Will ‘coronavirus’ enter the vocabulary of Indian languages, as ‘plague’ did over 100 years ago?

The advent of Covid-19 and the novel coronavirus has revived recollections of previous epidemics, with the abiding historical memories of how they spread among the populace, causing many deaths and bringing lives to a standstill. Just as governments are struggling to contain the pandemic today, so did administrators from an earlier era, sometimes with dreadful consequences.

A few months ago, I was researching the Chapekar brothers of Pune, who shot dead Walter Rand in 1897, a British official responsible for controlling the spread of plague in Pune. The brothers were convinced he had mismanaged the containment by defiling orthodox homes and insulting women. In this context, I came across a beautifully shot 1979 Marathi film called 22 June 1897, co-written by Shankar Nag and directed by Jayoo and Nachiket Patwardhan.

What intrigued me was when a town-crier in the film announces the imposition of the Epidemic Diseases Act on Pune. The announcement, in Marathi: “In the great city of Pune, the plague epidemic is raging and the Epidemic Diseases Act will be observed”’ The crier speaks in Marathi, but he uses the English name – “plague cha roga”’ – for the disease in question, which surprised me.

This threw up other semiotic queries – did the disease have local names? A Google...

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