With the Covid Pandemic raging and the situation all around particularly our government turning a blind eye to the thousands of death, I am reminded of a book by José Saramago titled: Ensaio sobre a Cegueira in Portuguese translated as Blindness. Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows.
2011, April. I was sitting with the Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee at his chamber in Writer’s Building discussing books when I mentioned to him of the book Blindness by José Saramago, as one of Saramago's most famous novels and noted in the citation when Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. I shared with him that it is believed to be a political allegory where the citizens go blind and believe in a certain ideology and after some time everybody gets back their sight.
Immediately Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee retorted: Is a translation available? I replied that it has been published. Immediately he called his Personal Secretary, I think, Sailen Mukherjee, and asked him to call the best person who could get him a copy at the speed of lightening, Raju Barman. Many years later when I shared this with Raju, he told me that he came in the evening and was handed a hand written note to get the book, which he did. I told him that note was written by me.
Times of India in the issue dated 9th. April, 2011 reported: This is where the winds of change' come to a halt. In the, people look immune to the "change syndrome", like a character in 's novel Essay on Blindness', who escapes a mass epidemic of blindness. The novel swings between reality and fantasy, portraying a social breakdown due to the disease, which vanishes suddenly, restoring hope. This is the novel Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is reading now. The epidemic in the novel has a parallel with Bengal's scenario, he feels.
Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The novel follows the misfortune of a handful of unnamed characters who are among the first to be stricken with blindness, including an ophthalmologist, several of his patients, and assorted others, who are thrown together by chance. The ophthalmologist's spouse, "the doctor's wife," is inexplicably immune to the blindness. After a lengthy and traumatic quarantine in an asylum, the group bands together in a family-like unit to survive by their wits and by the good fortune that the doctor's wife has escaped the blindness. The sudden onset and unexplained origin and nature of the blindness cause widespread panic, and the social order rapidly unravels as the government attempts to contain the apparent contagion and keep order via increasingly repressive and inept measures.
The first part of the novel follows the experiences of the central characters in the filthy, overcrowded asylum where they and other blind people have been quarantined. Hygiene, living conditions, and morale degrade horrifically in a very short period, mirroring the society outside.
Anxiety over the availability of food, caused by delivery irregularities, acts to undermine solidarity; and lack of organization prevents the internees from fairly distributing food or chores. Soldiers assigned to guard the asylum and look after the well-being of the internees become increasingly antipathetic as one soldier after another becomes infected. The military refuses to allow basic medicine to be delivered, which ensures that a simple infection becomes deadly. Fearing an imminent escape, soldiers shoot down a crowd of internees waiting for a food delivery.
Conditions degenerate further as an armed clique gains control over food deliveries, subjugating their fellow internees and exposing them to violent assault, rape, and deprivation. Faced with starvation, internees battle each other and burn down the asylum, only to discover that the army has abandoned the asylum, after which the protagonists join the throngs of nearly helpless blind people outside who wander the devastated city and fight one another to survive.
The story then follows the doctor's wife, her husband, and their impromptu “family” as they attempt to survive outside, cared for largely by the doctor’s wife, who can still see (though she must hide this fact at first). At this point, the breakdown of society is near total. Law and order, social services, government, schools, etc., no longer function. Families have been separated and cannot find one another. People squat in abandoned buildings and scrounge for food. Violence, disease, and despair threaten to overwhelm human coping. The doctor and his wife and their new “family” eventually make a permanent home in the doctor's house and are establishing a new order to their lives when the blindness lifts from the city en masse just as suddenly and inexplicably as it struck.
The book reflects the plague of ballots. Where a person is voted with overwhelming majority to insult human dignity. The citizens, terrified at finding themselves and everyone else blind, everything out of control. Some behave with stupid, selfish brutality, sauve qui peut. The group of men who seize power in an asylum and use and abuse the weaker inmates have indeed abandoned self-respect and human decency: they are a microcosm of the corruption of power. But the truly powerful of our world don't even appear in Blindness. Seeing is all about them: the perverters of reason, the universal liars. It is about government gone wrong.
Blindnessis a Book that says more about the days we are living in than any book I have read. Saremago writes with wit, with heartbreaking dignity, and with the simplicity of a great artist in full control of his art. Let us listen to a true elder of our people, a man of tears, a man of wisdom.