paid little heed to the conditions of the victims though. In some of the Bengali texts the reference to epidemics can be traced like an annual phenomenon, which seems like a cohabitational clause between people and microbes, causing diseases. Shibnath Shastri’s novel Jugantar (Epoch) in 1895 A.D., Tagore’s novel Gora, Sharatchandra’s novel Panditmoshai (Pundit), Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay’s Aranyak (Of the Forest)all these novels are exemplary classics of Bengali literature. But what connects them together? All of these tales s