The Indian past has never been more political. This newsletter questions the traditional (male, Hindu, dominant-caste, ‘secular’) orthodoxies presented in Indian schools’ history curricula. We investigate historical narratives by consulting sources and perspectives outside established media, and we review some of the most interesting academic books and articles currently languishing behind university paywalls.
There are no definitive answers here because we want to invite as many people as possible to an alternative conversation — on what it means ‘to do history’. If nothing else, we hope to convey that history matters, and to spark our readers’ interest in undertaking historical enquiries of their own.
Write to us with your thoughts and feelings at indianparallelcampaign@gmail.com!
Content-warning: the following piece discusses themes (covid-19, illness, death) that some readers may find distressing.
Hello again, friends —
Welcome to Part II! Previously on The Parallel Campaign, we discussed how India’s public health system — rather than being guided by a coherent set of values or unifying vision — arose, ad hoc, at the intersection of commercial interest, medical racism, and Indian cultures of hierarchy.
The cynical expediency of this system, its attendant failures, and the ruinous consequences these had upon public trust — these are all betrayed only too thoroughly by India’s experiences during the bubonic plague in 1896-97 and influenza in 1918. We think revisiting this tale of two pandemics is important, for it has something meaningful to tell us about how states can claim legitimate authority over the bodies and freedoms of people even while disclaiming responsibility for their health — a perspective from the past that’s essential to understanding our present.
Do you get deja vu?
The plague arrived in India in 1896, most likely from Hong Kong. The colonial state was initially reluctant to act, but soon found itself compelled to — an emergency international sanitary conference convened in Venice in 1897 threatened an embargo against the importation of goods from India. This jeopardised an important source of raw materials for Britain, as well as the intricate commercial system that maintained its balance of payments, of which India was an essential part.
Faced with the prospect of economic disaster and desperate to allay international fears — and spurred by horrifying folk memories of the Black Death in 14th century Europe — the state initiated a draconian programme of disease control. These included introducting the Epidemic Diseases Act in February 1897, which David Arnold has described as “one of the most extreme sets of measures ever employed by the colonial regime in India”. (This 124- year-old Act is still the primary legislative tool that the government uses to inform its Covid-19 response. A 2017 draft public health bill that attempted to replace the Act has now lapsed.)
The 1897 Act empowered authorities to identify and isolate the sick, move them to hospital (where most died), segregate their contacts into ‘health camps’, and confiscate or destroy any property suspected to harbour the plague. Houses were disinfected (sometimes by fire engines) and buildings were limewashed, all usually at the owners’ expense. Officials dug up floors, broke roofs and pierced walls to admit sunlight, and burnt people’s personal effects.
A segregation camp during a bubonic plague outbreak, Karachi, British India, 1897. Source: Wellcome Collection
Fairs and festivals were prohibited, and travellers on road, rail, and sea were all subject to extensive searches for physical signs of infection — detention camps became a common feature of the railway system. Corpses had to be compulsorily inspected and procedures for the registration of deaths were tightened. In Bombay, the plague’s initial epicentre in India, drains and sewers across the city were flushed every day with 3 million gallons of a dilution of carbolic acid and seawater.
Never before and never again would the colonial state mount an intervention of this scale and consistency, entering homes, interfering with caste and religious practices, regulating the disposal of the dead and restricting the free movement of people.
It is true that these measures were based on the prevailing sanitary wisdom at the time, which saw damp, darkness, and dirt as conducive to disease, if not the actual cause of it (Donald Trump and his bleach injections would have fit in so well). But they were also an extreme manifestation of the scornful attitude that colonial authorities held towards the Indian public, who could not be consulted, educated, or allowed any say whatsoever during this time of emergency.
Lack of trust begets lack of trust: the response was utter panic. Thousands of working- and middle-class inhabitants fled Bombay, including the street-cleaners and sweepers on whom the city’s crude sanitary system relied. Nearly 400,000 people, almost half the total population, had deserted Bombay by February 1897 — many of them taking the plague with them to semi-urban and rural areas. And as the disease spread across the subcontinent, the plague measures got ever more severe and desperate.
It has been argued, perhaps not over-conspiratorially, that the British administration and its police worked alongside public health advisors to stoke a panic: plague measures were a fine opportunity to prosecute people who might pose a threat to their authority.
The style and method of plague administration enabled — indeed invited — Indians to prey on each other. Some people responded enthusiastically to that invitation, with a viciousness justified as public-spiritedness.
In an atmosphere of panic and suspicion fuelled by what was effectively the criminalization of the disease, dominant groups tried to deflect the impact of plague measures onto weaker and more peripheral groups. Those whose rights in the village or neighbourhood appeared the most tenuous, or who could be more easily ‘otherised’ by the community — such as Dalits, Muslims, and sex workers — were most likely to be reported under suspicion of sickness.
Burning a suspected plague patient's clothes, Bombay, 1896-1897. Source: Captain C. Moss / British Library
But then, suddenly, restrictions were relaxed.
With the damage to public trust already done, the emphasis of public health measures was now changed from coercion to persuasion. Well-to-do householders were allowed to segregate and treat their sick at home rather than sending them to plague camps. Caste and community hospitals were encouraged, previously shunned practitioners of ‘traditional’ Indian medicine were entrusted to treat plague cases, and local leaders were co-opted to mediate between health authorities and their own communities. Baba Ramdev would have had a field day.
In other words, medical racism and state apathy found common ground with indigenous social hierarchy once more.
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar points out that it became increasingly obvious, as the plague worked its way through India, that the poorer classes suffered it most severely. The disease took on the character of a scourge of the poor, and so came to be seen as endemic — just another malady which flourished in India’s inhospitable climate of physical and moral sickness, “integral to the burden which the white man carried dutifully”. And once plague began to occupy a distinct social niche, the government found that the costs of trying to contain plague were mounting beyond the value it was willing to assign to the average Indian life.
There wasn’t even much of an attempt to hide this gory calculus. In the Indian Plague Commission’s report in 1902, Director-General of the Indian Medical Department called it a “disease of poverty”. In the Pioneer in March 1902, an anonymous writer commented: “We Europeans are indifferent…for the statistics show that fewer Europeans have died from plague than die each year from cholera, so we can chance plague as we chance cholera.”.
The result was that localised plague outbreaks persisted into the 1920s. (Could this be where we are headed with Covid-19, once India’s elites are fully vaccinated?)
It is estimated that ultimately around 12 million people died in India due to the plague (out of about 15 million worldwide). But influenza was far worse.
Metal rodent traps, for plague prevention, being distributed in an Indian city. Watercolour by E. Schwarz-Lenoir, 1915/1935 (?). Source: Wellcome Collection
I can feel it coming in the air tonight
Influenza first arrived in India from Europe, brought home by soldiers returning from the First World War in 1918. Unlike the plague, it was not seen as an ‘Eastern’ disease that threatened to contaminate the sanitary West (god forbid), and inspired far less dread as a result.
If only it had. Influenza, “in its rapidity of spread, the enormous number of its victims, and its total fatality” — in the words of one health official at the time — “reached a virulence before which even plague with all its horrors [faded] into insignificance”. While official statistics claimed that the death toll for influenza in India was around 12.5 million, that figure has since been significantly revised upwards to 17-18 million, and possibly even 20.
Be grateful you didn’t have to wear these. Indian troops at a gas mask drill on the Salonika Front during World War I. Source: Imperial War Museums
The vast majority of these deaths happened during a devastating second wave that lasted only around 4 months and decimated entire villages.
The historian David Hardiman has recorded oral accounts of that time among the adivasis of Western India, interviewing older residents of these villages in the 1980s. They spoke of a fearsome epidemic that ravaged their society when they were young, and claimed that never before or since had they seen so many die in such a short time period. Some listed the symptoms, such as high fever and delusions, violent fits, and the throwing back of the head — which led to the disease being referred to as manmodi (the ‘breaking of the neck’ disease).
The adivasis in this region were particularly vulnerable due to their poverty, malnourishment and poor water supply, the immunity-weakening malaria that was chronic in the region and — undiagnosed at the time — sickle-cell anaemia. “The adivasis were largely left alone to suffer,” Hardiman notes, “and so traumatic was their experience that to this day they still, in those hill and forest villages, remember that terrible time of manmodi.”
In the adivasis’ experience, remembered grief and terror was passed down the generations in the absence of records, statistics, memorials, or care — in defiance of the amnesia of the state. Even today, making sense of excess death, when there is no institutional will to uncover its cause, challenges our own neat division of feeling feelings, solving problems, and reckoning with the aftermath.
That reckoning is far less available to some. Medical treatment and the opportunity to rest and receive adequate nutrition played a critical role in surviving disease — and so death was not, and still isn’t, an equal-opportunity offender.
Body counts attested to this in the case of influenza just as surely as they do today — only mortality data, not numbers showing the actual incidence of cases, were available for most of the population. I.D. Mills has estimated, for instance, that influenza mortality amongst oppressed-caste Hindus was higher than mortality from all causes for any other sub-group — and roughly 7.5 times higher than it was for Europeans.
The Army was the classic test case. Even though Indian troops were reported to have a lower incidence of influenza than British ones (136 cases per 1000, compared to 219.5), Indian troops’ death rate was almost twice that of British one, because they were far less likely to gain access to a hospital.
It is difficult to articulate the devastation wreaked by the influenza pandemic. The most enduring record of the pandemic only appeared years later, in the census report of 1921, in which the full extent of the loss was first revealed — a lethargic, bloodless memory. But contemporary reports talk about rivers becoming clogged with corpses because there was not enough firewood for funeral pyres — and we know that because the pandemic hit women harder, especially those aged between 20-40, 1919 saw a reduction of births by around 30 per cent.
Yet plague received far greater attention than influenza ever did. The state threw up its hands, responding to complaints about its neglect by pointing out that even Western governments had struggled to cope with influenza’s unprecedented onslaught — what hope could India have?
Despite the importance of medical treatment in surviving influenza, only some roadside and travelling dispensaries were opened, alongside a few temporary hospitals — all concentrated in urban areas. Other than that, all the state really found in itself to do was offer advice: ‘Avoid public places. Stay home. Stay warm. Eat nourishing food’. It might as well have circulated leaflets that said ‘Stop being poor’.
Admittedly, World War I had severely depleted the ranks of medical and sanitary service personnel in India. The intense infectivity and short incubation period of the disease (less than 48 hours), as well as the lack of any real cure, meant that once it was underway, influenza struck communities like an avalanche that public health authorities could scarcely hope to contain — especially as its frontline workers were compromised by sickness and death too. But even controlling for this, it’s difficult to come to terms with the extent of state inaction.
Once apathy becomes policy — and it only has to happen once, as that cascade of tacit nods to the inevitable grows into a wave — institutions can be set on an almost irreversible kind of path-dependency. They check off boxes. They fill forms and quotas. They transform reality into a ‘papereality’ that makes it easier to forget, and harder to hold them to account.
In the state’s glaring absence, those who could turned to the private sector. But price-gouging was rampant, with many services and businesses at the time almost doubling their prices and fees. Civil society came together and mobilised resources and networks to tend to the sick and supply food, blankets and other essentials to the poor. But help from such organisations also tended to be concentrated in urban areas and had little impact elsewhere.
With no one else to rely on, the people had to be aatmanirbhar.
Affluenza?
Where, in the midst of this carnage, was India’s nationalist movement? We’re not really sure. The upper- and middle-class professional communities whose ranks had long supplied many anticolonial activists had, for the previous half-century, been concerned less with reducing the predations of cholera, plague and smallpox upon the vulnerable than with petitioning the government to kindly pay attention to a very different malaise: diabetes.
Although reliable statistics on its incidence were impossible to compile — its sufferers rarely frequented the ‘low-class’ government hospitals that supplied civilian health data — diabetes affected thousands of the wealthy male lawyers, doctors, bureaucrats, zamindars, and princes that comprised India’s elite.
Colonized Indians actually contributed vociferously to the early medical and political debates about the prevalence and treatment of diabetes — an ailment that at the time was little understood (insulin was first used in 1922), and which many saw as one that affected dominant-caste Hindu men in particular, especially in Bengal.
As Arnold puts it, this exemplified “middle-class ‘ownership’ of a disease...at a time of growing political assertiveness by the Indian bourgeoisie, and compounded by a feeling of neglect by the colonial medical establishment.”
Despite the fact that it cut short the lives of many of the Indians that the Raj directly relied upon to run the lower levels of government, the state, when it was not ignoring it altogether, blamed rising diabetes on the racial inferiority of native peoples — their ‘sexual excesses’, and the inability of their primitive constitutions to withstand the stresses of modern urban civilization. This fed into a potent sense of middle-class victimhood, with many well-off Hindus decrying that they had been marked out by colonial rule as a degenerated, ‘dying’ race.
Diabetes, seen as a disease of the weak-willed, was more evidence for the British belief that Indians were incapable of self-rule or basic management. Elite Indians, in turn, were often so preoccupied with trying to divert government attention to this ‘silent epidemic’ that they ignored other health policies altogether.
Yet, despite the relative insulation of the wealthy, influenza was too widespread not to affect Indians of all classes. In a letter in 1918, Mohandas Gandhi wrote,“I felt sad for a moment when I learnt that your family were afflicted with influenza and there was even a death. But such news is pouring in from everywhere,” he wrote resignedly, “so that now the mind is hardly affected.”
Such is the power of mass death to numb us when we are conditioned to see it as inevitable — it becomes hard to remember that uncontrolled disease can be as much a product of deliberate human (in)action as it is of nature.
Bare with us
In late 1918, Gandhi, like the rest of the nationalist movement, was instead fixated on the coming struggle over the Rowlatt Act, less perturbed by influenza than by the anticipated intensification of state repression. But this, we recognize now, was a false separation: it fails to realise that state inaction on influenza was itself a form of repression, just of a different kind — a crime of omission, to the Rowlatt Act’s crime of commission.
Source: indianhistorypics
In fact, to us, the sharp contrast between the colonial state’s response to plague and to influenza is actually a nightmarish illustration of one of history’s most depressing political hypotheses. Georgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher, has argued that the state apparatus works to sustain its power — effectively, if implicitly — by dividing the bodies under its control into two totalizing categories: included and valuable, or excluded and disposable.
Being in the excluded category means that you exist in a condition of ‘bare life’ — a kind of death by banishment and abandonment, precipitated by inaction rather than a deliberate act.
If you are lucky enough to be one of the included, your status is only ever a precarious one: a provisional privilege that can be denied. The state can always take back its gifts, and deprive you of the things you need, like healthcare, by reassigning you to the other category.
Throughout the crises and emergencies of the past century, and most notably during periods of war, genocide, or disease, states have sought to preserve their sovereignty and legitimacy by casting millions of people out of the charmed circle of political value into the purgatory of bare life. It is an experience most acutely — and forewarningly — experienced by marginalized groups such as internally displaced communities, the HIV positive and, as we were powerfully reminded this week, political prisoners jailed under arbitrary charges of terrorism.
Source: Frameline
Stripped of rights and entitlements, becoming bare life means being left with a body that has no meaning — only its own panic and fear and mute, unfulfilled needs. But it is also the cutting and slashing of stories and memories until they fit into preordained shapes, until no one is to blame except those lost, bare lives themselves — in their ignorance, their refusal to follow orders.
It was against exactly this kind of callous colonial machination, this arbitrariness of colonial categorisation, this blatant colonial manipulation of the rule of law, that the Indian nationalist movement came to position itself. By 1940, Gandhi himself famously acknowledged that, “It is impossible for an unhealthy people to win swaraj...we should no longer be guilty of the neglect of the health of our people”.
Sunil Amrith has even pointed out that medical metaphors abounded in the rhetoric of the freedom movement, with colonialism described as a sickness infecting the health of the national body.
The independent Indian state came into being — and claimed for itself its monopoly on violence — on the back of explicit promises to be better. It constructed its legitimacy by pledging to Indians — subjects who had been reliant on their colonisers’ goodwill — that they would now be treated as citizens with constitutional rights and guarantees, that they would be accorded the respect and care that they had been denied. In other words, the state promised that it would help all Indians transform their bare, animal lives into ‘the good life’.
Why, then, has reading this felt achingly familiar? Why have we been locking down like it’s 1897 and partying like it’s 1922? The politically convenient oscillation between intimidation and apathy, action and inaction, has clearly managed to survive into independent India — as has the state’s blatant disregard for the inherent, rather than instrumental, value of human life.
But this was not inevitable.
In Part III (the final one in what has inadvertently turned into a mini-series!), we’ll explore the public health choices that independent India made, and the role they played in condemning us to repeating our past mistakes.
Until next time,
Dear Tanvi and Niya, just when I thought you've outdone yourself in the Part I, you did it again in Part II. The blend of snark and insights in the newsletter is such a delight. I really admire how you label things, events, structures and actions such that it makes things so clear for me as a reader. The map is not the territory, so quoting all the examples is hard, but reading 'Cynical expediency', 'authority over the bodies while disclaiming responsibility for their health', 'stop being poor' and 'once apathy becomes policy' had me in awe of how perceptive is your work. You do it while connecting the dots that I never had, sewing it in a narrative that pulls me in with its lucidity. It's such an engaging learning experience. Thank you so much for all the work you've put in it.
Love the work - the stories are heartbreaking - and there was a lot I learned - plague! Flu! Brits? Indians! Diabetes - amazing how we shape the "civilizational concerns" to suit our elite needs