“A Spiritual Map of The Waste Land: From Fire Sermon to Shantih”
This Blog is a part of Thinking Activity assigned by Dr. and Prof. Dilip Barad sir regarding Waste Land by T.S Eliot and its connection with the Upnishadic and Buddhist readings of the text.
I approached Homebound not merely as a cinematic artefact, but as a literary text in motion one that continually reshapes its genre as the narrative unfolds. Reading Neeraj Ghaywan’s directorial choices through my own critical lens, I deconstruct the film into distinct literary modes that succeed and unsettle one another. What emerges is a text that resists narrative comfort, ethical closure, and generic stability.
I. Part One as a Broken Bildungsroman
The first half of Homebound appears to adopt the structure of a Bildungsroman—the novel of growth, formation, and social ascent—but only to fracture it from within.
Aspiration
Rather than portraying the protagonists, Chandan and Shoaib, as migrant textile workers (their real-life occupations), the film recasts them as aspiring police constables. I read this choice as symbolically charged. The police uniform becomes a metonym for institutional dignity a hope that legality, visibility, and respectability might neutralize the stigma attached to Dalit and Muslim identities. Their aspiration is not merely economic; it is ontological.
Subversion
Yet the genre’s central promise—that discipline and merit yield success—is systematically dismantled. The staggering statistic of 2.5 million applicants for 3,500 posts exposes the illusion of fairness sustaining the meritocratic myth. The protagonists’ faith in the system is revealed as fragile, even tragic, transforming the Bildungsroman into a narrative of arrested development rather than fulfilled becoming.
II. Tone and Texture: Literary Naturalism
As the film’s aesthetic and performances unfold, I am repeatedly drawn to the conventions of Naturalism, where characters are bound by environment, history, and inherited social conditions.
Somatic Determinism
Vishal Jethwa’s portrayal of Chandan is marked by what I interpret as a somatic performance. His body language particularly the way he physically contracts in the presence of authority—functions as an embodied archive of caste trauma. This is not simply acting; it is the corporeal inscription of historical humiliation.
The Aesthetic of Exhaustion
The cinematography reinforces this determinism. A palette of warm greys and dust produces what I read as an aesthetic of exhaustion. The camera’s recurring attention to feet, sweat, dirt, and labour refuses any romanticization of poverty. Like the Naturalist novel, the film insists on material reality as an inescapable force.
Quiet Cruelty
Equally telling are moments of understated violence such as the denial of a water bottle. These scenes register as quiet insults, revealing the everyday mechanisms through which caste and religious segregation operate without spectacle or overt aggression.
III. The Midpoint Turn: From Social Drama to Survival Thriller
The onset of the COVID-19 lockdown marks a decisive tonal rupture.
Narrative Transformation
The film abandons the slow-burn drama of aspiration and reconstitutes itself as a survival thriller. Urgency replaces hope; endurance supplants ambition.
Slow Violence
I read this shift not as a narrative convenience but as an exposure of what Rob Nixon terms slow violence. The pandemic does not create injustice; it merely accelerates and intensifies pre-existing structures of neglect, revealing how systemic cruelty becomes lethal under crisis conditions.
IV. The Ending as Existential Tragedy
Rather than offering catharsis or redemption, Homebound resolves itself as an Existential Tragedy.
The “Othered” Hero
Ishaan Khatter's Shoaib embodies a restrained, simmering angst. His decision to reject a job opportunity in Dubai and remain in India complicates the idea of escape. His tragedy lies not in failure, but in loyalty to a nation that persistently positions him as suspect, peripheral, and expendable.
Austere Minimalism
The minimalist background score and extended silences resist the emotional orchestration typical of Bollywood melodrama. The film refuses to tell us how to feel, allowing absence, pause, and restraint to bear the tragic weight.
The Failed Metaphor of Home
Ultimately, the “journey home” collapses as a sustaining metaphor. Neither the village nor the nation offers sanctuary. Dignity emerges not as a reward to be earned, but as a fundamental right systematically denied through bureaucratic indifference.
V. A Meta-Fictional Ethical Conflict
Beyond the diegesis, I discern a troubling meta-narrative that introduces a postmodern ethical tension between representation and responsibility.
The Unreliable Authorial Position
Reports that the family of the real-life subject, Amrit Kumar, were unaware of the film’s production and received a nominal sum raise unsettling questions. Can a text that exposes exploitation risk reproducing it through its own methods of creation?
The State as Editor
The CBFC’s mandated cuts including the muting of the word “Gyan” position the state as a literal editor of the text. This intervention underscores how narratives that foreground caste, religion, and systemic injustice are actively managed, softened, or silenced.
Conclusion: A Literary Analogy
To me, Homebound resembles a book that begins with the heroic cover art of an epic the dream of the police uniform is printed on the gritty, dissolving paper of social realism the migrant’s journey and reaches the reader already scarred by redactions impose.
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References-
Barad, Dilip. Academic Worksheet on Homebound. ResearchGate, January 2026, DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.10952.99849. ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399486487_Academic_Worksheet_on_Homebound.
This Blog is a part of Thinking Activity assigned by Dr. and Prof. Dilip Barad sirregarding T.S Eliot's Waste Land as a pandemic poem. I will ponder on some points regarding the topic and present some modernist views on the text as well.
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Here is the videographic content of my blog-
Here are the videos regarding the connection of Waste Land as a pandemic poem and its detailed analysis-
Why We Forget Pandemics: Uncovering the Secret Viral Code in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"
Introduction: The Strange Amnesia of Sickness
We have all just lived through a world-altering pandemic, and our collective instinct, understandably, is to forget. The experience of sickness, isolation, and loss has left a scar we would rather not touch. Yet this desire for amnesia is part of a much older, stranger pattern. We build monuments to our wars, inscribing the names of fallen soldiers in stone and steel. But what of the pandemics that killed millions more? The 1918 Spanish Flu infected a third of the world’s population, yet its cultural memory feels faint, almost ghostly. Why does history remember the battlefield so clearly, but the sickroom so poorly? The answer, and the memories we have lost, may be hiding in plain sight, encoded within the feverish, fragmented lines of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
The primary reason pandemics fade from cultural memory lies in the profoundly different narratives they permit. War, for all its horror, can be framed as a collective struggle, a story of a few fighting heroically for the many. The soldier’s death is elevated into a noble sacrifice that protects family and country. The military corpse is absent from the home front, transformed into a name on a memorial. Disease, however, is an intensely individual, internal battle. Its narrative is one of helplessness, not heroism. The civilian corpse, far from being absent, floods cities and homes—a material reality that offers no redemptive meaning. Dying from an infectious disease is not a sacrifice that saves your family; it is a tragedy that actively endangers them.
This lack of a sacrificial structure makes it nearly impossible to build the memorializing myths we create for war. As scholar Elizabeth Outka observes, the fundamental difference in how we process these deaths prevents them from taking root in our collective consciousness:
"With war, even if you're you disagree with the war you could at least argue about whether the death was worth it... With an infectious disease if you die your family is more likely to die. There is no sacrificial structure to build around a loss of this kind. It's simply tragedy..."
This cultural amnesia is not merely a passive psychological phenomenon; it is often compounded by the active, political process of erasure. The difficulty of documenting pandemic deaths—a challenge seen in 1918—persists today. When the Indian government, for instance, officially claimed during the COVID-19 crisis that "zero people died due to lake of oxygen," it revealed how official records can obscure rather than illuminate the scale of a tragedy, ensuring that what is lived is not always what is remembered.
While our collective historical memory falters, literature often serves as a more faithful archive of human experience. The subtle, internal realities of disease—the sense of innervation, the way illness reshapes perception—are precisely the kinds of experiences that literary art is uniquely equipped to capture. The problem is not with the writing, but with our reading. We are not habituated to decode the language of sickness in our great works, especially when more obvious interpretations, like the trauma of war or a general sense of cultural decay, are readily available.
3. "The Waste Land": A Famous Poem with a Missed Viral Context
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922, is the quintessential modernist poem, a fragmented and famously difficult work that has been subject to a century of critical analysis. For decades, scholars have interpreted it as a response to the spiritual void of World War I, a commentary on European cultural disintegration, or an expression of Eliot’s personal marital and sexual struggles. Yet Eliot himself resisted such singular readings, dismissing the poem as "only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life." This authorial deflection, paradoxically, opens the door for a reading that has been overlooked.
In her book Viral Modernism, scholar Elizabeth Outka advances a compelling thesis: for all the exhaustive critical attention, readers have almost universally missed the poem’s “viral context.” She argues that The Waste Land is not just a poem about the aftermath of war, but a powerful, deeply embedded record of the 1918 influenza pandemic—an event that was not just a historical backdrop, but a direct, physical, and psychological experience for the poet himself.
4. The Biographical Clues: Eliot's Own Pandemic Experience
The theory finds its grounding in stark biographical evidence. In December 1918, both T.S. Eliot and his wife, Vivian, caught the virus. His personal letters from the period are filled with the language of illness, referencing "pneumonic influenza," his own physical and nervous "collapse," and specific symptoms like "extreme dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth." The myasmic residue of the pandemic saturated his life.
For Eliot, the virus became a metaphor for the sickness that pervaded his world. In one letter, he tellingly refers to “the long epidemic of domestic influenza,” registering both the literal illness and the chronic despair of his marriage. This fusion of physical and psychological suffering—the body’s sickness mirroring the mind’s distress—would culminate in his nervous breakdown in 1921, creating the very state of physical and mental innervation from which The Waste Land was born.
5. The Textual Evidence: Reading the Poem as a "Fever Dream"
Once armed with this biographical context, the poem’s text reveals a wealth of imagery and structural choices that powerfully evoke a pandemic experience. The work begins to feel less like a cultural critique and more like a transmission from a sickroom, a fever dream put to paper.
1. "Delirium Logic" The poem’s radical fragmentation—its cacophony of voices and jarring leaps between subjects—mirrors a “delirium logic.” This is not merely a modernist literary device. It is a chillingly authentic reflection of a disturbed mental state caused by fever, poisoning, or brain injury—the very conditions that Eliot’s documented physical and nervous collapse suggest he endured.
2. A View from the Grave As critic Michael Levinson observed, the iconic opening, “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land,” can be read from a corpse’s point of view. This perspective from beneath the ground gives voice to the overwhelming presence of the pandemic dead, evoking the material reality of the civilian corpse that flooded cities and homes.
3. A Body Burning The climactic lines of “The Fire Sermon”—“burning burning burning”—have long been read through a Buddhist lens. But in a viral context, they transcend mere metaphor. The spiritual anguish is grounded in the visceral, bodily agony of a body consumed by fever, an incantation of pure, painful sensation.
4. The Fever's Thirst A central section of the poem describes a dry, rocky landscape and a desperate, unquenchable thirst: “If there were water and no rock... but there is no water.” Here, the well-known spiritual drought is grounded in the literal, agonizing dehydration that accompanies severe illness, a symptom Eliot himself recorded.
5. The Pathogenic Air Eliot constructs a pathogenic atmosphere through recurring imagery of “wind, fog, and air.” This creates a sense of an invisible, diffuse, and inescapable threat, perfectly capturing the nature of an airborne virus—a danger that is everywhere and nowhere at once.
6. The Tolling of Bells The poem reverberates with the recurring sound of “tolling of bells.” In a city ravaged by plague, this is not an abstract symbol. It is the literal echo of church bells that rang continuously for the pandemic dead, an auditory marker of ceaseless loss much like the constant wail of ambulance sirens in our own time.
To read The Waste Land through a viral lens does not erase other interpretations, but adds a vital, forgotten layer of meaning. The poem becomes more than a memorial to a lost era; it becomes a testament to the very silence that surrounds mass illness. Eliot, whether consciously or not, gave voice to a collective trauma that was already being erased from public memory, capturing the ghostly afterlife of a pandemic by hiding its remnants in plain sight. It leaves us with a critical question as we emerge from our own pandemic: What art from our own time is quietly recording our experience, and what will it take for future generations to learn how to read it?
Poetry, Power, and Prophecy: Yeats as a Modern Bard
HERE IS A BRIEF VIDEO GENERATED THROUGH NOTEBOOKLM OF MY BLOG-
This Blog is a part of Thinking Activity assigned by Dr. and Prof. Dilip Barad sir regarding William Butler Yeats' poems where I will ponder on some topics regarding his works assigned.
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The provided transcript examines W.B. Yeats’s poem "The Second Coming" through several interpretative lenses, moving beyond traditional analysis to address its contemporary relevance. Initially, the text frames the work within the trauma of the 20th century, specifically the political instability following the First World War and the Irish Revolution. The discussion then transitions into a religious and mythological reading, exploring biblical promises and Yeats’s mystical concept of Spiritus Mundi. Crucially, the source introduces a modern perspective by linking the poem’s apocalyptic imagery to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, noting that Yeats’s pregnant wife was nearly killed by the virus while he composed the piece. By drawing parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic, the speaker suggests that the poem’s "rough beast" and descriptions of drowning may reflect the biological horror of global contagion. Ultimately, the source argues that this "viral modernism" provides a vital third context for understanding the poem's enduring atmosphere of chaos and dread.
This lecture transcript explores W. B. Yeats’s six-line poem "On Being Asked for a War Poem," written in 1915 during the First World War. The text examines the poet’s refusal to write traditional patriotic verse, arguing that a creator’s voice should remain silent in times of conflict because they possess no power to correct the decisions of statesmen. The instructor highlights the pervasive irony of the work, noting that by writing a poem about his refusal to write, Yeats is actually meddling in the very political affairs he claims to avoid. Furthermore, the discussion provides essential biographical and historical context, explaining how Yeats’s identity as an Irish nationalist fueled his reluctance to support the British war effort and his desire for political neutrality.
Here is the Hindi Podcast of The Second Coming and On Being Asked for a War Poem- Pandemic and War Poems
The Secret Behind the Chaos: What We’ve All Missed in W.B. Yeats’s Most Famous Poems
Introduction: The Poet of a World Falling Apart
For over a century, William Butler Yeats has been the definitive poet of a world falling apart. Lines like “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” have become cultural shorthand for societal collapse, feeling as relevant in our turbulent present as they did in the shattered aftermath of the First World War. We turn to Yeats to find language for chaos.
But what if our common understanding of his most famous poems has missed the most surprising and deeply personal stories behind them? What if the poem we thought was a quiet retreat from politics was actually a fierce protest, and the poem we thought was about war and revolution was secretly fueled by the terror of a global pandemic?
This is the story behind the poetry. Prepare to uncover a few counter-intuitive takeaways that will change how you see the work of W.B. Yeats forever.
A Poet’s Silence Can Be the Loudest Protest. The year is 1915. The First World War is raging across Europe, and the cultural pressure to take a side is immense. The celebrated writers Henry James and Edith Wharton ask Yeats for a patriotic poem to include in a book benefiting war refugees a noble cause, seemingly impossible to refuse.
Yeats’s response was strange. He refused, but he did so by writing a poem about his refusal, titled "On Being Asked for a War Poem." Its core statement is an elegant sidestep:
"I think it better that in times like these / A poet's mouth be silent."
At first glance, this seems like an apolitical act of avoidance. But this was no passive retreat; it was a deeply considered, political protest. His deliberation is evident in the poem’s working titles, one of which was simply, “A Reason for Keeping Silent.” The source of that protest was twofold.
First, a poet’s duty, as Yeats saw it, clashed with the demands of wartime patriotism. While politicians offer a simple, nationalistic "right path," a poet’s obligation is to a more complex truth: to see "the horror of war and the shared humanity of soldiers on both sides," a perspective rarely welcome amid patriotic fervor.
Second, and most critically, Yeats was an Irish nationalist living under the thumb of the British Empire. He was being asked to write propaganda for his people's oppressors. Private letters reveal he felt more sympathy for the young German soldiers dying in the trenches than for the imperial cause he was asked to champion. His silence, therefore, was a statement. In an era that, much like our own social media age, demanded everyone immediately choose a side, Yeats’s refusal was a powerful declaration of independence, proving that sometimes the most potent political act is to refuse to speak on someone else's terms.
The Poem We Thought Was About War Was Secretly Fueled by a PandemicJust four years later, in 1919, Yeats was no longer silent. He wrote "The Second Coming," perhaps the most powerful and terrifying political poem of the 20th century. Its famous opening lines "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"—are an iconic expression of civilizational collapse.
The traditional interpretation has always been clear: the poem is a direct response to the political chaos of its time. The Great War had just ended, the Russian Revolution had upended an empire, and Ireland’s own War of Independence was tearing the country apart. The center, indeed, was not holding.
But according to the groundbreaking research of scholar Elizabeth Outka, laid out in her book Viral Modernism, this interpretation overlooks a devastating reality that was always hiding in plain sight. The poem, she argues, was profoundly and directly shaped by the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.
This was not an abstract news story for Yeats; it was an intimate terror. Just weeks before writing the poem, his pregnant wife, Georgie, was struck by the Spanish Flu and lay near death. The fear must have been unbearable. During that pandemic, the mortality rate for pregnant women was catastrophic, reaching as high as 70% in some areas. Yeats was watching his own world, his own family, face utter annihilation.
A Virus Turned Apocalyptic Metaphors into Gruesome RealityWith the context of the Spanish Flu, the poem's famous apocalyptic images transform from grand metaphors into expressions of a shockingly literal and personal horror. The biological reality of the pandemic gives the poem's most famous lines a visceral new meaning.
The "blood-dimmed tide": Traditionally read as a metaphor for the bloodshed of war, this line becomes chillingly clinical. A primary symptom of the Spanish Flu was catastrophic hemorrhaging. Patients' lungs would fill with fluid until they literally drowned in their own blood, which often flowed not just from their mouths but from their noses and even ears. The "blood-dimmed tide" was not just a symbol; for Yeats, it was a gruesome medical reality.
"The ceremony of innocence is drowned": We tend to read this as an abstract loss of goodness. But viewed through the lens of the pandemic, the word "drowned" becomes terrifyingly literal. For Yeats, watching his pregnant wife struggle to breathe, "the ceremony of innocence" was the life of his unborn child, threatened with being extinguished in the most horrific way imaginable.
The "rough beast": In war, the enemy is human. It has a face. But a virus is formless, invisible, and indiscriminate. It perfectly matches the description of the beast slouching towards Bethlehem, whose gaze is "blank and pitiless as the sun." This was not a human enemy but a biological threat that did not distinguish between rich or poor, good or evil. It simply spread and destroyed.
This interpretation does not cancel out the political one. On the contrary, the two are intertwined. The fear of the world ending becomes much more real and close when a loved one is fighting for their life in your own home. The raw, personal terror of the pandemic of watching his wife and unborn child fight for life against an unseen enemy provided the "raw emotional fuel" for the poem's grand, apocalyptic vision of a world coming apart at the seams.
Conclusion: Is the Rough Beast Slouching Towards Us?
Our journey reveals Yeats first as a poet who chose strategic silence as an act of defiance, and then as one who, only a few years later, screamed about a world collapsing politically, spiritually, and as we now know, biologically.
The final piece of evidence lies hidden in the poem’s drafts. Early versions of "The Second Coming" mentioned specific historical figures, like Marie Antoinette, as agents of chaos. But in the final version, Yeats deliberately removed them all. By doing so, he made the source of the world’s collapse abstract, mysterious, and faceless. The terror was no longer coming from a specific political actor, but from an invisible, indiscriminate, and inescapable force just like a virus.
This raises a final, haunting question. In today's world, filled with its own political turmoil, misinformation, and the lingering fear of pandemics, does Yeats’s century-old poem feel like a historical artifact? Or does it feel as though that "rough beast" is, even now, slouching our way?
