Bombay Fever/Spanish FLU: Public health and native press in Colonial Bombay,1918–19

Abstract

In view of the topicality of pandemics, this brief article discusses the responses of the vernacular press in Bombay during 1918 following the influenza pandemic of that year. With occasional inputs from English language dailies, such as The Times of India and The Hindu of the period, the aim is to understand how, as the epidemic receded, the government’s response to the epidemic was questioned and the influenza epidemic was constructed as a part of anticolonial rhetoric by the ‘native press’, closely monitored by the British.

Introduction

In early summer 1918, Bombay newspapers announced the appearance in several countries of a new disease, popularly known as ‘Spanish Influenza’. Initially, this news did not attract much attention, until it transpired that this disease, spreading from country to country, had reached India. First observed in Bombay, it was called ‘Bombay Fever’. By June 1918, Bombay had become like ‘a huge incubator of the germs of disease’, as The Times of India of 23 October 1918 observed, due to the high temperature and humidity. The failure of the Southwest monsoon that year, the dust-laden atmosphere and absence of rain so necessary for the dispersal and removal of infected material accentuated these conditions in Bombay’s crowded environment.

The influenza pandemic of 1918, claiming many millions of lives around the world, including some 12–14 million in India (Mills, 1986), posed an unprecedented public health crisis for India’s colonial government, which was overwhelmed and ‘threw up their hands in despair’ (Ramanna, 2004: 4565). Britain was fighting World War I, which meant that most British doctors were away in the war. There was a massive famine in India, and this sudden pandemic caused high mortality rates. With no effective cure in sight and an understaffed bureaucracy, not to speak of the state of the public health system, the colonial government was largely ineffective in this crisis, which affected the Bombay Presidency and many other parts of India. Rural areas suffered the worst effects of government neglect, inadequate food supply, prohibitive prices of essential medicines and lack of sanitation.

This article shows how critical press reports of the ‘native press’, monitored and collected by the colonial powers as part of colonial supervisory mechanisms, picked up the critique of government inefficiencies in handling the pandemic and led, largely in the rural areas of Bombay Presidency, to a rethinking of the modalities of imperial governance and the role of medical technologies in addressing such challenges. The historical evidence collected comes largely from weekly reports compiled in English, based on Indian newspapers published in the Bombay Presidency between July and November 1918. These sources were accessed online through South Asia Open Archives, which partners with JSTOR. These holdings of Indian newspaper reports, of c.1868–1942, are held at the India Office Library and the British Library in London.

The article first outlines the gruesome evidence of the deadly effects of the influenza pandemics of 1918 and then presents and discusses responses of the ‘native’ press to the inadequate medical infrastructure that failed to respond effectively to this medical emergency. The article concludes with a brief discussion on concurrent struggles between officially backed western biomedicine and indigenous medicinal culture in India, a battle which diverted valuable energies from the more urgent task of facing the dangerous pandemic.

Bombay Fever: The Evidence of Chaos

Massive labour migration to Bombay due to the rapid expansion of cotton-textile industry in the nineteenth century had led to overcrowding, especially among the labouring poor (Harris, 1978). There were one-room tenements (chawls), crowded insanitary, ill-ventilated slums, filthy lanes, stables and godowns, in a city whose vast proletariat was penned together and savaged by disease (Klein, 1986: 728–9). On the other hand, in stark contrast, were ‘fashionable western enclaves’ inhabited by British officials and the cosmopolitan elite (Klein, 1986: 728–9). Regarding overcrowding, Kidambi (2007: 36) quotes from a Health Officer’s report of 1864, visualising a narrow lane, 9 feet wide:

The houses on each side were of two or three floors, and the various rooms were densely peopled, and the floors of the verandah were fully occupied, while to eke out the accommodation in some of the verandahs there were charpaees or cots slung up with old matting to form a second tier of sleeping places for labourers that were employed in the railway terminus or elsewhere.

During the early twentieth century, such crowded conditions had hardly improved. Workers and labourers continued to live in ‘great rabbit warrens of houses’, as The Times of India of 9 October 1918 wrote, ‘prolific breeding holes’ for the rapid spread of the disease, which was either insect-borne or transmitted through human contact.

On 24 June 1918, The Hindu, the major English daily in Bombay, reported that 600 men had been taken away from the government dockyard on account of a curious fever. About 300–400 workers were absent from their work at the mint. Large numbers of workers in other sectors of trade and commerce fell prey to the epidemic, causing public concern. A detailed report in the Indian Medical Gazette (Phipson, 1918: 442–3), by the special assistant to the Health Officer of Bombay Municipality, noted:

The first cases among the civil population of Bombay appear to have occurred in the Indian ranks of City Police on 10th June when 7A Ward police sepoys one of which was employed at the docks were admitted to hospital suffering from a non-malarial fever; on the following day more were admitted from wards B, C and D. By the 19th, 14 cases were admitted from all over Bombay. After the Police the next group to be attacked, on the 15th of June, were the employees of Messrs. W A Graham, the well-known shipping firm. Next day, the men of Government dockyard suffered, followed on the 17th of June, by the first cases of a very large number among the employees of Bombay Port Trust, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. On the 18th, the Government Telegraph Office was affected and on the 19th the Mint…By the 20th of June, the disease had spread to Rachel Sassoon Mill…

In a later report, Phipson (1923: 512) observed:

The highest recorded incidence was at Green’s Restaurant (Bombay) where nearly 60% of its staff which consists almost entirely of Goanese cooks and waiters, were affected. The probable reasons for this very high incidence are the constant association by day and night of the staff with its clientele, and the inadequate and overcrowded living accommodation provided to them on the premises.

Phipson (1923: 512) also observed that, initially, the lowest incidence was among the Health Department male and female sweepers (halalkhores), who suffered only to the extent of about 4 per cent, although they are people of poor physique, perpetually on the verge of starvation, beset by usurers, addicted to gambling and the immoderate consumption of ‘country spirit’. The explanation, as Phipson (1918: 443) had noted, might lie in their ‘untouchability’, which would greatly diminish their liability to fall victim to ‘a disease requiring personal intercourse and contact for its propagation’. However, such deemed immunity of low-caste Hindus during the first wave failed to protect them during the second wave, one of whose striking features was the ‘excessive mortality among those very classes which escaped so lightly during the first’ (Phipson, 1923: 512).

Infected persons were crippled with fever, pain in their limbs and bones, bronchial inflammation with congestion and soreness and pain in the eyes. Nevertheless, as noted by The Hindu of 26 June 1918, ‘[t]he Municipal Health Department of Bombay say the epidemics is only an unusually general epidemic of the influenza that generally comes here about August’. Mistakenly presumed to be one of the general episodes of influenza, it was not taken seriously. However, on 28 September, the same newspaper described burning ghats for cremation perpetually surrounded by pitiable crowds, with cemeteries witnessing similar, large funeral parties. The ‘second wave’ resulted in high mortality in Bombay, with much greater impact in rural areas. In Bombay, according to Phipson (1923: 517), the mortality figures per thousand were 8.3 for Europeans, 9.0 for Parsees, 11.9 for Eurasians, 14.8 for Jews, 18.4 for Indian Christians, 18.9 for caste Hindus, 19.2 for Mohammedans, but 61.6 for low-caste Hindus. Evidently, the main sufferers among the heterogenous population of Bombay were poor low-caste Hindus and other unnamed impoverished groups, whose crowded conditions and poverty made them ready victims. Notably, a glaring omission in reporting by the ‘native press’ is silence regarding the fact that women appeared to die in greater numbers than men. The only snippet of information about this was located in a brief report on influenza in The Times of India, dated 11 December 1918:

Women died in greater numbers than men, an unusual phenomenon, and the reason the Sanitary Commissioner regards is their exposure to infection through nursing and their habitual confinement to their houses and consequent smaller access to the open air than in the case of men.

On 28 September, the Gujarati weekly Praja Mitra and Parsi called this epidemic ‘a dismal calamity’, remarking that ‘the heavy toll of daily mortality was nothing if not staggering’ (Report, 1918c: 16–7). It maintained that the public naturally turn their eyes towards the Government, which should convene a meeting to express sympathy with the suffering public, take them into confidence regarding the steps taken to cope with the evil and to consult public leaders about further measures.

Recorded history confirms that British India was possibly the hardest hit country in this extremely virulent outbreak of influenza. Bombay as a port city, with a large number of arrivals and despatch of troops and the constant influx of workers and migrants, bore the brunt. Two successive episodes of unusual magnitude of influenza struck the Bombay Presidency, marked by an interval of about 4 weeks. The first outbreak occurred in June 1918 and then appeared in the United Provinces and Punjab by July and August 1918. The second outbreak followed from about 10 September, with particular virulence in the Western, Central and Northern provinces of India and lasted till mid-November.

The Times of India of 29 July 1919 observed that in the Bombay Presidency, the worst sufferers were the five Deccan districts of Sholapur, Nasik, East Khandesh, Ahmednagar and Satara. Each of these districts lost as many people in 1 month from influenza as were killed in the city of Bombay, with undoubtedly a larger population than any of the aforesaid districts, during the whole year from other diseases. The personal physician of Mahatma Gandhi, Dinshaw Mehta, summed up the impact of influenza in a letter to The Times of India of 1 August 1919, writing that its onslaught was swift and severe. It simply stunned people: ‘It was among us and before we could gather our wits, it had done its deadly work and had disappeared’. Mehta also lamented the government’s ‘criminal neglect towards mute and meek masses which could be pleaded before the Bar of Humanity’.

Besides influenza, as the experienced executive Health Officer of Bombay Municipal Corporation, Dr John Andrew Turner, who had been in post since 1901 (Ramanna, 2004: 4560), noted in The Times of India of 23 October 1918, Bombay’s health was affected by epidemic incidences of smallpox, cholera and plague (Condon, 1900: 130; Harris, 1978: 10). These were reported to result in 20,868 deaths during the quarter ending 31 December 1918, out of which 3,963 deaths were due to influenza. The mortality from all causes was 58,388 and much higher in comparison to deaths in the previous year: ‘Never within the memory of the oldest man living in Bombay has this city witnessed so many people stricken down with fever and so many of them dying in a helpless condition’, reported the newspaper Gujarati on 6 October 1918 in anguish and alarm. It also noted that ‘reports from the mofussil show that some places like Ahmedabad, Poona and Sholapur are in a much worse condition’ (Report, 1918d: 26–7). As the disease spread rapidly all over India, the official death toll, as reported by F. Norman White was 7,089,694, although this report stated that these numbers are given ‘without any claim to accuracy’ (Sanitary Commissioner, 1920: 56–7). According to Mills (1986: 2), 12–13 million people died within 3–4 months in India as a whole. However, the British Government of India ‘did little to respond to the pandemic, even as famine-driven rise in price caused widespread malnutrition and sharp demographic differences in death rates’ (Mills, 1986: 2).

This shows that then, as now with COVID-19, socio–economic differences had major impacts, but were not addressed. The causation of this ‘mysterious fever’ in Bombay became a major issue of contestation. On 13 July 1918, Sanj Vartman observed that according to reports of the Health Officer of the Municipality of Bombay, ‘it is proved beyond doubt that this dangerous disease of influenza has been imported into Bombay from Mesopotamia (Iraq)’. The newspaper gave a detailed account of the outbreak in Bombay (Report, 1918b: 25):

Till 19 June, the health of the city was quite as usual. One army transport steamer came into our harbour at the end of May from Mesopotamia and entered the city on 4th of June. The Medical Officer of this steamer reported and drew the attention of the Medical Officer of Bombay harbour to the fact that some new disease has attacked the crew. It was the first duty of the Health Officer of the harbour, according to the Act on Infectious Diseases, to inform at once the Health Officer of the Bombay Municipality of this disease. This he failed to do and did not even inform the authorities till the 26th June.

The newspaper thus rightly argued (Report, 1918b: 25):

We do not understand why action should not be taken against this officer who showed so much of indifference to the health and happiness of a city inhabited by not less that 12 lakhs of beings. The military officers who were aware of it and who did not give timely action, should also be proceeded against. We request the Corporation to pass a resolution asking the Commissioner to bring an action against the Health Officer of the Bombay Harbour. If the Municipal authorities will sit silent this time, in future some new disease will enter the city via the sea causing serious injury to the health and happiness of the city.

Three months later, health authorities still debated the origin and symptoms of the disease among themselves, while the masses suffered, waiting for essential medicines. On 2 October 1918, Young India revisited the issue of the source of the infection (Report, 1918g: 26):

There is a widespread rumour that it has been caused by the influx of a large number of troops suffering from it. It is said—we cannot say how far it is true, that the military authorities told the Municipal health authorities that they were disembarking only three persons affected by it, but actually brought in three ship loads or nine hundred men in all. Dr Turner seems to believe that the epidemic now raging there has been caused by the actions of the military authorities. In view of the seriousness of the situation, the matter calls for urgent investigation.

Finally, on 22 October 1918, in a meeting of medical practitioners in Bombay to assess the situation, Dr Turner offered facts which conclusively proved that the disease had arrived by ships towards the end of May, and by June it had spread to Delhi, Meerut and even Shimla. In The Times of India of 23 October 1918, he observed that ‘Bombay was comparatively free from infectious disease on the 16th of June… there was no hint or suggestion that the general public were suffering from any infectious disease in any way until 22nd of June but by 24th June Bombay was in the throes of an epidemic’. Vernacular newspapers such as Bombay Samachar of 24 and 25 October and Jam-e-Jamshed, dated 26 October, supported the resolution made by the Municipal Corporation requesting the government to appoint a committee composed of scientists and medical men to enquire into the causes of the influenza epidemic and to suggest preventive measures concerning conditions prevailing in Bombay (Report, 1918g: 19–20).

Inadequate Medical Relief, Civil Society and Private Philanthropy

Questions about what the Government has done, or rather not done, were a common refrain of the Indian press, critical of inadequate responses by the state towards this unfolding crisis. Besides lack of preparedness, there was an apparent Government apathy in providing medical aid to the masses, as the second wave of the influenza, more virulent than the first, set in. The Gujarati criticised the Government’s attitude on 6 October (Report, 1918d: 26–7):

We do not know what the highly paid government experts have done to help these people in the districts. Even in a city like Bombay fever mixtures had to be made known to the public and Dr Turner has had to issue medical instructions though somewhat late. We should like to know what steps government has taken to help the suffering population in the mofussil which stands in need of readymade mixtures and medical instructions. The people at large would have been glad to be enlightened by the high medical experts in the service of Government at such a juncture…. At least the public do not know what kind of service they have rendered so far. The people in the mofussil are comparatively voiceless. But we trust government will be more prompt and generous in responding to the supreme call of the hour than they have been so far.

In his health report of Bombay for the fourth quarter ending 31 December 1918, Dr Turner was quoted in The Times of India of 13 February 1919, citing the reasons of the ‘abnormal increase’ of the influenza pneumonia which returned, leading to ‘a large influx especially of poor people in the city during the latter months of the year from districts suffering from scarcity and dearness of food’. This influx, he said, ‘must seriously press on the housing accommodation available and intensify overcrowding and the evils resulting therefrom’. A report in The Times of India of 13 February 1919, estimated a recent increase in Bombay’s population of 2–3 lakhs, with prejudicial impact on its health conditions. To counter this influx, a clearing house was opened at Chinchpoogli, South Mumbai, which had once served as a medical transit place during the Bombay Plague epidemic, ‘to detain such indigent persons and send them back to a Government workhouse or to their homes’.

Evidently, the authorities had failed to take substantial measures to cope with the situation arising from the present pestilence and famine. On 4 October 1918, Praja Mitra and Parsi raised the necessity of adequate supply of foodstuff and well-ventilated living accommodation for people. Referring to the Governor’s visits to dispensaries and cremation grounds in Bombay, the article questioned if the Governor had taken ‘the trouble of inquiring if sufficient steps were actually taken to meet the most unavoidable needs of the people, namely, the shortage of food supply and the improvement of insanitary areas’ (Report, 1918d: 27–8). The article also urged that the Government should ‘lose no time in opening grain shops for selling grain to the poorer classes at rates below the cost price, raising a loan, if need be, to meet the expense and in providing these classes with facilities for shifting to open areas from their insanitary slums’. On 5 October 1918, this article also interrogated Ibrahim Rahimtoola, an eminent politician and legislator, for the ‘apparent inaction’ and ‘delay’ in matters of sanitation and public health and shifting people to open spaces in the city (Report, 1918d: 27–8). Among various means to fight the disease, the Gujarati daily Akhbar-e-Islam suggested that the government should construct huts in open spaces, ensure better water supply for the city and make provisions for adequate food supply to the poor (Report, 1918d: 27–8).

The bilingual Gujarati and English daily Jam-e-Jamshed of 4 October 1918 also adversely commented on the apathy of members of the Bombay Municipal Corporation. This paper, begun as a weekly in 1832, became a daily newspaper in 1853 but, due to financial constraints, became a weekly again in the 1960s. It pointed out that to protect the vast population of Bombay, the arrangements made for disease-stricken patients at the Arthur Road Hospital and in the Military camp at Dadar were insufficient (Report, 1918d: 27–8). On 5 October, the paper observed that ‘it behoves the Government of Bombay to pacify the minds of the public by publishing the official statement explaining what steps the Government has already taken or contemplate to take to combat the disease which was wreaking havoc in Bombay’ (Report, 1918d: 27–8).

The Times of India of 14 October reported that by 4 October, six ‘Street or Table Dispensaries’ had been opened in Bombay city at Chakla, Memonvada, Nishanpada, Mandvi, Memonvada South and Mahim locations, supplying free milk, blankets, ‘pneumonia jackets’ and other help. These ‘pneumonia jackets’, supplied to the city’s poor suffering from fever as warm clothing, were made of thick cloth stuffed with cotton, with tags at the end instead of buttons. The Sheriff of Bombay, Devjee Canjee, inspected these street dispensaries daily. The Times of India of 5 October reported that these roadside dispensaries were provided with three stock mixtures in quart bottles labelled Mixture 1, 2 and 3, which a volunteer would dole out in small bottles on prescription by a medical practitioner. In a letter to The Times of India, 28 September 1918, Dr Turner had appealed to the public suggesting several remedies for the disease: Ammoniated quinine, eucalyptus oil, permanganate of potash or saturated aqueous solution of thymol for gargles, hydrargyria perchloride with equal parts of glycerine applied to the throat with a swab of cotton wool.

How effective these remedies were may be assessed from an earlier report of 58 typed pages on the influenza in Punjab, written by Thomas P. Herriot, M.B, Ch B (Edin), who was also a temporary Captain of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Herriot (1912: 30) noted:

For the ordinary mild type, the usual line of treatment was to administer Calomel grs. III and the salts the following morning. Diaphoretic mixtures aspirin and sodium salicylate were administered… but they cannot be ascribed any power of either cutting short of the disease or in the preventing of appearance of the symptoms of the virulent type of the disease.

Besides this, Herriot (1912: 31) observed that ‘no effect as regards shortening the disease or making it take a milder form can be ascribed to the administration of quinine. It only prevented a relapse of malaria complicating the influenza. Cinnamon was also administered but no great relief was observed’.

Influenza had by then spread to the villages, but there were no dispensaries for the rural poor. On 22 October 1918, Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Marathi newspaper, Kesari, questioned the measures undertaken by the government to combat the epidemic. He wrote (Report, 1918g: 20):

In big cities, doctors, volunteers and hospital arrangements can be had. But how can this assistance be obtained in the villages? Is it not the duty of the government to maintain travelling dispensaries in villages at such a time?….it is necessary for Government to appoint itinerant doctors immediately in places where the disease is raging violently. It is not possible to maintain doctors and supply allopathic medicines to the villages. Indigenous medicines should be used and ‘vaidyas’ should be appointed.

The next day, on 23 October 1918, The Bombay Chronicle, an English-language newspaper, published from Bombay since 1910 by Sir Pheroze Shah Mehta (1845–1915), a prominent lawyer, who later became the president of the Indian National Congress in 1890, and a member of the Bombay Legislative Council in 1893, published a statement by Sir Dinshaw Maneckji Petit (1873–1933), a prominent Parsi entrepreneur and a British baron. Sir Dinshaw commented on the insanitary condition of Bombay, which was so primitive and unsatisfactory as to make a fruitful soil for all sorts of diseases (Report, 1918g: 21): ‘The city, like all things superficially beautiful, hides within itself dreadful depths of disease, dirt and degradation. The condition of the city was such as it would not be tolerated even in a third rate city in Europe’. Sir Dinshaw suggested that the constitution of the Municipal Corporation must be radically overhauled, making it ‘a thoroughly democratic body amenable to and malleable to the general will of the population’, and ‘not dependent on the whims of the executive and the amiable platitudes of a self-satisfied plutocracy’ (Report, 1918g: 21).

It was unfortunate, as stated by Chandavarkar (1998: 211), that despite British perception of India as ‘a repository of diseases’, sanitation and sewers, town planning and public health occupied a low place in the imperial order of priorities. The colonial state was simply unwilling to incur the cost and was averse to bearing the political risks of sanitising India. The task of cleaning the sub-continent was ‘too gigantic to contemplate’ and would require ‘the British to meddle deeply and dangerously in the habits and customs of the natives’. Exposing the British policy of neglect of sanitation in India, Chandavarkar (1998: 212) further states:

Yet as they knew only too well the key to the enjoyment of their political kingdom lay not in social engineering but in salutary neglect. If the problem of public health was thus conceived in terms which could not possibly allow its resolution, the insanitary and unhygienic conditions of India’s towns and villages, however dangerous, were increasingly portrayed as innate and natural to the sub-continent.

While Ramanna (2004: 4560–6) notes reluctant government support, Polu (2012: 14) argues that ‘the colonialist view that Indians were resistant to change provided a convenient excuse for lack of political will to implement sanitary improvements’. In addition, ‘the negative attitude of the health officials toward Indian customs and lifestyle also often limited the scope of disease prevention and control’ (Polu, 2012: 14).

Evidence of British neglect even during the epidemic was affirmed by Jam-e-Jamshed of 4 July 1918 (Report, 1918a: 29–30), announcing the publication of the report of the Sanitary Commissioner’s Conference at Delhi in January 1918. This newspaper highlighted that questions regarding sanitation of Indian villages had been before the Government since 1879, but nothing had been done for the last 39 years. The newspaper refused to accept suggestions made in the Conference report that the village sanitation scheme should be applied gradually in the course of many years. The question of sanitation in villages was so important that not much delay should be made in taking effective steps (Report, 1918a: 29–30).

The Marathi bi-weekly Dnyan Prakash, dated 10 July 1918, also held the government responsible for the city’s contamination and commented on the Conference recommendations. This newspaper reported that the alternative scheme prepared by Major Norman White, Sanitary Commissioner to the Government of India, clearly proved the Government’s indifference towards the question of sanitation (Report, 1918b: 25):

It is much to be regretted that although Government themselves are responsible for the present unsatisfactory state of affairs they attribute it to the poverty and ignorance of the masses and thus seek to free themselves from any blame. But Government could have removed these causes by spreading education more widely and by curtailing expenditure on some other departments. They should spend on sanitation at least now the large amounts they have hitherto saved by neglecting it. We do not urge this expenditure during the continuance of the war but Government should no longer practise economy in this direction when normal conditions are restored.

At such a critical juncture, the Government of Bombay remained absent from its headquarters, having retreated to the hills. On 16 October 1918, Young India noted with shock that the Government simply chose to throw ‘the afflicted population in the hands of providence’ (Report, 1918f: 11). The Bombay Chronicle of 16 October 1918 sarcastically noted that ‘Brother Lazarus is not dead but only sleepeth’. It also pointed out that ‘whenever the undesirability of Government’s exodus to the hills is discussed, non-official members of the Council are overwhelmed with irrelevant counter arguments’. They remind us of the existence of the Post and Telegraph and advise that ‘though absent in body, the Government is with us always present in spirit’ (Report, 1918f: 11). Mocking the Government’s lethargy and indifference, Sunday Chronicle on 20 October pointed out that everything so far has been left to the Municipality and local philanthropic institutions. The ‘paralysing atmosphere’ in Bombay Secretariat has kept ‘the ma-baap (guardians) of the people in a state of coma’ (Report, 1918f: 11). The Sunday Chronicle also fumed at Government apathy during 1913–19, when Lord Willingdon (1866–1941) served as the Governor of Bombay. It was rumoured that Lord Willingdon or his wife had succumbed to the epidemic, which explained their absence from public engagements (Report, 1918f: 11):

The personal interest of Lord Willingdon in the distress of the sufferers is laudable enough, no doubt, but what are his worthy fat salaried lieutenants doing to alleviate the suffering of the afflicted?…This was nothing short of gross dereliction of duty. Greater facilities in the treatment of the poor patients should have been afforded, for example, by building temporary hospitals in open air such as Kennedy Sea Face and devising means and methods of up to date treatment of this fell disease especially for those in congested areas in dire need of charitable treatment. Our Muckle-Heads and Little-Wits are still waiting to see how things take their turn and then issue a precious Press Note explaining away amidst the ‘tres bien’ and their hobnobbing jackals.

Meanwhile, the epidemic had raged fiercely during the second influenza wave, which started in September 1918. ‘The wheels of Government move very slowly in India’, wrote the Gujarati on 20 October 1918. The paper felt that the government was slow in recognising the gravity of the epidemic (Report, 1918f: 11–2):

…we discover no sign of consciousness on the part of the provincial administration or the Government of India of the supreme necessity of devising and carrying out organised measures for coping with the problem when hundreds of people are dying and when many more lives are in peril. Organised measures can be adopted only by Government with the cooperation of the local bodies and the people at large but as yet we see no indication of activity on the part of the higher authorities… the question of the food control in India has not been handled so long in a spirit of promptitude and sympathy. What the Government should have done months ago is now being attempted in the usual style of the circumlocution department.

The Government’s gross neglect of a grave situation over months led to a huge price hike for foodstuff and cloth. The newspaper disapproved the government’s policy of exporting wheat to other countries in a human crisis like this (Report, 1918f: 11–2):

They have now resolved to stop the export of wheat and other than what is absolutely necessary on military and Government account in Mesopotamia and elsewhere. The Home Government could have brought supplies from their wheat producing colonies and thus reduced their commitments in the east. It is now proposed to exercise greater control over the export of all other kinds of food grains also. We are glad the Indian Government at last awakened to the necessity of adopting measures which should have been taken long before the situation became acute.

The extent of Government’s apathy towards rural areas is evident in a letter by an anonymous correspondent from Hubli to The Bombay Chronicle, dated 30 October (Report, 1918h: 22):

The cold attitude shown by the Government and the Local Board to the conditions obtaining in the rural areas is scandalous, while in the villages, the epidemic has been playing havoc, as absolutely no medicine is given by these bodies…The Relief Committee is an institution brought into being since the advent of the epidemic. It has recently found a new channel for the exercise of its activities. It is the villages…The population of Hubli Taluka including Hubli city is 120,000. If you omit 60,000 belonging to Hubli city, you will see that the Government is doing nothing for the remaining 60,000 to save them from the epidemic. Is it too much to expect that you would raise your powerful voice on behalf of these helpless rural classes?

‘Something is radically wrong’, Young India of 16 October fumed, ‘with regard to the Municipal administration in this city and drastic changes must be undertaken because the health of the communities can no longer be allowed to be threatened in this manner by a recurrence of such calamities’ (Report, 1918f: 18). It further noted ‘the serious neglect of the health conditions of the city’, since relief work organised in the poorer localities and the sanitary conditions disclosed have been ‘absolutely shocking’ (Report, 1918f: 18). It regretted to state (Report, 1918f: 18):

It is impossible to trust in future the health of the community to the vagaries of Government officials or to the stupidity of the owners of property who send their representatives to the Corporations. These representatives have disclosed a lack of public spirit and of their own responsibility in the past. In the matter of the adulteration of food, milk and in the matter of market inspection, in regard for the supply of filtered drinking water and cleaning of open drains between various properties, a shocking state of affairs exists as everybody in the community knows except those who live on Malabar Hill and at the Colaba.

It was true that influenza could be controlled not merely by dosing the masses with medicine, but also through the intervention of voluntary workers or self-organised helpers such as the Social Service League (SSL) and others. Founded in Bombay in 1911 (Ramanna, 2004: 4565), the SSL set up its own ‘Influenza Relief Committee’, managed by prominent industrialists, judges and doctors. On the appeal of Dr Turner to the public for urgent assistance, published in The Times of India dated 27 September 1918, the SSL became ‘the chief organiser of the epidemic relief committee, coordinating the efforts of 25 caste and community organisations’ (Ramanna, 2004: 4565). It collected funds, established 20 relief centres, ‘provided volunteer doctors including women, distributed stock mixtures provided by the municipality, milk and blankets, disseminated information from door to door and even cremated the dead’ (Ramanna, 2004: 4565). Community organisations volunteered to help influenza victims of other cities also. In Ahmedabad, the Gujarat Sabha, another non-official reformist body, took the lead in providing relief during the epidemic, rather than the municipality (Ramanna, 2004: 4565). In Bombay, the Hindu Medical Association was given a ward in Maratha Hospital. The Jain Hospital, St. John’s Ambulance Association and the Prabhu community offered hospitals and medical support. The Parsi community asked for a hospital and Wilson College offered their buildings for hospital use. Lady Willingdon Scheme Hospital at Arthur Road was utilised for serious influenza cases. These voluntary efforts of India’s civil society during the influenza of 1918 in cooperation with the Health Department were recognised in a brief report of 1919 on influenza in Bombay by the British Medical Journal, 2 (No. 3059), at p. 219. The willingness of Dr Turner, ‘who does not seem to fit any stereotype of a colonial administrator’ (Ramanna, 2004: 4565) to harness public support is highlighted, but despite all these efforts, more hospitals and ambulances were needed and more doctors and staff were required to run these facilities.

Indian versus Western Medicine and Bacteriological Research

Despite the appalling impact of the influenza, the Government did not know how to tackle the scourge and faced an acute shortage of doctors, as many were away on War duty (Ramanna, 2004: 4560). The Indian ‘native’ press, while emphasising the necessity of cooperation between the government, the corporation and other voluntary and public agencies in fighting the disease until the danger of recurrence was over, also suggested Indian medicines as remedies. Deccan Ryot on 31 October 1918 wanted Indian medicines to be encouraged in the absence of any medical aid in distant areas, where the nearest doctor might be 30 miles away. The Indian system of medicine alone, if encouraged, could hope to cope with a situation like this. Further, it argued (Report, 1918h: 23):

The doctor is both costly and rare. Besides, his dependence on the supply of medicine from far off Europe or America makes him not only in times of the epidemics like the present not only too costly but unreliable also. The Indian medicines yielding to no other medicine in efficacy, are comparatively cheaper and within the reach of the remotest corner of the country. The school masters, the post masters, and even the village officers may be given a little training to fit them to become useful apothecaries of our villages. But the essential thing is to bring into being large and scientific pharmacological institutions which could supply reliable Indian drugs in large quantities.

Other vernacular newspapers, including Praja Mitra and Parsi of 1 and 2 October 1918 also expressed regret at the government’s lack of adequate medical relief during the outbreak, and criticised its attempts to put down indigenous systems of medicinal treatment by implementing the Bombay Medical Act (Report, 1918d: 27). The article speculated as to ‘what must be the condition of the large number of people when even the small section of the public which depended upon the practitioners of the Western system of medicine felt the dearth of adequate medical relief’ (Report, 1918d: 27). On 6 October 1918, Gujarati condemned the high prices of essential drugs, which poor people could hardly afford (Report, 1918d: 27):

High prices have only undermined the health of the people who can buy neither sufficient food nor clothing. Costly medical drugs are beyond their reach and more than a fortnight ago we had earnestly appealed to Government and Municipalities to make them more accessible to the public. They are now being sold at prohibitive prices and here Government must step in and help the people out of their own stocks. The experience gained in the city must be utilised in the districts. The stock mixtures found effective in the treatment of the fever-stricken in Bombay ought to be distributed without stint or restriction in all parts of the Presidency. Medical lessons need not be learnt by bitter experience or experiments on the life of the poor in each district.

Since Western drugs were in short supply and local Ayurvedic and Unani medicines had been officially banned, common people were in acute distress. As a means to ‘relieve’ this shortage, the newspaper suggested that ‘the government should temporarily suspend the Bombay Medical Act and permit University medical practitioners to cooperate with those who follow the indigenous systems of medical treatment’ (Report, 1918e: 27). They also referred to the ‘indifferent attitude’ of the Government towards public demands for opening additional medical colleges and schools (Report, 1918e: 27).

Instances of hoarding of quinine came to light when the Gujarati on 13 October 1918 reported: ‘We do not know what truth is there in the report that someone had managed to buy a large quantity of quinine and thus forced up its price’ (Report, 1918e: 20). The paper demanded that this should be stopped. The Ahmedabad correspondent of The Times of India, on 13 October, confirmed that stocks of quinine had been exhausted in almost all dispensaries. This very ‘lamentable’ state of affairs ought to be strictly set right. The wide social gulf between people and high government officials prevented the latter from realising common people’s suffering. Otherwise, the local governments and their official experts would have responded to ‘the exceptional requirements of the harrowing situation with greater promptitude and sympathy than they have hitherto shown in the matter’ (Report, 1918e: 20). The paper was aghast at the Government’s apathy (Report, 1918e: 20):

It is not enough to call the epidemic a world scourge and then sit with folded hands. The poor people’s sufferings must be alleviated by organised measures throughout the Presidency with the cooperation of the public and charitable and the philanthropic agencies that may be available. A terrible war is being fought on the western front. But we too in India have to wage a formidable war against the enemies of human race such as plague, malaria and influenza, and face the misfortunes brought on by scarcity or famine. Plague has done for years its destructive work in India. Nearly 41 lakhs of people succumbed to the fever alone in India in 1916 exclusive of the two lakhs that fell victim to the plague. As if that was not enough, the country has now to endure the ravages of the influenza epidemic and the hardships produced by abnormally high prices.

Thus, the Indian press interrogated and critiqued the Government and large municipalities like Bombay and Calcutta regarding the delay in investigating the disease. Praja Mitra and Parsi of 27 September 1918 stated that ‘a superior bacteriologist with a first class laboratory may not be found in India but it was absurd to defer all investigations till an expert is brought in from Europe’ (Report, 1918c: 17). It pointed out that there were several well-known bacteriologists in India (Report, 1918c: 17):

The laboratory was up to date and well-equipped and Major Glen Liston, the bacteriologist-in-charge, was a capable investigator. Dr Fowler, the bacteriologist of Bangalore Research Institute, has a high reputation and either he or Dr Glen Liston or both may be entrusted with the investigation at once…The Bombay Municipality should take action without delay and publish the result of bacteriologist tests.

Sanj Vartman of 5 October strongly appealed to the Bombay Municipal Corporation to secure, in cooperation with the government, the services of an expert bacteriologist from England for investigating the disease and to take necessary measures to stamp it out (Report, 1918e: 20). Public health, however, during this unprecedented crisis, did not seem to be a major priority in the eyes of the colonial authorities.

Arnold (1986: 119) has argued that Western medicine, which could function as a means of social control and serve to legitimate colonial rule, frequently ran against the Indian system of healing. In the hands of British colonisers, Western medicine thus became a potent tool for their grand imperial design (Arnold, 1993: 290–2). Exploring the vital role of the state in medical and public health activities, Arnold (1993) argued that Western medicine became a site of contestation between the colonised and the colonisers. This was particularly evident in Indian responses to epidemics of smallpox, cholera and plague, and British attempts to contain and control them.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Western medicine in India still had limited acceptance (Ramanna, 2003), while most medical graduates from the Grant Medical College in Bombay, which introduced Western medicine in India, ‘were convinced of the efficacy of the Western medicine, but they also tried a combination of Western and Indian medicines in their practice’ (Ramanna, 2006: 3221). The dominance of Western medicine, as Ramanna (2006: 3221) further states, was promoted through passing the Registration of Medical Practitioners Act (RMPA) in the Bombay Presidency in 1912. Traditional vaids and hakims were now effectively kept out and classified as ‘irregularly qualified’, raising fears among Ayurvedic physicians that their practice would be made illegal (Hardiman, 2009: 264). In light of the passing of the RMPA, the Bombay government ordered the closure of the Poona Ayurvedic Dispensary in 1915, claiming that the medical officer-in-charge was ‘irregularly qualified’. This led to protests from Ayurvedic organisations all over the country and debates in the contemporary press, public meetings and petitions in Poona, in which Tilak was also involved (Ramanna, 2006: 3221). Evidently, such battles distracted from the urgent challenges to avoid mass mortality due to epidemics like the Bombay Fever.

Conclusions: Lessons Learnt from the 1918 Influenza Epidemic

By mid-November, the influenza was in decline all over India, but the ‘native’ press continued to raise strong arguments against colonial governmentality and public health. On 12 November, the Kesari proposed that the work of the Government Sanitary Department in the epidemic should be inquired into. The Government’s role in controlling the disease and providing support to those affected was highly questionable. The article raised some pertinent issues (Report, 1918i: 28):

The routine work is done by the Municipality and Local Boards but when a worldwide epidemic suddenly swoops down what can they do? Is it not the duty of the Government to help them with finances and medical advice? … Who are the real well wishers of the masses? Is there love or hatred between the different communities in India? Who looked after the backward classes? Have Indians a sense of responsibility and energy to take upon themselves some work and see it done and how much of it? All these questions can be answered from the experience we had during the last epidemic.

Thus, the emerging public sphere of native newspapers and periodicals of the early decades of the twentieth century was instrumental in shaping public opinion, criticising the techniques of ‘colonial governmentality’ (Kalpagam, 2002; Scott, 1995), which materialised the colonised body ‘in a grid of knowledge and tactics’ (Prakash, 2000: 193), based on stereotypes designed to justify colonial power.

Demanding better government support and administration during the influenza outbreaks of 1918, the native press of Bombay, as this article showed, fixed their critical gaze on the deficient relief measures undertaken by the colonial state. They indicted the government for apathy and indifference towards the rural masses, despite incurring the displeasure of the executive authority and curtailment of their freedom under the Indian Press Act of 1910. As Kalpagam (2002: 44) observes: ‘The newspapers served not merely as sites of consensus generation but also as channels of information from unknown people and places on the need and efficacy of governmental actions’. In contrast, voluntary agencies such as the SSL and other bodies did ‘splendid work in assisting the poorer classes during the Bombay epidemic’, as The Times of India of 19 October 1918 observed. Arnold (2015: 120) looks back at India’s epidemiological history with insightful observations on the virulent outbreaks of plague and influenza, separated by a 25-year period, focuses on urban–rural distinctions and then observes that influenza did not create anything like the kind of panic that had characterised plague outbreaks from 1896–7 onwards and intermittently for many years thereafter.

To conclude, whenever a new pandemic strikes the world, scientists, epidemiologists and government officials worldwide may look back to earlier instances of epidemics like plague, cholera and influenza as worst case scenarios, while developing effective epidemic controls and interventions. It is not certain, however, that this actually happens. If, in addition, there is insufficient leadership and lack of strategic planning, and other agenda of governance are deemed more important, as was the case in colonial India, there are likely to be serious deficiencies in responses. The influenza of 1918 largely disappeared from memory, and only few references to this epidemic exist in the literature, in popular culture and even in history books. However, the current COVID pandemic makes it absolutely necessary to draw lessons from such earlier pandemics and not to dismiss them as some kind of minor flu that will simply go away.