Dilip K. Das, Epidemic Narratives: The Cultural Construction of Infectious Disease Outbreaks in India

In recent years, the history of medicine has witnessed a decisive shift from event-based accounts of epidemics towards analyses that foreground culture, affect, and narrativity. Works such as Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation (Venkatesan et al. 2022),1 to which Dilip K. Das himself contributed, have demonstrated that epidemics are not merely biomedical occurrences but meaning-making events embedded in social imaginaries. Das’s Epidemic Narratives: The Cultural Construction of Infectious Disease Outbreaks in India extends and consolidates this scholarly trajectory by offering the most sustained attempt yet to read epidemics in India as narrative formations unfolding across a long historical timeline. Das’s central claim that epidemics are culturally constructed through stories, images, and ideological frames places the book firmly within contemporary social and cultural histories of medicine. What distinguishes his approach is his treatment of narrativity as a mode of historical analysis. By reading epidemics in India as narrative constructions unfolding across a vast timeline, Das expands the field’s methodological scope by positioning literary, visual, and popular texts as key sites where epidemics acquire meaning and social force.