Representative image: Sassoon General Hospital, Poona, with a queue of patients awaiting treatment. Photo of wood engraving by C.R./Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0
When I was told that within those eleven years the inhabitants of Poona had been reduced to nearly one-third, I knew why so many homes were dark on a night of lamps and family affection.
These chilling lines by British journalist Henry W. Nevinson describe the Diwali of 1907 in Poona (now Pune), which bore the brunt of the bubonic plague. His biographer Angela John has described Nevinson as a dissident scribe and as one of the finest war correspondents of his time. He reported from around the world and wrote for several leading liberal newspapers of the time, like Daily Chronicle, Manchester Guardian and Daily News.
He exposed modern slavery on Africa’s west coast. His book, The New Spirit in India, is a collection of his reports while touring different cities in India in 1907 and 1908, during the Swadeshi Movement. He was under the colonial British government’s watch given his support for the freedom struggle. The director of criminal intelligence had chronicled weekly reports on his movements and reports in a file entitled ‘The doings of Mr. H.W. Nevinson in India’.
In a chapter from his book, called ‘Rats and Men’, Nevinson described the colonial government’s response to the plague and the general condition of public health measures in Poona.
Nevinson begins with the government’s misguided strategies to control the plague when it first struck in 1896. It divided the city into compartments under military guard, and British soldiers forcibly entered houses and examined men, women and children for symptoms. They were then taken off to isolated hospitals if there were any signs of concern.
One of the symptoms was the swelling of the glands in the groin. Many people were thus outraged by these checks, and riots broke out in the city after forced examinations. Nevinson wondered if just these incidents could have seeded the feelings of distrust and bitterness towards British rule.
In his account of the plague in Poona, published in 2020, Chinmay Tumbe observed that the government gave Walter Charles Rand, the chairman of the plague committee, sweeping powers to curtail the epidemic. Tumbe also documented forced examinations and misconduct with women, which eventually lead to Rand being assassinated by the Chapekar brothers.
Nevinson noted the ubiquitous presence of rats during his stay in the city. The British government offered a reward for catching rats, and Nevinson wrote he would find the occasional person carrying them in cages to official rat-collectors, who eventually paid out for 25,000 of the rodents. Nevinson also visited the camps the government had set up for plague patients near the Poona railway station, and observed the caste dynamics there. Some of the Brahmins would get their food sent to them from outside – akin to the privileges that first-class misdemeanants in British prisons had. Nevinson then attempted to correlate the resistance to and recovery from plague with the patients’ caste-based food habits.
As part of its response, the government started pouring thousands of litres of disinfectants down ditches, drains and the streets. The plague spread in spite of this. A health officer drained an entire pond behind the Deccan club in Poona and turned it into a malarial marsh. Nevinson wrote that the while the Indian population was very particular about cleaning and washing, their impeccable habits did not help. Learning from its mistakes from the early years of the plague, the government of 1907 did not segregate people anymore but organised health camps, isolated patients and inoculated the population. And they eventually realised that evacuation and disinfection were not reliable either, leaving only inoculation.
In this regard, the memory of the Mulkowal incident of 1902, when 19 people inoculated with a prophylactic substance developed by Waldemar Haffkine died of tetanus, was still fresh in the people’s minds. The British government had to counter the resulting mistrust of vaccines, fanned also by rumours that inoculation led to the spread of disease instead of its containment. There was also a cultural taboo against vaccines as they were perceived to be a western intervention.
According to Nevinson, there was similar mistrust of inoculation in England as well at the time. The government paid six pence per person to get inoculated; the money was to manage the brief illness that followed the jab. And to keep the same people from collecting more than one share of the reward, government officials maintained fingerprint records.
The government also set up four free inoculation centres in Poona. One of them was in the middle of a central market, so that the entire ritual of a person getting inoculated played out in front of a crowd, and could encourage others to join as well.
Nevinson’s account of the plague is remarkable for his sharp critique of the British state. He laid its complete cluelessness vis-à-vis dealing with the plague bare, and criticised the draconian measures it installed to beat the disease. In his telling, the government’s attempts were like an elephant sitting on orphaned eggs to hatch them. His empathetic voice manages to steer clear of the colonial gaze through most of his account.
This said, his insightful stories covered only the British government’s efforts to counter the plague. We ourselves must not lose sight of people like Savitribai Phule and her adopted son Yashwantrao, who were attending to the plague’s victims and both of whom eventually succumbed to it themselves.
Much like its colonial counterpart, our present government has also failed us miserably, on all counts, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. And much like Savitribai Phule and Yashwantrao, India’s civil society has risen to the occasion and has mounted many efforts to help each other.
Sasi Kiran teaches at Flame University, Pune.