The masterful volume, Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, edited by Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge University Press, 1992), remains the classic of scholarship in this genre. Another classic of this genre is Rene and Jean Dubos’s The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society (Rutgers University Press, 1987) that I taught for many years.
The volume under review is also extremely interesting, the first of its kind in India as far as I know, that traces the response of Indians to the various epidemics that cluttered our colonial history. This is done not through notoriously inadequate official statistics—then, as now, as data on COVID-19 mortality indicates—but through literature: novels, magazine articles, literary tracts, newspapers and even collections of folklore. These are, of course, in addition to the primary data from the archives.