The cholera pandemic exposed India to the international glare in the nineteenth century, for all the wrong reasons. By this point, India had been in the limelight for its key position in international commerce. Trade was thriving, and Bombay, Calcutta and Madras had become global cities with vessels leaving and arriving at their ports on a regular basis. The East India Company was slowly digging its talons into the subcontinent despite formidable opposition, and with the decline of the Mughal empire in India, as well as the beginning of the Crown rule as the princely rulers lost their power to govern their states, it gained absolute monopoly over trade in India, paving the way for massive economic enterprises.
During this time, Britain was also profiting from the opium trade in China. By the mid-nineteenth century, the sea-based economy had proliferated swiftly and following the Napoleonic wars, the British emerged as the most superior naval power. Overall, international trade was booming through profitable ventures as oceanic travel linked remote parts of the world. In fact, their conquests were not limited to Asia; Africa was being ‘explored’, and the slave trade was on the rise. Leisure travel and migration were also becoming common, carrying people aboard ships to continents they had not known before. This formed the backdrop of the first cholera management measures following the pandemic outbreak of 1817.
Cholera seemed to have crept up on the world at a time when it could inflict unprecedented harm. In the first few years of the nineteenth century, there were only a few sporadic cases across the Indian subcontinent, making it seem administratively innocuous. But the situation turned grave suddenly when the first great epidemic began in Bengal in the latter part of 1817. It declined in the cold weather months, but increased in March 1918, and spread rapidly like never before to different parts of the country. Efforts to curb it were quickly sanctioned. Dr Tytler, assistant surgeon to Charles Chapman, judge and magistrate of the district of Jessore, believed that cholera was caused by the ‘vitiated state of bile’, and was concerned about the confined nature of the bazaar and crowded dwellings of the natives. A Lottery Committee was set up around the same time as the early years of the pandemic and aimed to generate funds for the improvement of the city, including repairing drains and roads, although conservancy work remained under the magistrates and revenue officers. Civil courts and businesses closed down temporarily, and massive emigration took place, impacting the density of the population. At this point, the administration did not foresee the severity of the outbreak.
However, it was a ‘very peculiar and malignant epidemic’, as it left a trail of destruction in its wake.
David Arnold has noted how one of the most perturbing incidences of cholera amongst troops was in Bundelkhand in 1817. James Jameson wrote about cholera as an advancing enemy force creeping upon the defenceless, leaving behind a trail of mortality. It was noted that 764 out of 11,500 fighting men died in a single week. Between 1818 and 1857, some 5,719 European soldiers under the Bengal command had died of cholera.Statistics collected in several districts by Jameson show that over 10,000 were killed within two months alone. Recording cholera death rates today involves a lot of estimation. When cholera swept across India in the years after 1817, colonial officials relied on rumours or rough estimates of death tolls. Extrapolations from military to civilian deaths produced estimates as high as forty million Indian deaths during cholera’s first fourteen years. David Arnold has written:
Cholera, like smallpox, was one of the mainstays of nineteenth century medical statistics in India. Because the collection of vital data did not begin in earnest until the late 1860s, it is impossible to arrive at an accurate figure for the number of deaths caused by cholera during the nineteenth century, especially during its earlier decades. But from such imperfect statistics as are available, it would appear that at least 15 million deaths occurred in British India alone between 1817, the year in which the century’s first major epidemic erupted in Bengal, and 1865, when mortality data began to be collected systematically for the first time. A further 23 million cholera deaths were recorded between 1865 and 1947, a figure likely to understate the full extent of the mortality.
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Cholera travels beyond India
Historians have avidly recorded cholera’s first worldwide journey as it initially appeared to have travelled along trade routes to different parts of the world. In 1819–20, when Captain Thompson was dispatched from Bombay to the ruler of Oman, it was not known that the next year, another force would land from Bombay in Arabia—the cholera morbus.
It was said that a ‘plague’ was spreading out in Oman, which ‘attacks a man’s abdomen, and matter is ejected from the mouth and anus till he dies’. It appeared on the borders of the Persian Gulf, in Muscat, Bandar-Bushehr and Bassorah around the same time. The damage caused by the pandemic was so extensive by 1821 that a prince of Persia’s Qajar dynasty, Mohammad Ali Mirza Dawlatshah (1789–1821), who had previously won battles against the Ottomans and besieged Baghdad in 1821, was brought to his knees by the disease, and his forces were forced to retreat after his death.
Thereafter, as it swept further westwards, it penetrated Africa and Europe. On the other side of the coast of India, the story was similar as it became virulent in Burma, where it had reached in 1819, and in the following year, Siam, which was left devastated. It appeared next in Malacca, Penang and Singapore over the next few years. It also arrived in Java and Manila due to mercantile activities. At this time, it was noticed that cholera attacked soldiers on disembarkation, sailors on ships on voyages, troops while marching and in camps, and during pilgrimages. This was a crucial observation because in a world that was becoming increasingly interconnected, there was an increased likelihood of the spread of disease.
However, cholera had merely reared its head at this point. In 1826–34, it began again in Lower Bengal, around the Presidency circle, and extended quickly throughout Banaras and Kanpur divisions, as well as in the North-Western Provinces, Punjab, and Himalayan hill stations. In 1829, Lt Connolly, who was in Herat, reported that it was exceptionally violent in Kabul and Khorasan (a historical region that spans parts of modernday northeastern Iran, southern Turkmenistan and northern Afghanistan), leading up to the Persian capital. Indeed, it caused destruction in Tehran, Bokhara and Khiva. It then spread along the trade routes from India to reach Russia, where it broke out in the trading city of Orenburg. Europe was under attack as the disease reached its frontiers through Persia, where it was at its peak during 1832–33. The first appearance of the Asiatic Cholera in Canada was in Quebec, in 1832, from where it spread to the United States, in New York and Philadelphia, and spread all around.
Notwithstanding brief spells of respite, the threat of cholera seemed to be ubiquitous in the nineteenth century. It flared up in 1840, hitting Madras and Bengal, and from there, spread along the seashore and on ships, advancing to Malacca. It entered China due to the constant supply of men and materials of war from the cholera-stricken regions of Madras and Bengal, travelling as before, and yet again, reaching America in 1848, which had been free of cholera for over a decade. It touched Britain and Europe, and North America at various points throughout the nineteenth century, killing several, and remained without a cure until the 1840s.
This excerpt from ‘In Sickness And In Death: How Faith, Medicine and Race Shaped British India’ by Ipshita Nath has been published with permission from HarperCollins Publishers India.