“One who owes his oxygen to the pump is a dying man. Is it any wonder that India is in a dying condition?”
It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that these lines were written by someone deeply agonised by the deaths of thousands of Indians during the Covid-19 second wave in April and May. As it turns out, those sentences actually appeared in Young India on July 6, 1921. They were written by Mohandas Gandhi. A few months later, on March 5, 1922, he used the metaphor again. “India does not get enough oxygen and feels suffocated,” he wrote in Navajivan.
Gandhi’s invocation of this the image of people gasping for oxygen appeared shortly after India had been devastated by the influenza pandemic that started in 1918. It buffeted the country in four waves before it ended in 1921. David Arnold estimates that 12 million Indians – 5% of the country’s population – died in the pandemic. Like with Covid-19, influenza affected the functioning of the lungs.
The…