Transactions of the RHS  (), pp.

– © Royal Historical Society 

doi:./S

DEATH AND THE MODERN EMPIRE:

THE – INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC IN INDIA*

By David Arnold
   
  

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

The impact of the – influenza epidemic on India was devastating.

Upwards of twelve million people, and possibly as many as eighteen
million, died from influenza or from pneumonia and respiratory compli-
cations. This mortality was equivalent to  per cent of the population as
recorded in the decennial census of . As many people (,)
died in one Indian province – the Central Provinces – as in the whole
of Britain and the United States combined. Unlike bubonic plague,

* The author wishes to thank Margot Finn and the RHS for the invitation to present this
lecture and is indebted to the anonymous reviewer and those who attended the talk for their
helpful comments and suggestions.

Recent epidemiological studies support a figure of between eleven and fourteen million
excess deaths due to influenza: Siddharth Chandra, Goran Kuljanin and Jennifer Wray,
‘Mortality from the Influenza Pandemic of –: The Case of India’, Demography, 
(), –; Siddharth Chandra and Eva Kassens-Noor, ‘The Evolution of Pandemic
Influenza: Evidence from India, –’, BMC Infectious Diseases,  (), –;
Kenneth Hill, ‘Influenza in India: Epicenter of an Epidemic’, iuss.princeton.edu/
papers/.



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       
which struck India in  and had caused some twelve million deaths by
the late s, mortality from influenza was concentrated in a few short
months. It was thought to have begun with the arrival of infected troop-
ships at Bombay and Karachi in May and June . This triggered the
milder, first wave of the epidemic, in which old people and children
appeared especially at risk, but in which overall mortality rates remained
low. In Bombay in late July it was confidently predicted that the epidemic
was nearly over. Then a second, far more fatal, wave of influenza swept
across India from September to early December . In this second
phase, adults between the ages of twenty and forty were thought to be par-
ticularly susceptible, with more women than men dying from the disease.
In one day alone,  October , there were  registered deaths from
influenza in Bombay city, more deaths than at the height of the plague
epidemic in the s and s, while across the Bombay Presidency
as a whole more than a million deaths occurred during October and
November . N. H. Choksy, an Indian medical officer in Bombay,
wrote that ‘In its rapidity of spread, the enormous number of its victims
and its total fatality …, influenza reached a virulence before which even
plague with all its horrors fades into insignificance.’
Across western and central India, the countryside suffered at least as
much as the cities. In the Central Provinces, where an estimated  to 
per cent of the population perished, the epidemic spread ‘with great rap-
idity, paralysing towns and decimating villages’. In what was described
by the provincial sanitary commissioner, F. G. N. Stokes, as ‘incompar-
ably the most violent outbreak of disease of which we have any knowl-
edge’, hundreds died in the space of a few days. ‘The ravages of the
disease were seen at their worst’, Stokes wrote, ‘in the villages, where
the complete helplessness of the people combined with scarcity of food


Times of India (Bombay) (hereafter ToI),  July , .

Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner of the Government of India,  (Calcutta, ),
–. Studies of the epidemic include Mridula Ramanna, ‘Coping with the Influenza
Pandemic: The Bombay Experience’, in The Spanish Influenza Epidemic of –: New
Perspectives, ed. Howard Phillips and David Killingray (), –; T. V. Sekher,
‘Public Health Administration in Princely Mysore: Tackling the Influenza Pandemic of
’, in India’s Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism, ed. Waltraud Ernst and
Biswamoy Pati (), –. The best demographic study remains I. D. Mills, ‘The
– Influenza Pandemic: The Indian Experience’, Indian Economic and Social History
Review,  (), –.

In Bombay Presidency there were , influenza deaths in October : Annual
Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for the Government of Bombay,  (Bombay, ), . In
Punjab , deaths were attributed to influenza between  October and  December
: Report of the Sanitary Administration of the Punjab,  (Lahore, ), app. D, xi.

N. H. Choksy, ‘Influenza’, Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of
Bombay, – (Bombay, ), .

Annual Sanitary Report of the Central Provinces and Berar,  (Nagpur, ), .

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  –     
and clothing produced a calamity which baffles description.’ Punjab’s
sanitary commissioner painted an even more apocalyptic picture. At
the height of the crisis between mid-October and early November
, the scenes, he wrote, were
such as to render adequate description impossible. The hospitals were choked so that it
was impossible to remove the dead quickly enough to make room for the dying: the
streets and lanes of the cities were littered with dead and dying people: the postal and
telegraph services were completely disorganised; the train service continued, but at all
the principal stations dead and dying were being removed from the trains; the
burning ghat [cremation site] and burial ground were literally swamped with corpses,
whilst an even greater number awaited removal; the depleted medical service, itself
sorely stricken by the epidemic, was incapable of dealing with more than a minute frac-
tion of the sickness requiring attention; nearly every household was lamenting a death,
and everywhere terror and confusion reigned.
The Ministry of Health in London likewise acknowledged that the ‘total
mortality in India in the month of October []’ was ‘without parallel
in the history of disease’. And yet after December  the epidemic
rapidly lost its destructive impetus and within a few years had sunk to
statistical insignificance. Smallpox, cholera, plague, malaria and tuber-
culosis once again dominated India’s public health agenda.
What are we as historians to make of this indisputably catastrophic
episode? Clearly, a century on, an event in which twelve million
people died (and an unknown number were rendered seriously ill)
deserves our close attention and careful scrutiny, but in revisiting the
 epidemic what exactly are we seeking to investigate and by what
means can we recuperate that ‘forgotten’ past? In recent years historians,
demographers and epidemiologists have had much to say about
influenza in India, as elsewhere; but, in concentrating on the epidemic
itself they have tended to neglect the wider interpretive issues that sur-
round it. How then should we position India’s influenza epidemic in rela-
tion to its long-term health and mortality trends and more broadly in
relation to Indian society and colonial governance? Was the epidemic
a one-off event, which despite the staggering mortality, actually tells us
little about India’s underlying condition and future trajectory, or was it
the exemplification of significant trends and developments? But, in
seeking to answer such questions, we should first note an important


Ibid.

Report of the Sanitary Administration, Punjab, , app. D, xi.

S. P. James, ‘Australasia and Parts of Africa and Asia’, Ministry of Health, Report on the
Pandemic of Influenza, – (), .

From , registered deaths due to influenza in Bombay city in , the number had
fallen to , in  and  in . Deaths from respiratory diseases remained higher for
longer. Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay, –
(Bombay, ), .

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semantic distinction. In writing about India some authors refer to the
influenza pandemic, implying that India, though it suffered most, was
just one of the many countries ensnared in this global event, a catastro-
phe whose epidemiological origins lay elsewhere. For others this was in
essence an Indian epidemic, whose nature and impact, despite its external
provenance, were heavily contingent upon India’s own material and
social conditions. Historians have written of the ‘unification of the
globe by disease’ and cite the – pandemic as a prime example
of this. But do the events of  more strongly suggest India as a
land apart, subject certainly to such global visitations as the influenza
pandemic, but otherwise governed rather more by its own preoccupa-
tions? How, in this moment of exceptional crisis, do we reconcile the
local and the global?

I Situating the Indian epidemic

I would have liked to begin this discussion by turning to visual source
material to illustrate the Indian epidemic – photographs of hospital
wards crammed with patients or emergency relief centres, pictures of
people wearing protective face-masks, piled-up bodies awaiting crema-
tion or burial. Such images are widely available for the pandemic in
other parts of the world, such as Britain and the United States, but, so
far as I am aware, there are no such images for India. Nor are there
many for other Asian societies, apart from Japan: to that extent, the
lacuna I am trying to describe was not specific to India alone. That
visual absence in – is all the more striking in that there are a
great number of photographs of the plague epidemic in India in the
s and s, showing precisely such scenes from hospitalising the
sick to cremating the dead. Why not for –? Similarly, there are
a large number of detailed reports, statistical compendia and commis-
sions of enquiry for the plague epidemic, and the government plague
proceedings run to dozens of volumes: there is nothing comparable for
influenza. A preliminary report was published early in  by
Norman White, the Government of India’s sanitary commissioner, but
it is brief, appeared before the full impact of the epidemic was known,
and was never supplemented by a more comprehensive account.
When White wrote his report the mortality was put at no more than
six million: five million in British India and one million more in the


Notably Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ‘A Concept: The Unification of the Globe by
Disease’, in Ladurie, The Mind and Method of the Historian (Brighton, ), –. A
similar logic informs K. David Patterson and Gerald F. Pyle, ‘The Geography and
Mortality of the  Influenza Pandemic’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine,  (), –.

Such images are available online from the Wellcome Collection, London.

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  –     
princely states. As we have seen, the provincial sanitary commissioners
gave vivid, often detailed, accounts of the epidemic in their annual
reports for , but thereafter had virtually nothing to say on the
matter, and it was left to the Indian census report of , published in
, to provide more comprehensive data on India’s missing millions.
There was newspaper coverage of the epidemic and the rumours and
complaints that swirled around it, but, given how vocal the Indian
press could be on other matters, these reports were neither particularly
extensive and insightful nor did they greatly embellish the official
record. What follows is, then, an attempt to explain such an absence.
In the light of this lacuna, one might agree with the remark made in
 by Howard Phillips and David Killingray that the – pan-
demic has ‘yielded a relatively poor historiographical harvest’, though,
given how much new material has appeared since then, that is now ques-
tionable. Globally, the pandemic no longer seems to fit the ‘forgotten’ tag
once almost universally applied to it. But it would be hard to accept for
India their further view that ‘coming in the heyday of the newspaper and
the printed word, … [the pandemic] left behind mountains of written
evidence across the world, often in the unlikeliest of places, more so
than any pandemic before it’. In India, accounts of cholera and
plague over the previous century vastly outweighed the scanty volume
of material, personal and public, generated by influenza. Widespread
illiteracy is an insufficient explanation for this. Although influenza


F. Norman White, A Preliminary Report on the Influenza Pandemic of  in India (Simla,
), .

The true scale of the mortality began to emerge with the first published returns in :
‘Indian Census: Influenza Effects’, ToI,  April , .

A further contrast can be made with the Indian soldiers’ letters from the Western Front
intercepted by the censor and used by historians as testimony to their personal experiences:
David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, – (Basingstoke, );
Santanu Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture (Cambridge, ).

Howard Phillips and David Killingray, ‘Introduction’, in Spanish Influenza, ed. Phillips
and Killingray, ; Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 
(Cambridge, ).

Phillips and Killingray, ‘Introduction’, .

For a similar explanation, see Myron Echenberg, ‘“The Dog that Did Not Bark”:
Memory and the  Influenza Epidemic in Senegal’, in Spanish Influenza, ed. Phillips
and Killingray, –.

Some attempt has been made for India, as for Southeast Asia, to tap folklore and oral
history: David Hardiman, ‘The Influenza Epidemic of  and the Adivasis of Western
India’, Social History of Medicine,  (), –; Kirsty Walker, ‘The Influenza
Pandemic of  in Southeast Asia’, in Histories of Health in Southeast Asia: Perspectives on the
Long Twentieth Century, ed. Tim Harper and Sunil S. Amrith (Bloomington, ), –.
But, thus far, this has been less productive than, for example, in recovering the Irish experi-
ence: see Ida Milne, Stacking the Coffins: Influenza, War and Revolution in Ireland, –
(Manchester, ).

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       
claimed most of its victims in India among the poor, they were not the
only section of society to observe and experience it. And yet, so far as
I am aware, there is remarkably little by way of private correspondence
or personal memoirs to shed light on what has been dubbed ‘the greatest
pandemic in the world’s history’. How can twelve million people die,
and yet apparently leave so little trace?
One plausible explanation might be that British India was an unmod-
ern society ruled over by an unmodern state, chaotic in form and
conduct, unknowing or uncaring about mass mortality or perhaps, after
decades of pestilence and famine, impervious to the suffering of its sub-
jects. Appointing enquiry commissions, compiling statistics and reports,
applying science to social need – this is surely what modern states do
when faced with a crisis of such momentous proportions. Seen thus,
India’s colonial government in – might seem not to have fulfilled
its modern responsibilities. This adversarial view would be in keeping
with recent, hostile interpretations of the British Raj by Shashi Tharoor
and Jon Wilson. Neither of these authors actually discusses the
influenza epidemic, but their general line of argument might suggest
that it was yet another unnatural disaster attributable to, or greatly accen-
tuated by, imperial misrule. Nobody in government, it might be said, was
particularly concerned about the twelve million deaths in –
because nobody in authority much cared or had the political will, the
administrative capacity and the technical resources to do much about it.
In our search for guidance on how to situate the Indian epidemic we
could also turn back to an article by Ira Klein published in  which
looked at the period  to  and documented the extraordinarily
high rates of mortality in India caused by famine and recurrent bouts
of cholera, plague, smallpox and malaria (among others), a ‘woeful cres-
cendo of death’ that culminated with the influenza epidemic of –
. Klein thus appended the epidemic to a long cycle of mass suffering
and staggering mortality: its significance lay in reinforcing and carrying
to fresh heights a long established pattern of death and disease. Only
after , he suggests, did things get better, but not very much. Klein
further argues that British attempts to modernize India were themselves
partly to blame for this ‘woeful’ saga: by disrupting natural lines of drain-
age and creating swamps where none had existed before, irrigation
canals and railway embankments facilitated the spread of malaria;
British rule, along with railways, the opening of the Suez Canal and
the new steamship routes, exposed India to outside epidemics in a


Phillips and Killingray, ‘Introduction’, .

Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (); Jon Wilson, India
Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire ().

Ira Klein, ‘Death in India, –’, Journal of Asian Studies,  (), .

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  –     
manner not previously possible; while at the same time the inherent
insufficiencies of colonial medicine and public health failed to check or
reverse this fatal trend. But in the context of the – influenza epi-
demic is an argument about botched modernisation and ‘tatterdemalion’
health services sufficient to account for what happened to India and its
apparent historical neglect?

II Influenza in context
 was not the first time India had been hit by the disease. In common
with other regions of Eurasia, epidemic influenza, in a relatively mild
form, had struck India in  and lingered on for several years.
Interestingly, in the light of , soldiers, both British and Indian,
were implicated in this epidemic as transmitting the disease as well as
being among its principal victims, though this may simply reflect
greater awareness by the sanitary authorities of health in the army
than among the civilian population at large. A few medical reports
were written about the disease, but, until it recurred with such virulence
in , influenza was, one sanitary commissioner confessed, ‘regarded
with apathy and scepticism by the vast majority of the [medical] profes-
sion’ in India. By the time influenza had petered out, India was over-
whelmed by the monumental impact of bubonic plague, perhaps the
greatest epidemic crisis India has ever faced and conceivably the greatest
crisis of British rule between the end of the Mutiny/Rebellion in 
and the run-up to Independence and Partition in . Unprecedented
though it appeared at the time, in retrospect the  influenza can be
seen as nestling in the shadow of the earlier plague epidemic.
Historians have written extensively about India’s plague episode but
some of its salient features deserve to be restated here. Firstly, there
was great alarm that by spreading to India in  from Hong Kong


Ibid., , .

Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India,  (Calcutta, ),
–, ; Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India,  (Calcutta,
), , .

Report of the Sanitary Administration, Punjab, , app. D, xv; K. C. Bose, ‘Influenza as
Seen in Calcutta, and Its Treatment’, in K. C. Bose, A Collection of the Medical and Surgical
Papers of Rai K. C. Bose (Calcutta, ), –. In Bombay in  there was only one regis-
tered death from influenza, and in  six compared to , from plague and , from
tuberculosis: Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay, –
(Bombay ), , .

David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century
India (Berkeley, ), ch. ; Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian
Preventive Medicine, – (Cambridge, ), ch. ; Raj Chandavarkar, Imperial Power
and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. – (Cambridge, ),
ch. .

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       
and potentially moving on to Europe, plague was re-enacting the apoca-
lyptic Black Death, with the added fear that India’s international trade
would be embargoed unless the government took immediate and
drastic steps to prevent the onward spread of the disease. Given the
imminent threat it seemed to pose to the West, plague generated a
vast quantity of scientific research and a coordinated international
response in ways that influenza twenty years later conspicuously did
not. Secondly, the Government of India and its provincial administra-
tions rapidly adopted extraordinarily wide-ranging and draconian mea-
sures to try to check the spread of plague. These included body searches
of travellers, demolishing infected houses and burning their contents,
segregating possible contacts, carrying suspected cases off to hospital,
and creating innumerable plague hospitals and evacuation camps.
This raft of highly interventionist measures produced such a furious
public backlash that within months the government was forced to back-
track and, even at the expense of plague’s probable spread, was obliged
to rely to a far greater degree on Indian intermediaries, on voluntary
measures, and even (reluctantly) on practitioners of indigenous medicine.
What trumped state intervention in the early plague years was the potent
combination of popular discontent (itself a heady mixture of rumour, riot
and resistance) and the anger of the middle classes whose lives were pro-
foundly disrupted and who felt humiliated and deprived of the leadership
status to which they were entitled.
Thirdly, and contrary to the ‘chaos’ thesis, the state was forced to act
in a more overtly scientific manner, agreeing to a specialist plague com-
mission and forming a bacteriological department to examine this and
other diseases and find urgent solutions to their spread. Plague thus
instigated a revolution in colonial medical science and public health. It
also created the prospect of a revolution in colonial governance, with
sanitary need and the hygienic education of the people spearheading
the rationale for a more interventionist state. Some changes did indeed
follow, as in the formation of urban improvement trusts in Bombay
and Calcutta. But in practice, fearing a recrudescence of popular oppos-
ition if it pressed too hard, and mindful of its own security and economic
constraints, the state backed away, leaving the exercise of its power more
fitful and erratic than ever before. If the government did not intervene
more actively in the – epidemic it was in part because it had
been chastened by its previous experience of plague.


Andrew Balfour and Henry Harold Scott, Health Problems of the Empire: Past, Present and
Future (), ; Pratik Chakrabarti, Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the
Tropics (Rochester, NY, ).

For the relationship between the plague and influenza epidemics, see David Arnold,
‘Disease, Rumor, and Panic in India’s Plague and Influenza Epidemics, –’, in

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  –     
By the outbreak of war in  the medical and public health initiatives
generated by the plague epidemic, or contemporaneous with it, were
starting to have some effect. Contrary to Klein’s argument, there was
a growing conviction that the battle for India’s public health was being
won – against plague, smallpox, cholera, malaria, typhoid and all the
other diseases to which India had hitherto been prone. And, even if
famine had not disappeared entirely, it seemed to be in abeyance.
Many issues – malnutrition, infant mortality, women’s health, tubercu-
losis – undoubtedly remained; but, in the principal cities, it was as if a
corner had been turned. India, it seemed, was beginning to win its
public health war. At the end of  Calcutta’s health officer announced
that the year had been the healthiest the city had ever known. Deaths
from cholera and smallpox, after falling for years, had reached ‘phenom-
enally low’ levels. Plague deaths were at their lowest since , having
consistently declined since : indeed, plague had ‘almost vanished’
from the city’s vital statistics. India’s great eastern metropolis could,
it seemed, now anticipate a new age of public health.
Then in , the ink barely dry on the health officer’s report, Calcutta
was savaged by one of the deadliest epidemics it had ever known, and
mortality soared to unprecedented heights. At thirty-five deaths per
thousand of the population, the city’s death-rate was suddenly back
from twenty-three per thousand the previous year to the highest
recorded since . No one had been expecting that. As the health
officer put it, ‘The setback in the progressive decline of the mortality
which had been a characteristic feature of the returns since  is to
be regretted.’ But then, when the influenza crisis had passed by early
, it was almost as if it had never happened: deaths from influenza
and pneumonia fell rapidly while cholera, plague, malaria and even
smallpox re-emerged as the principal challenges to sanitary rule.

Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, ed. Robert Peckham (Hong Kong, ),
–.

For the downward trend in mortality among Indian and British troops, see Annual
Report of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India,  (Calcutta, ), –.
Indians troops remained highly susceptible to pneumonia, which accounted for a quarter
of their deaths in : ibid., ; White, Preliminary Report, .

Annual Report on the Municipal Administration of Calcutta, – ( vols., Calcutta, ), I,
, –. In Bombay, too, the annual death rate was lower in  than in any year since
: Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay, –
(Bombay, ), .

Annual Report on the Municipal Administration of Calcutta, – ( vols., Calcutta, ), I,
–.

Ibid., I, .

In  Calcutta’s health officer recorded only  deaths from influenza out of ,.
He noted continuing mortality from influenza but was more alarmed by the ‘terrible epi-
demic’ of smallpox in  which caused , deaths: Report on the Municipal
Administration of Calcutta, – ( vols., Calcutta, ), I, –.

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       
From such a perspective, even in the s, influenza appeared as a tem-
porary aberration, not a regular or indicative feature of the epidemio-
logical landscape.
Moreover, unlike plague, and before it cholera, both of which had
erupted from the East to menace the West, in  influenza struck
India from the West. It was America and Europe’s catastrophe before
it was India’s, and it was there, in the West, that investigative research
and the quest for remedial measures were concentrated. Influenza was
a viral disease whose causative agent was impossible to detect at the
time even under a microscope: it was not fully identified until .
India’s expertise in medical science had grown enormously since the
s but mostly in parasitology and bacteriology where the enemy
was easier to identify and respond to, not in virology. In India, as in
the West, laboratory research was misled into believing that influenza
had a bacteriological origin. Although an anti-influenza vaccine was pre-
pared in three of India’s leading bacteriological laboratories, there was
little confidence in its effectiveness. In December  R. H. Malone
of the Indian Medical Service (IMS) was appointed to investigate the
bacteriology of influenza and find a viable vaccine: his enquiry yielded
few results. Compared with recent discoveries in, and treatment of,
malaria, plague, typhoid, among other diseases, there was, from the per-
spective of India’s medical experts, nothing about the influenza epidemic
to celebrate and memorialise. It was an unhappy episode, not a meaning-
ful encounter. Seen from a global perspective, India was unlikely (again
in contrast to plague where India had been fundamental to global
research) to provide a key to understanding influenza. Indeed, in the
global narrative India was viewed almost as collateral damage, a
transit station in the wayward peregrinations of a global disease.
Besides, India, the most populous society on the planet, was notorious
for its poverty and famines: deaths there, even in their millions, were
to many outside observers, unsurprising. To read the medical literature
of the period is to feel that India’s twelve million dead had rapidly
become a mere appendage to a more compelling Western story of
disease and public health.

III War fever

If we were to ask: What was the time of influenza? To what temporality
did it belong? one answer would be ‘the time of war’, for it was the Great


Ramanna, ‘Coping’, .

India, Education (Sanitary), no. , Dec. , India Office Records (IOR), British
Library, London; White, Preliminary Report, –.

Ministry of Health, Report on the Pandemic, p. xiv.

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  –     
War that helped give the epidemic its global dynamic and its local char-
acter. The war had a massive impact on India and thereby facilitated
the epidemic that hurried in its wake. For India engagement in the
war began early with soldiers sent in September  to serve on the
Western Front, before being relocated to other battlefronts, mostly in
the Middle East. In all, close to a million Indian troops served in the
war, of whom , were killed and , wounded, a heavy loss
but one that might seem of relatively little demographic significance
compared to the influenza death toll. That British India could mobilise
a million men, supply vast quantities of arms, clothing and military
materiel, help fund hospitals and troopships, and put its increasingly
industrial economy on a war footing itself says something about the
modern capabilities of the colonial state. But evident, too, was the enor-
mous strain the Indian economy and its creaking infrastructure were
under by .
The impact of the war was apparent from the outset. Troopships from
Basra in Iraq were believed to have brought influenza to Bombay and
Karachi in May–June  – associating the arrival of the epidemic in
India with the protracted and enervating Mesopotamia campaign.
Other factors linked influenza with the war and the army. Intensive
recruitment for the Indian Army was still actively continuing in the
middle months of  when influenza first struck, and the disease
quickly impacted on the number of men available or willing to present
themselves for enlistment. Once the disease had become established,
troop movements and army barracks were central mechanisms in the
India-wide dissemination of the disease. Many of India’s volunteer sol-
diers came from agricultural families: this was especially so in Punjab
where whole villages were wiped out by the disease and adult males
proved particularly vulnerable to influenza and pneumonia. Indeed,
officials in Punjab expressed with hindsight their relief that the epidemic
had not struck sooner, which would have deprived the army of its prin-
cipal recruiting ground. India was also a victim of the wartime ‘famine


Recent scholarship has increasingly recognised a military connection: see Mark
Osborne Humphries, ‘Paths of Infection: The First World War and the Origins of the
 Influenza Pandemic’, War in History,  (), –.

De Witt C. Ellinwood, ‘The Indian Soldier, the Indian Army, and Change, –’,
in India and World War , ed. De Witt C. Ellinwood and S. D. Pradhan (New Delhi, ),
.

ToI,  July , ;  July , .

‘Fortnightly Report on the Internal Political Situation’, Madras, for the first half of
October , India, Home (Political), no. , November , Tamil Nadu Archives,
Chennai.

ToI,  July , ;  July , ; Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner, United
Provinces, , app. D, A.

M. S. Leigh, The Punjab and the War (Lahore, ), –.

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       
of tonnage’, one of the several forms of ‘famine’ to which India was
becoming subject by . Severe shortages and distribution delays,
ultimately linked to the stresses and strain of the war itself, affected
imports by sea and the capacity to move goods by rail and began to
impact on commodity prices which by late  reached record levels
for food-grains, cloth, kerosene and other essentials.
In the countryside, famine in a more literal sense stalked several pro-
vinces. Although it is frequently argued that the influenza pandemic of
– was so destructive globally because it attacked some of the
healthiest members of the population, whose immune systems went
into fatal overdrive, this appears not to adequately explain the situation
in India. Certainly, in the deadly second wave of the epidemic it was
adults in the twenty to forty age range who were most affected, but
the Indian reports almost universally emphasise a strong correlation
between poverty, deprivation and debility on the one hand and
influenza (and still more tellingly pneumonia) on the other. ‘The
people who suffer most,’ wrote Punjab’s sanitary commissioner, ‘are
the poor and the rural classes, whose housing conditions, medical attend-
ance, food and clothing are in defect.’ Even among Indian soldiers,
who might otherwise have been regarded as relatively fit and with
access to reliable medical attention, fatalities from influenza and pneu-
monia were remarkably high. Many women in this age group, particu-
larly in the countryside, died because their own health was neglected or,
having attended to their sick and dying menfolk, there was no one left to
nurse them in turn. As I. D. Mills has remarked, in India in  famine
and influenza constituted ‘a set of mutually exacerbating catastrophes’.
The time of war was also concurrently a time of famine, and almost from
the outset influenza was described as ‘really a disease of hunger and
exhaustion’.
One of the problems India faced was that many officers of the Indian
Medical Service (numbering barely  even in peacetime) had been
drafted into war service overseas: the ultimate rationale for the IMS
was as a state-run military medical service, and in an emergency like


ToI,  January , .

‘Statistical Abstract for India, – to –’, Parliamentary Papers, –, Cmd.
, table , on .

As in Madras: Season and Crop Report of the Madras Presidency for the Agricultural Year, –
(Madras, ), –.

Report on the Sanitary Administration, Punjab, , app. D, xvi.

On pneumonia deaths among soldiers, see White, Preliminary Report, .

Annual Sanitary Report, Central Provinces, , .

Mills, ‘Influenza Pandemic’, .

ToI,  July , ; Purshotamdas Thakurdas in Bombay Legislative Council, ibid., 
September , .

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  –     
the Great War military health took precedence over civilian needs.
Some members of this elite medical service had died by , others
had yet to revert to their civilian posts. This exposed the underlying fra-
gility of India’s medical administration. Doctors had to be drawn in from
the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) (whose more normal remit was
the care of British troops in India) even for routine hospital work, but
they often lacked the local expertise (including basic language skills) to
do the job well. Some of the many difficulties faced by medical staff in
 are evident from an MD thesis on the Indian epidemic submitted
to the University of Edinburgh in  by a Scottish doctor, Thomas
Herriot. Herriot had qualified in  with a specialist interest in
disease prevention which involved him in intensive laboratory work.
He was drafted into the British Army in February  and made a tem-
porary captain in the RAMC a year later. Transferred to the Indian
Army in , in the summer of that year he was put in charge of the mili-
tary hospital at Jullundur in Punjab. The first he knew of ‘Spanish
influenza’ was from reading a newspaper report but this meant little to
him until the disease actually arrived in India.
The first wave of the epidemic reached Punjab in August : the
second wave in mid-September was far more virulent. With other
medical staff off sick with influenza, and himself struggling with recurrent
malaria and dysentery, Herriot was burdened with the duties of his
invalid colleagues as well as his own. The first cases he was aware of
were, characteristically, among Indian soldiers returning from leave.
From them influenza spread to Indians in the bazaar, to labourers and
domestic servants and hence to Europeans. It was at first assumed that
this disease was malaria, already rampant in Punjab in recent years,
but analysis in the brigade laboratory failed to reveal either malaria para-
sites or the plague bacillus. If, Herriot noted, the disease was in fact
influenza, ‘no information had been received, either from other stations
[in India] or from England which would help in diagnosing the
disease’. Basically, he was on his own.
Before the epidemic was over there had been a million deaths in
Punjab: one in twenty of the entire population. Like Bombay, Punjab
had been one of the provinces worst affected by recent famine, plague
and malaria, again suggesting that influenza was at its worst among


Government of India, The Army in India and Its Evolution (Calcutta, ), –.

Thomas P. Herriot, ‘The Influenza Pandemic, , as Observed in the Punjab, India’
(MD thesis, University of Edinburgh, ), –.

Ibid., . Calcutta’s health officer had a similar experience: ‘Unfortunately with half my
staff down with influenza, very few precise observations were made in the early stages of the
epidemic.’ Annual Report on the Municipal Administration, Calcutta, –, I, .

Herriot, ‘Influenza Pandemic’, .

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       
populations already worn out by disease and hunger. In this specific
context, Klein’s argument for appending – to the earlier history
of India’s burgeoning mortality since the s seems apposite. In 
conditions were exacerbated by the failure of the monsoon and the
poor outturn of crops including the fodder – here was yet another
‘famine’ – needed for cows and buffaloes to produce the milk that
medical experts urged Indians to consume as an aid to their recovery.
The nights were bitterly cold and many Indians slept indoors, Herriot
noted, ‘in the little mud huts where there was overcrowding and no ven-
tilation’, an environment in which influenza and pneumonia thrived.
Victims were wracked with pain; some, delirious with fever, proved
hard to control. Their temperature rose to  or  degrees: they
were exhausted but unable to sleep. As their health deteriorated and
pneumonia set in, patients’ faces turned ‘a peculiar violet lavender
hue’: this, he observed, was a ‘grave sign’, promising little hope of recov-
ery. For those who did survive, convalescence was painful and slow.
Herriot drew some consolation from the fact that of the  cases he
treated only  died:  in , a relatively low proportion of those hospi-
talised. Given the bewildering array of symptoms patients presented
and continuing medical uncertainty as to the nature of the disease,
Herriot would have liked to have examined blood and urine samples
for himself, but he lacked the apparatus and the time to do so. His
Indian assistant, who helped with laboratory work, was laid up for
several weeks with pneumonic influenza: the only authoritative source
of information Herriot possessed was articles in The Lancet. He struggled
to keep track of patients, to record their symptoms, or know how best to
deal with their urgent complaints. He could only muddle through: it is
not surprising that even before the epidemic was fully over he was inva-
lided out of India and returned, broken in health, to Edinburgh. He
died, aged , at Berwick-upon-Tweed, in October .
Herriot’s personal account of the virtual breakdown of medical ser-
vices in Jullundur could be taken as indicative of the more general par-
alysis of modern societies and modern states around the globe in . In
this respect India was hardly unique: everywhere during the months
when influenza ruled the world, modernity seemingly stood still and
medical expertise and public health policy proved of little practical


Leigh, Punjab, .

Herriot, ‘Influenza Pandemic’, .

Ibid., –, .

Ibid., , .

Ibid., .

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  –     
benefit. But India’s medical modernity was fragile, particularly when
confronted with an epidemic crisis of such monumental proportions.
Workers in the more self-evidently ‘modern’ sectors of the Indian
economy were among those worst hit. Docks, railways, trams, telegraph
and postal services came almost to a standstill; productivity in textile fac-
tories slumped as half the workforce lay sick and dying or had fled. In
the Kolar goldfields in Mysore there were , cases of influenza
(roughly half the workforce) with  deaths. The high court in
Calcutta was unable to function, as judges, lawyers and jurors were
absent sick. The forestry service, among colonial India’s largest and
proudest state enterprises, ground to a virtual halt as officers and
labourers alike fell sick and died. City cremation grounds, which
after years of gradual reform had become exemplars of a kind of sanitary
modernity, struggled to cope with the sheer numbers of the dead: ,
bodies were cremated in Calcutta’s half-dozen burning grounds in ,
more than sixty a day, while in Bombay, amidst wartime shortages, it was
hard to find enough wood to consume so many corpses. In the country-
side the dead were simply dumped on waste ground or on riverbanks.
India’s modernity was unable to cope with such a comprehensive
onslaught on its war-weary services and fragile infrastructure. This
incapacity partly explains the archival absence referred to earlier – the
dearth of photographs, the paucity of medical research memoirs, even
of private correspondence. Too many people were overworked, sick,
or on their deathbeds, to have the time or energy to record what was
happening.

IV Influenza and the politics of memorialisation

Influenza received less public attention than it might otherwise have
done because for many Indians the epidemic was not the primary
issue. It was the symptom, not the underlying cause. Hunger, poverty
and soaring prices were what really mattered. Harsh and worsening eco-
nomic conditions aroused popular anger in ways not seen since the
height of the plague years. There were riots across the Madras


Sandra M. Tomkins, ‘The Failure of Expertise: Public Health Policy in Britain during
the – Influenza Epidemic’, Social History of Medicine,  (), –.

Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner, United Provinces, , app. D,  A.

The Times (London),  April , . This figure was presumably for deaths from all
causes, as elsewhere influenza deaths were reported as : C. P. Vinod Kumar,
P. G. Revathi and K. T. Rammohan, ‘Kolar Gold Mines: An Unfinished Biography of
Colonialism’, Economic and Political Weekly,  (), .

ToI,  July , .

In the Central Provinces alone  forestry workers died: ‘Central Provinces Forest
Administration Report, –’, Indian Forester,  (), .

ToI,  March , .

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       
Presidency in September , not over influenza or any government
attempts to control it, but over steep and sudden rises in food prices, exa-
cerbated by shortages, speculation and hoarding. By the same token,
sickness and death among the poorer classes partly explain why such pro-
tests quickly ebbed away. The collective energy was lacking to sustain
them, but wholesale mortality among the poor had the paradoxical
effect of creating a labour shortage and so boosted wages and
employment.
In the early plague years the popular and middle-class reaction had
been against excessive state intervention. In  the complaint was
that the government was too lethargic and inactive. Having little to
offer in their own defence, medical and sanitary officers were disposed
to blame the devastating impact of the epidemic on popular ignorance
and the ‘absolute helplessness’ of the people or on the sudden eruption
of a crisis that was beyond the capacity of any state to control. As one
official put it, ‘no agency can cope with an avalanche’. The inactivity
of the state made it the more likely, however, that Indians, especially
urban, middle-class Indians, would come forward instead – organising
relief committees, visiting the sick, handing out food and medicine,
directing the disposal of the dead. In an urban context, colonial
claims about the ‘absolute helplessness’ of the people look thin when
measured against the upsurge of middle-class philanthropy. Since the
s Indian religious and social welfare organisations like the Arya
Samaj, the Ramakrishna Mission, the Seva Samiti and Bombay’s
Social Service League had gained extensive experience of charitable
relief work in times of famine, pestilence and flood: that expertise was
now deployed to help those struck down with influenza. The demon-
strable inability of Western medicine and public health measures to
curb the epidemic or bring relief to sufferers encouraged practitioners
of other systems – Ayurveda, Unani, homoeopathy – to offer their


David Arnold, ‘Looting, Grain Riots and Government Policy in South India, ’,
Past & Present,  (), –.

Season and Crop Report, .

Bombay Chronicle,  October , Report on Indian Papers Published in the Bombay Presidency
(Bombay, ), week ending  October , .

Annual Sanitary Report, Central Provinces, , app. C, , .

Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner, Bombay, –, –; Annual Report on
the Municipal Administration, Calcutta, –, –; Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner,
Madras,  (Madras, ), –.

Ramanna, ‘Coping’, –; ToI,  September , ;  October , ; Annual Report
of the Sanitary Commissioner of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh,  (Allahabad, ), app.
D,  A.

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  –     
services and recommend their own medicines and tonics, leaving IMS
officers to rail against such ‘questionable remedies’.
The Government of India’s sanitary commissioner noted with some
condescension: ‘Never before, perhaps, in the history of India, have
the educated and more fortunately placed members of the community,
come forward in such large numbers to help their poorer brethren in
time of distress.’ He tried to put a positive gloss on the fact that
middle-class Indians had mobilised themselves to do what the state
had largely failed to. ‘History’, he declared, ‘has shown that unnecessary
loss of life through epidemics has been an important factor in awakening
a public health conscience.’ The ‘appalling mortality’ of  would not
have been in vain ‘if it inculcates in the minds of the general public the
dire necessity for public health reform, and for taxation to meet essential
expenditure’. In reality, though, influenza marked a further stage in the
maturing of Indian civil society and the passing of political leadership
and social hegemony from colonial officials to the Indian middle
classes. In their eyes at least, the response to influenza showed their
superior commitment to serving the poor and needy. ‘Who’, asked one
nationalist newspaper, ‘are the real well-wishers of the masses?’ For
any patriotic reader the answer was not seriously in doubt.
Another kind of politics was abroad, too. The war, however physically
distant from Indian shores, released in many Indians an impending sense
of the apocalypse, a civilisational and existential nightmare of which
influenza was only one manifestation. In the popular imagination the
mysterious epidemic was not influenza at all but ‘war fever’. In
September  an Indian identified only as ‘B’ wrote to the newspapers
from Poona claiming that the pandemic had been unleashed by ‘vapour
from the gas bombs’ in France and was now ‘spreading all over the
globe’. The idea was quickly ridiculed as unscientific and absurd, but
that it was published at all and drew such a critical response was a
sign that it reflected an underlying collective anxiety. The
Government of India’s sanitary commissioner insisted that, whatever
‘wild rumours’ might say, influenza was not a ‘war disease’. ‘Such wild


Deccan Ryot,  October , Report on Indian Papers, Bombay, week ending  November
, ; Rajendra Kumar Sen, A Treatise on Influenza: With Special Reference to the Pandemic of
 (North Lakhmipur, ), .

Glen Liston in Praja Mitra,  October , Report on Indian Papers, Bombay, week ending
 October , .

White, Preliminary Report, .

Annual Report, Sanitary Commissioner, India, , .

Kesari,  November , Report on Indian Papers, Bombay, week ending  November
, .

ToI,  September , .

White, Preliminary Report, .

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       
unfounded rumours’, he wrote, ‘as those which attributed the pandemic
to the extensive use of poison gas on the western front, or to the evil
machinations of our unscrupulous enemy [Germany], would scarcely
have deserved attention, had they not been so current in India during
the months of October and November [].’ A sense of impending
catastrophe was evident nonetheless. Pramanath Nath Bose, a Bengali
geologist formerly in state service, joined in the widely shared sense of
dismay at the madness of the brutal, mechanised warfare that had
seized mankind, threatening societies around the globe and imperilling
India. That influenza was a disease everyone with an education knew,
but the sickness that underlay it was that of a warped civilisation,
modern, mechanical, amoral.
Influenza also connected with the unfolding political crisis as national-
ist politicians sought to capitalise on Britain’s weakness and India’s hard-
ship to win vital concessions. If some of India’s leading dissidents, such as
Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Annie Besant, were less vocal than they had
been in , a new whirlwind force was emerging in Mohandas
Gandhi, who in a matter of months switched from recruiting soldiers
for the Raj to riding the wave of anti-colonial discontent. Recovering
from a protracted illness of his own, he called for non-violent resistance
against the repressive Rowlatt Act and so sparked a fresh round of protest
and defiance. It might be excessive to argue that agitational politics
drove endemic hunger from the newspapers’ front pages, or that, imper-
ial violence supplanting epidemic violence, the Amritsar massacre of
April , with its nearly  deaths, put the twelve million influenza
deaths in the shade; but something of that order helps explain why
influenza did not command more intense and lasting attention. The
Indian middle classes, so vocal over plague, were far more muted over
influenza. Though they, too, suffered and died in the epidemic, their
minds were elsewhere. As in Ireland in the crucial years –,
influenza in India could be subsumed within a more compelling story


Jim Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon (), xvi; White, Preliminary Report, .

Pramatha Nath Bose, National Education and Modern Progress (Calcutta, ).

Gandhi was involved in army recruitment at Godhra in Gujarat on  July  just as
‘Bombay influenza’ struck the town: ToI,  July , .

I see no reason to doubt Gandhi’s own assertion that he was suffering from dysentery
and exhaustion and not, as some recent writers claim, from influenza. Nor do I see grounds
for arguing that the epidemic ‘pushed India closer to independence’. Laura Spinney, Pale
Rider: The Spanish Flu of  and How It Changed the World (), , –. On the broad
relationship between political unrest and influenza, see Kenneth L. Gillion, Ahmedabad: A
Study in Indian Urban History (Canberra, ), ; James Masselos, ‘Some Aspects of
Bombay City Politics in ’, in Essays on Gandhian Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of ,
ed. R. Kumar (Oxford, ), ; C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad,
– (Oxford, ), –.

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  –     
of patriotic suffering and aspiring nationhood. Where Klein appended
the epidemic to a sustained crisis of mortality dating back to the s,
others at the time and since have incorporated influenza into other nar-
ratives: hunger, poverty and the subsistence crisis, the political struggle
for independence, or, as on the Kolar goldfields, the long history of
labour exploitation, industrial accidents and insanitary working
conditions.
By the time the full demographic toll from the epidemic had become
apparent through the decennial census in , India had moved on to
non-cooperation, civil disobedience and a political crisis that threatened
the survival of the Raj. By the time that crisis was over, India had a new
constitution, Gandhi was in jail and influenza mortality had sunk to
insignificant levels. The Armistice in November  was duly celebrated
in India and the death of Indian soldiers memorialised in monuments
from Neuve Chapelle to Basra and New Delhi. But there was no
public thanksgiving for the end of the epidemic, no formal commemor-
ation for influenza’s twelve million ‘fallen’.
Influenza was clearly personal as well as political. It impacted mas-
sively on families, communities and individuals across the subcontinent,
but the evidence for this is remarkably scarce and fragmentary, not least
with respect to women’s lives. In one of many obituary notices the
‘untimely’ death from influenza of Syed Edroos, ‘a young man of fine dis-
position and much promise’ and son of a member of the Bombay legis-
lature, was said to have ‘caused profound regret and sincere sorrow
among all sections of the community’; but we learn little more. In a
village in the United Provinces a young widow whose husband and
father had both died from influenza returned to an older tradition of
honouring the dead by committing sati on her husband’s funeral
pyre. The poet Nirala recalled how he was summoned home with a
telegram informing him his wife was gravely ill with influenza. By the
time he arrived at her village his wife had died and the Ganges was
swollen with the bodies of the dead. ‘This was the strangest time in my
life’, he wrote, ‘my family disappeared in the blink of an eye’, as did
most of their labourers and sharecroppers. Gandhi wrote a letter in


Milne, Stacking, ch. .

Kumar et al. ‘Kolar’, –.

Neuve Chapelle: India’s Memorial in France, – (); David A. Johnson, ‘New Delhi’s
All-India War Memorial (India Gate): Death, Monumentality and the Lasting Legacy of
Empire in India’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,  (), –.

On the need for a more ‘feminised’ history of the pandemic, see Terence Ranger, ‘A
Historian’s Foreword’, in Spanish Influenza, ed. Phillips and Killingray, xx.

ToI,  July , .

ToI,  May , .

Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, A Life Misspent (New York, ), –.

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       
November  to his son Harilal in which he noted that Harilal’s family
had been badly hit by influenza. But, with what almost seems like indif-
ference, Gandhi added that ‘such news is pouring in from everywhere so
that now the mind is hardly affected’. In a further letter to his English
friend C. F. Andrews, the following January , Gandhi remarked: ‘So
you have been suffering from influenza,’ but he makes no further
comment. Such vignettes, however intimate, moving or perturbing in
themselves, present us with only a very fragmentary impression of the
twelve million lives lost and the millions more whose existence was shat-
tered or destroyed by the epidemic. Instead, influenza is almost always
incidental to some other story. In his account of the man-eating tigers
of Kumaon, Jim Corbett described how, during the  epidemic,
corpses were dumped in the jungle for want of any other means of dis-
posing of them. The bodies were found by leopards who acquired a
taste for human flesh and so became man-eaters. An anecdote that
begins with human mortality becomes a story of animal predation: leo-
pards, not people, change their behaviour. And even now interest in the
 epidemic is often less about recovering the fine-grained materiality
of India’s past than a means of trying to gauge when and how the next
big pandemic will travel the globe and leave millions more dead in its
wake.
For all the immensity of lives lost and the enormous suffering it occa-
sioned, India’s influenza epidemic did not seem, even to contemporaries,
to convey any particular moral or political lesson, to be instructive to
state, science or society. It was not, from the perspective of the colonial
state and its medical establishment, an episode of which they could be
proud or which they could readily incorporate into a narrative of pro-
gress. For many Indians, to whatever class they belonged, influenza
was part of a more engrossing struggle for survival, subsistence and
self-determination. We, as historians, can and should try as far as we
can to fill up that apparent void, that seeming absence, in the historiog-
raphy of the pandemic. But I doubt that for India we will ever quite
escape from the characterisation of influenza as a ‘forgotten’ epidemic.


Gandhi to Harilal Gandhi,  November , Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol.
, .

Gandhi to Andrews,  January , ibid., .

Corbett, Man-Eaters, xvi.

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