Covid-19 in India, Disease, Health and Culture: Can Wellness be Far Behind? [Paperback]

This book is a cultural exploration of health and wellness, with a focus on impacts of Covid-19 on the population of India.

The chapters in this book present original research, systematic reviews, theoretical and conceptual frameworks, encompassing multidisciplinary, inter- and intra-disciplinary fields of study, in the context of how culture and disease sufficiently unpack and inform each other. The book includes contributions from the social sciences and the humanities and analyses issues that range from smallpox to the history of vaccine, indigenous healing practices, the Macbeth paradigm, Zizekian encounters, mental asylum, and marginalised genders. Using the theme of intellectual interconnectedness in the times of self-isolation and social distancing, the book is a collaboration of critical thinkers who identify and visibilize the hidden global issues related to disease and health that have divided the world into narrow binaries  individual/society, poor/rich, proletariat/bourgeoisie, margin/centre, colonised/coloniser, servitude/liberty, powerless/powerful. By doing so, the book emphasises the potential of holistic wellness to improve human life and humanity across the globe.

A novel contribution on the cultural factors that played an important role in contemporary times of Covid-19, this book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Cultural Studies, Health and Society and South Asian Studies.

Chapter 1. Can Wellness be Far Behind?: Disease, Health and Culture Section I. Social Science Perspective Chapter 2. Colonialism and Disease: Smallpox in the Aboriginal Population; Chapter 3. Vaccine Nation and its Miserables: Bodies and Bio-citizenship in the Empire; Chapter 4. Spaces of Cure or Confinement? Inside the walls of the Mental Asylums of the 19th Century; Chapter 5.lS¢