The Bombay plague epidemic: Colonial governance and Indian responses

When the plague hit colonial Bombay in 1896, the city had already gained a global reputation as the busiest port of British India.Footnote ⁸ Therefore, the rapid transmission of the disease and the alarming mortality rates from Bombay attracted wide global censure. For fear of facing trade bans, the government was eager to frame plague as an endemic disease that originated from the city’s filthy quarters of the poorer Indians.Footnote ⁹ Consequently, the government organised massive cleaning campaigns to whitewash the streets, buildings, and drains with carbolic acid, often evacuating its inhabitants without their consent. Additionally, the enactment of the Epidemics Act in February 1897 gave the governmental plague officials unrestricted power to detain and segregate plague suspects, and to destroy their houses and properties suspected of harbouring the disease-causing germs. Public physical searches were conducted on the passengers travelling by rail, road, and sea, and those suspected of being infected were forcibly hospitalised.Footnote ¹⁰ Finally, reinforcing Western medicine and anti-plague vaccination as the sole means of surviving the plague, the government denigrated and denounced the indigenous practitioners of traditional medicine and faith healing.Footnote ¹¹

The execution of the government’s interventionist anti-plague measures, argues David Arnold, not only exposed the bodies of the residents of Bombay to the ‘gaze’ of Western medicine but also to its physical touch – an intrusion of the greatest concern to a society wherein touch connoted possession or pollution.Footnote ¹² Therefore, the intrusive plague policies that ‘assaulted’ their bodies sparked public resentment against the colonial government.Footnote ¹³ Fearing the governmental measures, the poorer inhabitants fled the city in large numbers. Those who stayed back either hid the sick or the dead to evade the search parties.Footnote ¹⁴ Besides such attempts to escape the measures, they staged violent riots and protests against the forcible removal of the sick from homes and the violation of women’s honour in the name of plague searches, both in Bombay and other plague-afflicted parts of the Presidency, like Baroda, Nasik, Poona, and Karachi.Footnote ¹⁵ The public’s fury ultimately led to the assassination of the Poona Plague Commissioner, W. C. Rand, who was infamous for his notorious plague measures.Footnote ¹⁶

The governmental plague policies underwent a shift from direct interventionism to strategic co-option following Rand’s assassination in 1897. Enlisting selected local elites for the popularisation and implementation of plague measures among the masses, the government advanced sanitary practices and medical procedures, like Prof. Waldemar Haffkine’s anti-plague vaccination, through them.Footnote ¹⁷ Additionally, the urban elites contributed significantly to building the city’s medical infrastructure and facilities. When the plague broke out in 1896, there was only one hospital, the Municipal Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Arthur Road (or the Arthur Road Hospital), for the accommodation of plague cases in the city.Footnote ¹⁸ A separate hospital, the St. George’s hospital, was exclusively maintained to treat Europeans who contracted the plague.Footnote ¹⁹ It was not until December 1896 that the government began acquiring more buildings to be converted into plague hospitals for the Indian residents of the city.Footnote ²⁰ Additionally, to address the public’s objection to the disregard of their caste rules in general plague hospitals, the Plague Commissioner, William Gatacre, exhorted various caste and religious communities to erect new hospitals for treating members of their communities.Footnote ²¹ Consequently, twenty-nine such hospitals, funded and maintained by prominent religious communities, were built, of which ten were for the Muslims, one for the Parsis, one for the Jews, and seventeen for the Hindus.Footnote ²²

Despite the robust body of scholarship on the Bombay plague, aside from a few attempts to portray women’s role in the plague work, much of the existing research portrays the epidemic landscape as a hypermasculine domain, primarily controlled and managed by men.Footnote ²³ Two scholars who have attempted to recover the female voices of the time are Ian J. Catanach (2007) and David Arnold (2023). By bringing together the dissenting voices of the British doctor Edith Pechey, of an Indian social reformer, Pandita Ramabai, and of numerous women who nudged their men to protest against the government’s interventionist plague measures, Ian Catanach highlights the women’s labours in the plague years.Footnote ²⁴ Two decades later, David Arnold made a similar attempt to resurrect female presence in plague-stricken Bombay by unveiling the lives and experiences of three British doctors, Alice Corthorn, Margaret Christine, and Marion Hunter, who worked in the plague hospitals in Bombay and its outskirts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Being a gender minority in a largely male-driven medical workforce, these women were discriminated against in their workspaces, and their careers in Bombay were short-lived.Footnote ²⁵

Besides reviving these female voices, Arnold’s essay is of particular significance to this paper, for it initiates a brief discussion on the presence of Western nurses tending to the afflicted populace of Bombay. Examining the official correspondence of British doctors and plague officials, Arnold notes that the British men in Bombay were divided in their opinions about the importation of Western nurses from England. While some like Dr Lloyd Jones lauded their work in the plague hospitals, many other British medical officers, he notes, considered these nurses as mere aesthetic projections of the empire, whose ‘presences were glorious, but it was not nursing’.Footnote ²⁶ Given their lack of experience living in a colony and their ignorance of the local languages, these nurses, they opined, could offer no significant contributions to the medical work in plague-run Bombay. Furthermore, Arnold highlights the racial bias inherent in Western nurses against the Indian nurses, popularly known as the ward ayahs, who were only deemed good enough to carry out menial chores in the wards, like cleaning after the patients or changing their bedpans. The British colonial nursing in Bombay, Arnold notes, thus needed an ‘underclass of the native ward ayahs’ for its day-to-day functioning.Footnote ²⁷ Although Arnold’s work offers an entry point into discussing non-military nursing during the Bombay plague years, given the governmental nature of his sources, it fails to record the Western nurses’ interactions with the populace. Their experiences of kinship with the colonised and their discontentment towards the empire go unnoticed. This paper attempts to nuance the relationship between the colonial nurse, the population she tended to, and the empire she served by studying their representation in two different genres – the popular periodical publications of the time and the private letter correspondences of a nurse who worked in Bombay.

Colonial nursing in British India

Nursing in colonial India had a rather fragmented beginning in the nineteenth century. The colonial state, argues Madelaine Healey, readily and persistently tolerated an underdeveloped nursing system, engaging only minimally with the concerns of the nurses in India until the late 1930s.Footnote ²⁸ Hence, most of the primary initiatives for the growth and evolution of the profession were driven by dedicated individuals, social organisations, philanthropic efforts, and missionary work. Early attempts to bring medical aid and nursing services to India focused on catering to the European community. In the first half of the nineteenth century, British women in India provided nursing care and midwifery services to British communities throughout the subcontinent.Footnote ²⁹ Some of these women also extended their medical aid to the ailing Indians, especially towards the Indian women. Referring to themselves as ‘doctresses’ or ‘lady doctors’, these women engaged in amateur medical practice amongst the colonised, equipped with medical guides, kits, tinctures, and tools that they had brought from England to sustain themselves in the tropics.Footnote ³⁰

A renewed interest in colonial nursing in India was sparked by the Indian Rebellion of 1857, when the casualties of the event exposed the lack of adequate medical aid and good nursing for the British in India.Footnote ³¹ Notable efforts from British women, like Lady Canning, the wife of Governor-General Charles John Canning, and Sophia Cotton, the wife of Bishop George Cotton of Calcutta, alongside other leading British women, led to the founding of the Calcutta Hospital Nurses Institution in 1859.Footnote ³² It was a private charity that provided nurses for the European wards of the Medical College Hospital and the Presidency General Hospital, in addition to supplying private nursing services for the elite Europeans of the Presidency for a fee.Footnote ³³ In 1863, Florence Nightingale, through the Report of the Royal Sanitary Commission of Bengal, suggested that trained nurses be recruited from England to care for the wounded soldiers in India. It was only in 1888, with the arrival of ten trained nurses in Bombay, that the Indian Nursing Service, or the INS, was officially launched.Footnote ³⁴ These nurses were under the supervision of Nurse Catherine Grace Loch, who later protested against their biased treatment by the Army officers and male doctors in the Indian military hospitals.Footnote ³⁵ Besides these efforts at war nursing, scattered attempts were made by motivated individuals to ensure nursing care for the Europeans in India. A few such individual initiatives were the Up-Country Nursing Association, founded in 1892 to provide private nursing care for European residents on a subscription basis, the Lady Ampthill Nursing Institute, founded in 1904 in Madras, and the Lady Minto Nursing Association, established in 1906.Footnote ³⁶ Finally, in an attempt to lay down a common code of conduct for the vocation and to set rules for uniform training of all nurses in British India, the Trained Nurses Association of India (TNAI) was established in 1908.Footnote ³⁷

Contrary to such active measures to meet the nursing needs of the resident Europeans, nursing amongst the colonised was perceived as an afterthought, as a supplement to recruiting female doctors to India. Women missionaries to India in the nineteenth century were the first to recognise the importance of providing medical aid to the Indians, especially to Indian women. Limited by their purdah observances, the zenanas restricted the entry of male doctors, and therefore, Indian women were denied skilled medical aid. Armed with religion and medicine, women missionaries secured entry into the previously inaccessible private spheres of Indian elite women, the zenanas.Footnote ³⁸ Through their mission reports and personal writings, they roused public feeling towards the neglected conditions of the sick women and children, thus leading to the Zenana mission work in different parts of India.Footnote ³⁹ In 1867, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) established the first female medical mission in India, the Delhi Female Medical Mission. They managed and catered to a large population of women through their rudimentary dispensary and nursing home in Delhi.Footnote ⁴⁰ Female medical missionaries with a basic training in Western medicine and practice were considered suitable emissaries who could advance the mission’s larger agenda of religious conversion among the colonised, alongside offering medical aid. In fact, the mission hospitals they managed distributed Christian tracts and Bibles to the visiting women patients, and routinely incorporated scripture readings into their medical practice, thereby ensuring that a dose of religion was administered much before treatment commenced.Footnote ⁴¹

The first fully qualified female medical mission doctor to arrive in India was Dr Clara Swain, who was recruited to work in India by the American Methodist Episcopal Church in 1869.Footnote ⁴² In 1880, Fanny Butler, one of the earliest female graduates of the London Medical School, was the first medically qualified British woman missionary to serve in India under the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society.Footnote ⁴³ Additionally, Anglo-American Christian missions, the London Missionary Society, the Christian Missionary Society, American Baptist, and Lutheran missions also recruited fully trained, professional nurses from the West to India.Footnote ⁴⁴ The arrival of qualified medical women heralded the rise of hospitals as the primary space of medical mission activity, in the aftermath of which a need was felt for training more women in nursing services.Footnote ⁴⁵ In addition to providing qualified doctors, the missions set up nursing schools in India, focusing on training a local corps of nurses. In 1882, the Sisters of the Community of St. John the Baptist of Clewer trained local nurses and supervised the staff at Eden Hospital in Calcutta.Footnote ⁴⁶ Many women missionaries associated with Anglo-American Christian missions, the American Arcot Mission, the Christian Medical Association of India, etc., are known to have directed the training of Indian nurses in different parts of India throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁴⁷

Apart from women missionaries, many British women and wives of British employees in India were instrumental in conceiving of and executing the recruitment and training of Indian women in medicine. The most notable of them was Lady Dufferin, who, at the bidding of Queen Victoria, constituted the National Association for Supplying Medical Aid to the Women of India in 1885 to support the education and training of Indian nurses. The association also instituted the Countess of Dufferin Fund to cater to the medical education of Indian women and establish hospitals and dispensaries for their care.Footnote ⁴⁸ Furthermore, a crucial part of nineteenth-century efforts to develop colonial nursing was funded through philanthropy. As early as 1871, Lord Napier of the Madras Presidency, with the help of Florence Nightingale, encouraged nursing and trained nurse probationers in the Presidency.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the Bombay Presidency, Indian nurses were trained in the private Cama Hospital, founded by Pestonjee Hormusji Cama, under the care of Miss Edith Atkinson, who had worked as the lady superintendent of the hospital since 1886.Footnote ⁵⁰ Additionally, the Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy Hospital in Bombay started training nurse probationers from 1891.Footnote ⁵¹ An Indian woman reformer from Bombay, Ramabai Ranade, also trained nursing candidates in her home, Seva Sadan, as a means for the socially marginalised women to earn a livelihood.Footnote ⁵²

Despite these efforts, the nursing profession did not appeal to the Indian women of the middle or the upper classes. Commonly perceived as ‘polluting work’, which involved interacting with strangers and their bodies, the profession defied all caste and ritual pollution rules of the Indian society.Footnote ⁵³ Moreover, until the 1930s, the majority of Indian candidates for nursing were widows, orphans, or destitute converts, who saw the profession as a foothold to social acceptance. The monopolisation of the profession by such lower-class, minority groups further tarnished its social image.Footnote ⁵⁴ Additionally, the association of Western nursing with Christianity and its unfolding in India through missionary groups further alienated the Hindu communities from taking up the vocation.Footnote ⁵⁵ Therefore, the extant community of nurses in India was largely comprised of Anglo-Indian or Eurasian women, who, owing to their mixed-race identities, were regarded by both the Indian and European communities as ‘loose’ women.Footnote ⁵⁶ Consequently, there was a heightened and persistent moral suspicion attached to the profession, which deterred Indian girls from ‘good families’ from taking up the training. Finally, with the emerging opportunities for Indian women to obtain medical education from schools in India and abroad, the most ambitious of them preferred to train as doctors rather than nurses.Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, although many organisations and individuals were focused on training Indian nurses and elevating the social status of the profession, it was not the most sought-after career path amongst women of high standing in society.

Notwithstanding these multi-nodal attempts at advancing the nursing profession in India, a consolidated, government-sanctioned attempt to bring Western nurses to serve the afflicted residents of colonial India appears to have been made only during the Bombay plague outbreak of the late nineteenth century. The enormity of the epidemic and severe criticisms about the government’s mismanagement of the disease in Bombay led to the setting up of governmental plague hospitals and medical camps throughout the Presidency. Although many medical missions and nuns volunteered at these hospitals, a fact we learn from the Plague Photograph Album, a strong need was felt for trained Western nurses to run these hospitals and manage the staff.Footnote ⁵⁸ Hence, the plague years mark a crucial juncture in the history of colonial nursing in India, for, unlike the case of war nursing, wherein the European nurses tended to their countrymen wounded and maimed by the war, the plague-ravaged Bombay presented an uncommon medical scenario – of having to care for the sick, racial ‘Other’. Furthermore, although there may be overlaps in the experiences of war nurses who served the British soldiers and the civilian nurses who served the populace during the plague, the latter’s history merits a standalone inquiry. They were, I argue, multiply positioned – empowered as well as discriminated against – within the peculiar social and political environments they inhabited, further aggravated by the epidemic.

Representations of Western nurses in Victorian periodicals: A rhetoric of imperial benevolence

The Bombay plague outbreak was one of the first extensively documented medical crises in British India. The colonial archive comprised administrative reports, letters, photographs, and scientific literature on the governmental plague work in Bombay, but their circulation was limited to the bureaucratic circles. Contrarily, the popular press and periodicals relayed news of the riots and racial conflicts between the government and the Indians to the English reading public in the Metropole. Studying the synergistic relationship between the British press and the Empire in the nineteenth century, Julie Codell argues that the press wrote what may be called ‘imperial co-histories’ wherein Britain and its colonies textually constituted their identities.Footnote ⁵⁹ Although the British newspapers reported news on the plague, I posit that the contemporary Victorian periodicals offered a relatively more accessible platform for open discussions and debates on the governmental plague policies in Bombay. This was made possible by the peculiar mixed nature of the periodicals, which combined verbal text and images, and allowed for heterogeneity of form and authorial voices.Footnote ⁶⁰

The Bombay plague was a recurring topic across a range of narrative forms in contemporary periodicals, like the Pall Mall, the Good Words, the Longman’s, The Saturday Review, the Temple Bar, The Review of Reviews, and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, to name a few. They carried political writings, personal interviews, and commentary lauding the tough and selfless work of British officers and soldiers in Bombay. Furthermore, they featured descriptive eyewitness accounts of the horrors of the affliction, and fiction set in plague-stricken Bombay, repeatedly portraying the British as altruistic saviours of the colonised. Together, these periodical articulations of the plague portrayed the British government in Bombay as benevolent rulers of the land, thereby attempting to mitigate the English public’s suspicions over the brewing discontent against British plague policies in Bombay. It is against this background of the role of Victorian periodicals in mediating the discourse on the Bombay plague in the Metropole that I situate this inquiry into the periodical presentations of the Western nurse.

Before examining the periodicals, it may be worth noting that the figure of a nurse had had a literary precedence in nineteenth-century England. The Victorian definition of a nurse evolved from its initial perceptions of a kind, laywoman-turned-care-giver of the 1820s to a well-trained, professional, modern, Anglo-American nurse in the 1850s, following the Crimean War. This model of the modern nurse, exemplified by Florence Nightingale, soon found a seminal place in Victorian literature and society.Footnote ⁶¹ The image of the ‘heroic nurses’ she championed, as powerful bearers of social reform and redemption in Victorian society, was a sought-after trope among prominent British novelists.Footnote ⁶² Victorian England was troubled by the possible subversion of social and gender roles that the image of the self-independent heroic nurse could bring about.Footnote ⁶³ Furthermore, portraying the colonial nurses’ engagements with the colonised people, these novels also reflected the racial tensions inherent in British imperialism.Footnote ⁶⁴ Interestingly, even though these novels preceded the Bombay plague, the periodical representations of the Western nurse in Bombay reflected neither the aspects of the heroic, modern nurse nor that of the stern, racially biased coloniser. Contrarily, examining selected periodical articles of the time, we see the colonial nurses emerge as shallow characters, persistently echoing the benevolence of the imperial project.

Of the periodical articles that discussed the Bombay plague, I examine two accounts specifically focusing on the Western nurse in the plague hospitals. The first article was published in the Good Words periodical in December 1899 under the signature M.A.M. Titled ‘Plague-Stricken Bombay: A Peep into the Plague Hospitals of the City’, it is an eyewitness account of a visit to the city’s plague hospitals.Footnote ⁶⁵ The narrator, notably a male witness, declares his narrative purpose as ‘to tell how human sympathy is endeavouring to relieve the sufferers, and to give some impression by a brief sketch of a visit to the hospitals of what is being done and suffered’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Nevertheless, despite being an eyewitness record, the author does not provide any details about the hospital, its location, or the names of the nurses he interviews. Thus, the article presents a certain generic description that may fit any plague hospital and any British nurse working in Bombay during the epidemic. Furthermore, going astray from the professed aim of capturing the scenes of the plague hospital, the account chiefly engages in a panegyric on the sacrificial nature of the Western nurses who served the Indians in the plague hospitals. Describing them as those who had been sent ‘out from home on plague duty’, the narrative affords a disproportionate significance to recording the dire circumstances of the nurses’ plight in Bombay over the dismal state of the masses.Footnote ⁶⁷

The perspective of the witness-narrator in the article is shaped by a determining male gaze, reflecting the stance of a paternal imperialist. Explaining the notion of male gaze, Laura Mulvey notes that

Borrowing Mulvey’s notions, I explore how the male gaze in the article appropriates the female Western nurse for articulating the imperialist agenda. The narrator’s depiction of the Western nurses seldom deviates from their conventional representations as skilled medical agents and altruistic caregivers. This controlled presentation may be understood in the context of a crisis of female sexuality in nineteenth-century colonial nursing. Imperial nursing enterprises in several British colonies faced censure over their failure to control the sexuality of the nurse recruits. Fearful that these nurses may engage in inappropriate relations with the men in the colonies and bring shame to the Empire, controlled surveillance was practised through a code of conduct for their dressing and behaviour in the colonies.Footnote ⁶⁹ A similar sense of control emanates from the portrayal of nurses as de-sexualised beings in this eyewitness account of them. The male narrator upholds their professional abilities as he writes, ‘they were full of knowledge about the diseases and the patients. When showing each patient, the nurses described their illnesses, physical conditions, and recovery statuses’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Further alluding to their emotional strain from encountering numerous deaths around them, the narrator quotes one of the nurses as saying, ‘Sometimes we think a patient is recovering and we leave him for five minutes. On our return, we find him dead’.Footnote ⁷¹ Additionally, by recounting their hardships during the monsoon months, working through the heavy rains due to the poor infrastructure of the hospitals, the narrator constructs them as mirror images of the ‘kind and selfless empire’ in Bombay.Footnote ⁷² Thus, oscillating between being adept caregivers and exemplars of altruism, the narrator-witness confines the depiction of the nurses within the boundaries of empathy and sacrificial femininity.

Moreover, showcasing the nurses’ interactions with Indian patients, the narrator fashions a seemingly impartial presentation of the races in the plague-run colony – as peacefully coexisting and mutually enabling groups. Consider the presentation of the convalescent wards, which the author describes as ‘full of good cheer, gratitude and self-satisfaction’. He adds how the convalescents who leave the hospital are ‘full of praise for the kind treatment’ they received in the hospital. ‘They are truly grateful for the unselfish care which has been bestowed upon them’. Quoting the nurses’ opinions on the outcome of their work, he adds, ‘Here in the hospital, they have comfortable cots, a well-ventilated ward, and kindly English nurses to tend them, and they are satisfied’.Footnote ⁷³ Here, the article impresses upon the English reader that the poor and desperate Indians need an English nurse to help them survive the epidemic. Underscoring this claim, he adds how nothing could surpass the ‘patience of the suffering people and the devotion to sacred duty’ of the ‘noble and self-denying nurses’ who minister to them. Thus, the article juxtaposes the ‘intensest suffering’ of the patients and the ‘evident signs of kindly aid’ that the author witnessed in the ‘unceasing care’ of the nurses in the plague wards.Footnote ⁷⁴ Presented thus, the male gaze projects the imperial desire for prolonged rule through the nurses’ work in Bombay. Their demeanour and approaches to the populace are offered as justification for the British presence in Bombay. Further, overvaluing these nurses as magnanimous, kind, and efficient caregivers, the narrative steers towards concretising the notion of a ‘benevolent’ empire.

The portrayal of the nurses as selfless caregivers, I suggest, stems from the imaginative possibilities offered by the relative absence of British nurses from the news and official plague records. Although there are visual references to the nurses’ duties amidst the sick in plague hospitals in the Plague Photograph Album compiled by the British plague officials, given the restricted circulation of these photographs, the English reading public could not have beheld a collective visual representation of the British nurse in Bombay. It may thus be surmised that the limited visibility of the British nurse and ignorance about the nature of her interactions with the residents of Bombay provided a plain canvas from which the periodical writers could create and mould the character of the Western nurse in Bombay. Therefore, it is not surprising that these articles used her as the rhetorical subject and the ideological ground on which the burden of justifying the imperial work in epidemic-ridden Bombay was placed. Notably, the issues faced by these women nurses in their workspaces and their interactions with their male colleagues, which we see emerge through their self-narrations, do not find an expression in this periodical account.

A second periodical plague article that showcases the life and work of a Western nurse in Bombay is titled ‘Fighting the Pestilence: A Nurse’s Experiences in India’. Published in the periodical The Leisure Hour in August 1899, it is a first-person account of a nurse who was recruited from England to serve the plague-afflicted populace in the Bombay Presidency.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although the article is authored by A. V. Stewart, whether or not it is the real name of the nurse-narrator is debatable. Therefore, I propose to read this periodical article as a fictionalised, semi-autobiographical narrative. We learn from the account that the nurse-narrator was a professionally trained nurse, who had previously worked at a London hospital. In Bombay, she was placed in charge of the government plague hospital in Surat, a city in Bombay Presidency, alongside another nurse, whom she refers to as Sister A. Though religious nuns, popularly addressed as sisters, often volunteered to do care work in Indian hospitals in the nineteenth century, the companion nurse, Sister A, is not one such missionary nurse. This we may ascertain from a reference to her as a ‘London Sister’ who journeyed with the narrator, as part of the delegation sent by the India Office from England.Footnote ⁷⁶ Furthermore, the narrator uses the term ‘sisters’ as a collective noun to refer to a group of nurses in the article. We see this when she recounts the group’s decision on anti-plague vaccination, noting that ‘four of the sisters decided for and six against’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Thus, the kinship term ‘sister’ in this context could have implied a shared sense of duty, ‘a cross-cultural continuity of care and commonality of purpose’.Footnote ⁷⁸

The article begins with the phrase ‘Shiva, the destroyer has come!’, reiterating the Indian belief that the fury of the Hindu God Shiva has caused the onset of the plague.Footnote ⁷⁹ The nurse’s avowal of the medico-religious nexus to define the plague is significant, for it helps obscure the longstanding critique in the Metropole of the British government’s disregard for the populace’s traditional medical beliefs that diseases were curses sent down by their displeased deities.Footnote ⁸⁰ Therefore, with the invocation of the local deity, the nurse sets herself as an ‘empathetic’ narrator, willing to understand the dynamics of the disease from an Indian perspective. Towards this, the nurse-narrator adopts the rhetorical style of sentimental Victorian travel narratives, wherein her narrative authority lies in the authenticity of somebody’s (her or the populace she writes about) felt experience.Footnote ⁸¹ Further, following the mode of sentimentality, her portrayal of the colonised does not take the form of vicious savages, but she casts them within a new sentimental stereotype as ‘benign, ingenuous, child-like victims’, dependent on the coloniser.Footnote ⁸² Moreover, women travel writers, it is argued, occupied a split position as travel narrators, owing to their racial superiority in the colony and gender inferiority as female colonisers. Their ambivalent position allowed them greater access and insights into those aspects of Indian lives that were off limits for the British men in India.Footnote ⁸³ Although not a traveller, the nurse-narrator, too, had privileged access to the cultural and religious belief systems of the people, owing to her profession. Wielding the cure of medicine during an epidemic, the nurse-narrator secures the trust of the populace she brings relief to. The narrative, thus, features a seamless weaving together of a story of medical salvation with objective descriptions about the land and its culture.

The nurse-narrator claims credibility as a nonpartisan witness through descriptions of the land and the people, evoking the travel narrative paradigm. For instance, she begins her account with a geographical description of Surat’s location in Western India.Footnote ⁸⁴ Further along, describing her first impressions of India, she writes:

Resembling an ‘arrival scene’ in a traveller’s account, which sets the relationship of the colonial traveller to the land, the nurse-narrator’s description sets the tone for her ‘production of an “Other” who negates her “Self”, as completely other’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Although appreciative of the ‘beauty’ of the land and the ‘gorgeous’, ‘brilliant’, and ‘picturesque’ scenes she witnessed, she swiftly exoticises both the land and its people, marking their ‘mystery’ as different from her race.

The narrator maintains this racial difference throughout the account, for it sustains the imperial enterprise of the colonial ‘Self’ improving the inferior ‘Other’. Nurturing, caring, and emotionally invested in the miserable conditions of the colonised, the nurse-narrator, I note, appears to be what Barbara Ramusack calls a maternal imperialist.Footnote ⁸⁷ Believing that they belong to a superior civilisation, which imbues them with the ‘duty’ to bring ‘civilisation’ to the savage parts of the world, the maternal imperialists cast themselves as ‘mothers’ to their ‘unruly’ children of the colonies. However, the problem with this fictive kinship, argues Ramusack, is that it is founded on an unequal racial relationship – mothers are always European while the Indians continue to be infantilised as their dependent wards.Footnote ⁸⁸ A similar sense of inherent superiority and maternal affection runs through the nurse-narrator’s account of her experiences in Bombay and interactions with the Indians. Moreover, her maternal imperialist stance is powerfully conveyed through the mode of self-narration, which lends the account an apparent tone of candour, as opposed to the third-person, eyewitness’s narration in the previous periodical article.

Portraying themselves (Sister A and herself) as people who left behind the comforts of their home country to serve the needy, the author elevates the profession of nursing as a selfless devotion. Extrapolating this stance, she interweaves discipline and routine alongside empathy and compassion to define the work of a nurse. Summing up her day’s work, she writes:

The narrator further elaborates the mental and emotional exertion of their work, from having to encounter countless deaths in the wards every day; ‘It was literally work among the dead and dying. The entrances and passages were often full of patients whose beds there was no room in the wards till the dead had been carried out’.Footnote ⁹⁰ She further recollects the case of a little boy orphaned by the plague: ‘It was a strange and pathetic sight to see this tiny survivor of a whole family, sitting on the floor amidst the dead, who had doubtless loved him so dearly, with childish ignorance clamouring for the bowl of milk which Tukeram, my old ward-boy, was feeding him’.Footnote ⁹¹ Noting how she cared for the boy, bathed, clothed him, and found him a good family to live with, she remarks how the Indians anticipated that she would adopt the little boy. All her declarations of selfless devotion and duty described above carry an implicit assertion of her colonial authority, as she reiterates that it was her timely intervention in their miserable lives that offered them salvation.

The nurse-narrator’s focalisation of a sentimental traveller is, at times, supplanted by an ethnographic gaze. Combining elaborate descriptions of the cultural practices of the populace with visual illustrations, her ethnographic persona is underscored by her professed attempts to comprehend the cultural and religious sentiments of the people she cared for. Elaborating on a curious Indian custom of keeping a lamp lit on the floor and constantly burning beside a dying person as his last breath leaves his body, she remarks:

Further, describing the preparations for cremation, she writes,

These detailed descriptions were accompanied by a visual record of the death rites and cremation pyres (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1.

Depiction of cremation, with the body burning on a pyre and the mourners seated around it. From A.V. Stewart. ‘Fighting the Pestilence: A Nurse’s Experiences in India’. The Leisure Hour, August 1899 (Source: ProQuest Database, accessed on 13 August 2020)

Figure 2.

An image showing a corpse being washed on the banks of the Tapti River before cremation. From A.V. Stewart. ‘Fighting the Pestilence: A Nurse’s Experiences in India’. The Leisure Hour, August 1899 (Source: ProQuest Database, accessed on 13 August 2020)

The photographs in the article are similar to the ones in the government’s Plague Photograph Album. Despite the nurse’s professed claims about her desire to ‘comprehend’ the Indian culture empathetically, the presentation of these images, I note, is not without its politics. Citing the profusion of images of corpses and cremation pyres in the Plague Photograph album and sketches of the blazing funeral pyres in illustrated newspapers of the time, David Arnold argues that these images were used to emphasise the primitivism of the Hindu cremation.Footnote ⁹⁴ These representations generated an unsettling (yet alluring) spectacle of ‘oriental’ exoticism and marked the bizarre ‘eastern’ bodily practices and ‘stranger’ funeral rites as far removed from the Victorian conventions of death and burial.Footnote ⁹⁵ Building on Arnold’s observations, it may be surmised that the images of cremation from colonial India were a curious spectacle that had an audience in the Metropole. Moreover, these images of cremation rites showcase and underscore the difference between the ‘primitive’ Indians and the people of the Metropole. The inclusion of these visuals in the nurse’s account underscores the cultural estrangement faced by the British in India, thus impressing on the minds of the English reader an image of an empire inclined to ‘know’ the Indian ways of life and death, while planning the anti-plague measures. The portrayal of these Indian customs, when viewed in the light of the criticisms against the governmental plague measures’ insensitivity towards the populace’s religious and cultural sentiments, may be read as a calculated narrative strategy to gesture towards the Empire’s humanitarianism.

Finally, digressing from her role as a medical saviour, the nurse-narrator draws on anecdotes from her workspace to imply that the Indians she tended to welcomed and valued her presence in their lives. Most of her anecdotes feature recently orphaned or abandoned children of the plague victims. One such episode she recollects is of a five-year-old boy who had accompanied his sick mother to the hospital. The boy soon turned to be her constant companion, ‘trotting up and down after me and insisting, in spare moments, on fun and frolic’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Another twelve-year-old girl, who had lost her parents and siblings, she recollects, nursed her only surviving three-year-old brother to health. Describing her departure from the hospital, she writes, ‘It was a grand day for the little heroine when she carried her brother out of the hospital, both resplendent in the gorgeous new clothes we provided for the occasion’.Footnote ⁹⁷ As may be noted in these two anecdotes, all of her interactions with the Indians end on a certain note of kindness she bestowed upon them. Implying a sense of parity and reciprocity in her engagements with the Indians, the nurse-narrator concludes her account by advocating for a mutually enabling relationship between the two races. She adds:

Though the ending may, as in the previous periodical article, give the reader a sense of a balanced portrayal, the mutual relationship she urges through her account tacitly promotes the unopposed continuance of British rule in India, so that the ‘needy and confused’ Indian may be helped and supported in critical times like the plague. Finally, by portraying the relationship between an English nurse and an Indian patient as agreeable to one another, the process of British imperialism is ‘camouflaged’ as a desirable design that benefited the governed much more than the rulers.

Although mediated through different focal points – of a male eyewitness’s gaze in the descriptive account and a maternal imperialist’s perspective in the semi-autobiographical account of the nurse-narrator – the two periodical plague accounts reveal a shared rhetoric of carefully managed presentations of the Western nurse in Bombay. Portrayed as models of unreasonable altruism, incredibly sympathetic and forgiving, and as displaying excessive maternal affection towards their patients, they are a far cry from the Victorian new heroic nurse, who is a professional woman of distinct individuality. Unlike their complex and often subversive portrayals in the novels as possible threats to the social and gender order in England, the nurses in these narratives are presented as complicit in the imperial project and as complementing the patriarchal order within the British Empire. As such, the figure of the nurse in the periodical plague narratives functions as a synecdoche for the empire, always speaking on behalf of the empire, and shielding British rule in the colonies from its critics in the Metropole.

Autobiographical nurse as an ambivalent subject

In her essay ‘A Woman’s Trek: What Difference Does Gender Make?’, Susan L. Blake explores how a woman’s narrative perspective alters the descriptions of the colonised and the imperial ideology in European travel accounts from the colonies.Footnote ⁹⁹ Comparing the travel account of a woman traveller, Mary Hall, to colonial Africa against two contemporary male travellers’ accounts from Africa, Blake contends that, ‘A woman’s point-of-view does not guarantee a reciprocal relationship with an Other, but it opens a crack in the concept of Self through which to examine the concept of “Other”’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Building on Blake’s argument that gender opens up new entry points to understand the ‘Self-Other’ dynamics in a colonial setting, I explore how the intersecting identity politics of race, class, and culture further nuance the figure of a Western nurse serving Indians in Bombay. Examining an altogether different form from the periodicals, this section analyses the personal letters of a British nurse, Hester May Dowson, who served in Bombay from 1897 to 1898.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Attending to the distinct form and expressive possibilities allowed by letter-writing, this analysis also demonstrates how colonial women’s standpoints were not only shaped by their positionalities but also by the nature of the narrative forms that they adopted to articulate their experiences.

Hester May Dowson was one of the many British nurses recruited for plague work in Bombay. Dowson and her friend, Nurse Harriet McDougall, worked in the Parel Governmental Plague Hospital from 1897 to 1898. Selected extracts from her letters from Bombay to London were posthumously compiled as Bombay During the Plague, 1897–98: Extracts from the Letters of H.M.D. Contrary to the periodicals’ defined public readership in the Metropole, Dowson’s letters were composed to her relations in London. Thus, the privacy, confidentiality, and familiarity of recipients of the epistolary medium provided Dowson an opportunity to pen her genuine thoughts about the people, the plague, and the government’s plague policies. The image of the nurse that emerges through Dowson’s letters cannot be neatly classified as either complicit with or in opposition to the British government’s plague policies. Situating her letters within discourses on nineteenth-century British women’s intimate letter writing and the rhetoric of British women’s writings from colonial India, I contend that the non-military nurse, caring for the colonised Other during a medical crisis, occupied an ambivalent position that opened up newer perspectives on colonial relations.

Writing in 1898, Nurse Dowson’s letters follow the tradition of nineteenth-century letter writing, especially by women from different parts of the empire. Women, particularly migrant women, wrote back to their families, friends, or their spouses detailing their lives, work, routine, and fears, as a way of maintaining their familial links, rehearsing or creating familiar stories, and retaining a sense of shared identity, while settling in new and distant places.Footnote ¹⁰² Examining many such letters, Monagle et al. argue that nineteenth-century women’s letters differed from those of earlier periods through the notion of intimacy they contained.Footnote ¹⁰³ In the context of women’s letter-writing, the essence of the term ‘intimacy’ lies in the confidential nature of the form made possible by the renewed notion of the ‘addressee’, which had by then acquired the meaning of being the only one (or ones) who read the contents of the letters. Assured of a confidential dialogue with the addressee, this marked a shift from the old practice of reading letters aloud to a wider, unfamiliar audience.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Resorting to informal language and expression of feelings, these letters enabled them to recast their sense of self through a new kind of frankness and self-disclosure, often impossible to incorporate into conversations.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Thus, these women writers could carve out letter writing as a ‘private’ act.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Hester Dowson’s informal style and candid tone of writing suggest that, like her contemporaries, she too shaped her epistolary persona, reassured by the intimacy and privacy afforded by the letter form.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Although the book cover does not carry publication or editorial details, it is mentioned that it was meant solely for private circulation. Similarly, being a compilation of fragments of her letters, information regarding the addressee(s), her relationship with them, the typical length and frequency of the letters, and the exact duration of the correspondence from Bombay cannot be reliably ascertained. Nevertheless, from the available sequence of letters, they seem to have been sent twice a week. Additionally, putting together occasional references to her interlocutors, her letters seem to be addressed to a familiar, collective audience of her family, and were probably read aloud to them.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Her familiarity with the addressee(s) may be understood from her use of collective referential pronouns and words of endearment when she writes, ‘Over and over again, I think it is almost worthwhile coming away to get such dear letters and sweet thoughts from you all, and to find out what a great deal we care about each other, though we are seldom much together’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Additionally, the majority of her letters note how much she missed them and longed to see them. Notably, she does not seek counsel from them or display excessive deference in her letters. Rather, her epistolary persona comes across as a confident young woman, certain of her life choices and informing her kin back home of the ingenious ways in which she managed her difficult life in a faraway land, suggesting she shared a close relationship of relative equality with them.

Dowson’s letters largely focus on adjusting to life in Bombay as a colonial nurse working amongst the Indians. Just like the nurse figures in the periodicals, she narrates the trials of her job while tending to the afflicted people. However, her sufferings and sacrifices are not the only focus of her letters. The majority of her letters detail the interpersonal relationships she formed in Bombay, including her friendship with her companion nurse, Miss McDougall, her relationships with the British community in Bombay, day-to-day interactions with her servant boy, her Goanese cook, and her rather difficult conversations with the Indian orderlies in the hospital wards. Towards the end, she writes about the death of her companion, Nurse McDougall, and we witness her battling the grief of her death as a lone migrant in a foreign space. Unlike the periodical writings, Dowson’s letters do not seem to navigate intentionally towards a particular rhetoric. In fact, the letters are laced with her opinions about the land, its people, and the British officials on plague duty, often featuring outright censure of the government’s anti-plague policies.

Dowson strongly criticises the British government’s lukewarm responses and inefficient provisions to contain the plague in Bombay. She speaks disapprovingly of the deplorable state of the plague hospitals. She confesses that owing to the lack of resources and facilities, the nurses in Bombay found ‘it most terribly harassing and depressing to be obliged for want of the necessary materials, to allow things to slide, and perhaps only do for the patients a little better than would be done in their own homes’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Given the mental agony the patients go through in these alien spaces, she opines that they may have been better off at home, spending their last days surrounded by people whom they love. Elaborating upon their mental anguish, she notes how the Indian patients in the hospitals were averse to touch – a concern, argues David Arnold, that contributed to broader resistances to Western medicine in Bombay. Dowson notes that most of them disliked being touched or fed by the British nurses. Alternatively, she notes that they would find a ward boy of the same caste as the patient, through whom food and medicines were administered. Citing these instances as obstacles that her job required her to tackle, and not as racialist judgments, she foregrounds the needless psychological trauma to which the Indians were being subjected in the hospitals, against their will.

The futility of the government’s insistence on forcible hospitalisation is further underscored in Dowson’s opinion that the doctors brought from England were new graduates who lacked the requisite expertise to treat the plague patients. Expressing her disdain for their inept work and racial prejudices against Indians they treated, she writes, ‘It sometimes makes my blood boil to hear of, and see how the personal feelings and little caste and religious prejudices of the people are despised and trodden on, especially by these young men fresh from England, who know nothing of the language or the natives’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Furthermore, describing their reckless treatments, she notes that, to the detriment of the poor patients, they prescribed the same treatment, applying ice poultices to all, irrespective of the specificity of the cases. Explaining the impracticality of such a remedy for the hot and humid climate of Bombay, she writes:

Thus, pointing out the flaws in the medical services offered to the colonised, the nurse’s letters expose the facade of Western medicine that was often upheld as a mark of imperial benevolence. Such expressions of vacuity of the medical enterprise and its imperial agents are absent in the periodical literature, whose narratives are singularly fixated on glorifying the work of the empire in colonial Bombay.

Nurse Dowson’s letters are not just documents exposing the British government’s perfunctory plague policies; rather, they also unravel the government’s discriminatory attitudes towards the female nurses in the colonies. She contrasts their living conditions with those of the male doctors from Britain, who were given better accommodation, additional allowances, and considerably higher pay in Bombay. Evaluating her position vis-à-vis the British male doctors in Bombay, she writes:

Dowson’s revelation of the gendered nature of the colonial medical realm could be read in tandem with the ongoing resentment against the hierarchical, masculine space of the nineteenth-century British medical realm. Although women doctors from England preferred to migrate to the colonies to advance their medical careers, such gendered biases continued in colonial India.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Dr Marion Hunter, who was the only female doctor to have served in the Poona plague hospital, notes that she was often discriminated against by her male colleagues for being a woman in a medical realm otherwise manned by them.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Similar experiences were revealed by the British war nurse, Catharine Grace Loch, in the memoir of her life and work in the INS (Indian Nursing Service) from 1888 to 1902. Evaluating her circumstances, Loch writes that war nurses, for lack of a rank in the Indian military medical system, were slighted by the orderlies who reported to them as well as insulted by the doctors they worked with, all because the government left all ‘women things vague and unbusinesslike’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ One hears similar echoes of the women medical professionals’ plight in Dowson’s letters.

Dowson’s tone of fearless critique of the British government was not a commonplace occurrence in nineteenth-century British women’s writings from India. Examining the vast body of journals, memoirs, letters, fiction, and sketches of the Memsahibs and women visitors to India from the nineteenth century, Sara Suleri observes that, relegated to the peripheries of colonisation, their writings were veiled behind the trope of ‘feminine picturesque’. They could write about and capture images of people and places from their peripheral vantage points, provided they ‘remained immune to the sociological conclusions of their own data’. That is, they could enter the political domain to aestheticise through the picturesque presentations but not to analyse.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Contrarily, Dowson’s letters enter and critique the political domain of the Empire, questioning the very necessity of British interventions into the Indian medical realm. Her narrative authority, I posit, was shaped by her complex subject position in colonial Bombay. Dowson was unlike the wives of British officers, women missionaries, and female travellers to India in the nineteenth century, who were, argues Ramusack, cultural missionaries and maternal imperialists. Having internalised a Eurocentric ideology, these women’s interactions with the colonised were premised on a self-imposed burden of improving the Other, by bringing hygiene, education, Christianity, and Western morality to Indian homes.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In fact, furthering Ramusack’s argument, Nancy L. Paxton notes that their professed complicity with the imperial enterprise in their writings is a direct reflection of the Victorian morality, sexual discretion, and domestic roles that tied these women to their social and class standing.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Dowson, belonging to the working class of British women in India, did not shoulder the burden of imperial motherhood as these women.

Nevertheless, Hester Dowson’s letters were not entirely free of such racial biases. We see attitudes of Eurocentrism surface when she makes generalisations about the Indian ward boys and the Bombay-trained Eurasian nurses. Writing about her trouble with the ward boys in the hospital, she says, ‘We find it all rather trying to the temper, especially when they will stop and talk and explain in an unknown language, instead of doing work which is so obviously waiting to be done’.Footnote ¹²⁰ A similar bitterness comes through her observations about the Indian nurses, whose caste she frames as a factor limiting their efficiency at work. Subscribing to the prevalent assumption that the Eurasian nurses were ‘loose women’, she observes, ‘The Bombay nurses are well-trained, but often half-caste or Eurasian, and not so capable at their work as we, nor can they keep order or make the ward boys work nearly as well’.Footnote ¹²¹

Notwithstanding her sense of racial superiority, building on Blake’s idea of the gendered nature of colonial travel writing, I argue that Dowson’s letters create a fissure in the imperial fabric. Bound by the nature of her job, she engages closely with the Indian populace and their resistance to Western medicine. Her sustained interactions with the colonised Other helped her reconfigure her imperial Self. Dowson notes in her letters that the agitated patients attacked nurses and pelted stones at them. Defending their actions, she instantly explains that the Indians perceived the nurses as the faces of the Western medical system and held them responsible for the forcible hospitalisation and administration of medicines to them. She writes, ‘… I am afraid, a good many of the natives hate us, and all connected with this plague business’.Footnote ¹²² Nevertheless, rather than being quick to judge them, putting herself in their shoes, Dowson analyses the impact of their plague measures on the miserable Indians. She writes:

As is evident in the above excerpt, the nurse’s cognisance of the unfair power that imperialism granted her and her countrymen in Bombay prompts self-reflection and introspection. Her letters are suggestive of an alternative intimacy and empathy with the colonised Other that the writings of British women who preceded her fail to achieve. This could be because of her complex subject position: racially superior to the Indians she cares for, yet subordinate within the British colonial hierarchy due to her gender and class. Unlike the Memsahibs and the mission women, she is not bound by marital or social ties. At the same time, she exercises a distinct form of power through her medical expertise and relative financial independence. Further, her ambivalent social and financial position offers her a narrative authority, unavailable to the other women who preceded her.

Situated firmly within her complex subjectivity as an imperial agent and an independent woman, Nurse Dowson’s epistolary persona narratively challenges the uneven hierarchies that construed the colonial ‘Self’ and its ‘Other’. In her letters home, comparing her life in England and India, she expresses an uncommon desire to live in India.

Acknowledging differences in the Indians’ understanding of the world, but not condescendingly, she writes:

Describing the land as more peaceful and its people as emotionally and morally superior to the English, the nurse subtly inverts the myth of superior civilisation that held up the imperial enterprise. Unlike the nurse figure in the periodicals, who tried to hide her imperial agenda behind a facade of professed parity and reciprocity between the races, Dowson’s letters subvert the implicit racial hierarchy by elevating India and Indians above the British in the Metropole, thereby opening up a space to reconfigure the ‘Self-Other’ dichotomy.