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DEATH AND THE MODERN EMPIRE: THE 1918–19 INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC IN INDIA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2019

David Arnold
David Arnold*
Affiliation:
AT STRATHCLYDE UNIVERSITY
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Abstract

In India the 1918–19 influenza pandemic cost at least twelve million lives, more than in any other country; it caused widespread suffering and disrupted the economy and infrastructure. Yet, despite this, and in contrast to the growing literature on recovering the ‘forgotten’ pandemic in other countries, remarkably little was recorded about the epidemic in India at the time or has appeared in the subsequent historiography. An absence of visual evidence is indicative of a more general paucity of contemporary material and first-hand testimony. In seeking to explain this absence, it is argued that, while India was exposed to influenza as a global event and to the effects of its involvement in the Great War, the influenza episode needs to be more fully understood in terms of local conditions. The impact of the disease was overshadowed by the prior encounter with bubonic plague, by military recruitment and the war, and by food shortages and price rises that pushed India to the brink of famine. Subsumed within a dominant narrative of political unrest and economic discontent, the epidemic found scant expression in official documentation, public debate and/or even private correspondence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 29 , December 2019 , pp. 181 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2019 

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Footnotes

The author wishes to thank Margot Finn and the RHS for the invitation to present this lecture and is indebted to the anonymous reviewer and those who attended the talk for their helpful comments and suggestions.

References

1 Recent epidemiological studies support a figure of between eleven and fourteen million excess deaths due to influenza: Chandra, Siddharth, Kuljanin, Goran and Wray, Jennifer, ‘Mortality from the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19: The Case of India’, Demography, 49 (2012), 857–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chandra, Siddharth and Kassens-Noor, Eva, ‘The Evolution of Pandemic Influenza: Evidence from India, 1918–19’, BMC Infectious Diseases, 14 (2014), 510–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kenneth Hill, ‘Influenza in India: Epicenter of an Epidemic’, iuss2009.princeton.edu/papers/93252.

2 Times of India (Bombay) (hereafter ToI), 24 July 1918, 6.

3 Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner of the Government of India, 1918 (Calcutta, 1920), 56–67. Studies of the epidemic include Mridula Ramanna, ‘Coping with the Influenza Pandemic: The Bombay Experience’, in The Spanish Influenza Epidemic of 1918–19: New Perspectives, ed. Howard Phillips and David Killingray (2003), 86–98; T. V. Sekher, ‘Public Health Administration in Princely Mysore: Tackling the Influenza Pandemic of 1918’, in India's Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism, ed. Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati (2007), 194–211. The best demographic study remains Mills, I. D., ‘The 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic: The Indian Experience’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 23 (1986), 1–40CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

4 In Bombay Presidency there were 675,222 influenza deaths in October 1918: Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for the Government of Bombay, 1918 (Bombay, 1919), 23. In Punjab 962,937 deaths were attributed to influenza between 1 October and 31 December 1918: Report of the Sanitary Administration of the Punjab, 1918 (Lahore, 1919), app. D, xi.

5 N. H. Choksy, ‘Influenza’, Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay, 1918–19 (Bombay, 1919), 79.

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7 Ibid.

8 Report of the Sanitary Administration, Punjab, 1918, app. D, xi.

9 S. P. James, ‘Australasia and Parts of Africa and Asia’, Ministry of Health, Report on the Pandemic of Influenza, 1918–19 (1920), 383.

10 From 3,964 registered deaths due to influenza in Bombay city in 1918, the number had fallen to 1,605 in 1920 and 118 in 1924. Deaths from respiratory diseases remained higher for longer. Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay, 1924–25 (Bombay, 1925), 1.

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12 Such images are available online from the Wellcome Collection, London.

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54 Herriot, ‘Influenza Pandemic’, 4.

55 Leigh, Punjab, 11.

56 Herriot, ‘Influenza Pandemic’, 6.

57 Ibid., 8–11, 50.

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64 In the Central Provinces alone 325 forestry workers died: ‘Central Provinces Forest Administration Report, 1918–19’, Indian Forester, 47 (1921), 36.

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70 Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner, Bombay, 1918–19, 39–40; Annual Report on the Municipal Administration, Calcutta, 1918–19, 81–9; Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner, Madras, 1918 (Madras, 1919), 8–9.

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77 ToI, 18 September 1918, 5.

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