PANDEMIC AND LITERATURE: A STUDY ON KAKKANADAN’S VASOORI

Abstract
The current pandemic situation has completely altered our lives.In this context, it is imperative to look back at the history of human civilization to see how the ancient faced such situations. Works dealing with the horrors of plague have been written in various regional literature across India, the famous being Rabindranath Tagore’s PuratonBhritto, Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and U.R Anandamoorthy’sSamskara. The article focuses on a Malayalam novel, Vasoori, written by Kakkanadan (1968) which revolves around the lives of common village folk caught in the jaws of smallpox. The novel focuses on the lived in experience of a community forced to face the disease almost every year. It is enlightening to go through the novel in the current Covid-19 pandemic as it concentrates on the first human reaction to pandemics – fear. By using the motif of smallpox, Vasooripushes the reader to reflect on the ancestral fear of humans to infectious diseases and how it completely shatters the body’s internal perceptions.Thus reading Vasooriin the current pandemic situation is one way of understanding how the human race dealt with a disease for which there seemed no solution in sight.

Keywords: Disease, Regional literature, Fear, Uncertainty, Lived in experience, Social and moral degeneration

https://doi.org/10.37948/ensemble-2021-sp1-a012