Art In The Time Of The Pandemic

Sangita Jindal, Shireen Gandhy, Atul Dodiya and Abhay Sardesai assess the looming crisis and discuss the way ahead.

- Sangita Jindal, Shireen Gandhy, Atul Dodiya and Abhay Sardesai

Abhay Sardesai: As we find ourselves in the middle of these violent dislocations of body, mind and spirit that the Corona pandemic has engendered, I am reminded of this powerful poem by W.B. Yeats, called The Second Coming. I am sure many of us know it quite intimately. Yeats wrote it around 1919, immediately after the First World War had ended but also when the Flu pandemic was raging in Europe from 1918 to 1920.

The centre disintegrates and innocence is contaminated, says Yeats, as “The darkness drops again; but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” It’s a terrifying vision of a savage upheaval, things that have gone crazily haywire, a world that has turned upside down. It is also a picture of a universe that is waiting for this Sphinx-like monster to assume its form and conquer the world by tearing it apart.