मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Thursday, December 14, 2023

Cholera epidemic of 1817, East India Company, Third Anglo-Maratha War and Mount Tambora

मी एप्रिल ४ २०२३ रोजी लिहले:

"एप्रिल महिना मला आठवण करून देतो इंडोनेशिया मधील माऊंट टॅमबोरा (mount tambora) चे ५ एप्रिल १८१५ च्या संध्याकाळी फुटणे, ज्या घटनेला उद्या २०८ वर्षे पूर्ण होतील ... 
 
त्या फुटण्याचे पडसाद तेंव्हापासून आजवर उमटत आहेत... 
 
In the year 1816 (popularly known as Year Without a Summer), in India, the monsoons did not arrive as expected, causing drought and water shortages at first, and then flooding during the dry season.
Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History", 2023
 
"... The eruption devasted other regions, such as the Indian subcontinent, where a shift in monsoon rains, a failure of trade winds and a three-year depression of the thermal cycle of South Asia not only led to major reductions in crop yields and of maritime trade, but also served to change the microbial ecology of the Bay of Bengal. In 1817, unusually early and heavy rains brought about a surge in cases of cholera that caused death on an almost unimaginable scale. The bodies of the dead and dying were gathered together, wrote one eyewitness, with funeral pyres burning non-stop to incinerate the rich and the poor, and other corpses picked over by vultures or jackals. It was ‘a scene of woe which completely baffles the power of description to portray’...."
 
तत्कालीन मराठी लेखनात माऊंट टॅमबोरा चे उल्लेख मी कधी ऐकले किंवा पाहिलेले नाहीत (तुम्हाला माहित असल्यास कृपया येथे कळवा) पण त्याने झालेला नाश तर आपल्या पूर्वजांनी भोगला आहे ... 
 
१८१७-२४ सालात आलेल्या कॉलराने १०-२० लाख भारतीय लोक मारले. भारत (आणि महाराष्ट्र) पारतंत्र्यात पण १६७४ नंतर १८१८ साली पुन्हा गेला ही गोष्ट लक्षात घेण्यासारखी आहे...."
 
पण ते पुस्तक ईस्ट इंडिया कंपनीच्या सैन्याचा कॉलरा पसरवण्यातील  हाताबद्दल काहीच लिहित नाही. 

मी एप्रिल २०२३ मध्ये वाचले. 
 
Jonathan Kennedy त्यांच्या "Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues", २०२३ या पुस्तकात लिहतात : 
"... Cholera had been endemic in the Ganges Delta for many centuries. It first broke out of its original home in 1817, carried by East India Company troops as they tramped across the subcontinent; the Marquis of Hastings lost a third of his 10,000 men to cholera while fighting the Marathas...."
 
प्रा चिन्मय तुंबे त्यांच्या "The Age Of Pandemics: 1817-1920: How they shaped India and the World", २०२० पुस्तकात लिहतात:

"... By September, reports of a major cholera outbreak were pouring in from various parts of the Bengal province, a region comprising much of modern-day Bangladesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and coastal Odisha. The epidemic struck during the prelude to the Third Anglo-Maratha War and caught the English forces unawares. The governor general, Francis Rawdon-Hastings (1754–1826), was camping in Bundelkhand in November 1817 in a bid to oust the Pindaris, powerful mercenaries operating in central India under Maratha patronage. Cholera ripped through his camp, killing hundreds by the week...."

Frederick F. Cartwright and  Michael Biddiss, 'Disease & History: From ancient times to Covid-19':
 
"... In 1817 cholera broke out with great violence over the whole Ganges delta, which became notorious as a focus. Medical men in the area stated that it had not been seen in the delta before 1817 and considered it a new disease. Their opinion is now regarded with some doubt. A possible explanation is that cholera was endemic in Central India, then largely unexplored by Europeans, and made its way down river to the coast, carried by troop movements and river shipping...."
 
 
 
 
 

Anti-cholera inoculation, Calcutta, 1894 , courtesy : Wikimedia

 

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)