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 cremation 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 1918–19 is all the more striking in that there are a great number of photographs of the plague epidemic in India in the 1890s and 1900s, showing precisely such scenes from hospitalising the sick to cremating the dead.Footnote ¹² Why not for 1918–19? Similarly, there are a large number of detailed reports, statistical compendia and commissions 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 1919 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 princely states.Footnote ¹³ As we have seen, the provincial sanitary commissioners gave vivid, often detailed, accounts of the epidemic in their annual reports for 1918, but thereafter had virtually nothing to say on the matter, and it was left to the Indian census report of 1921, published in 1923, to provide more comprehensive data on India's missing millions.Footnote ¹⁴ 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.Footnote ¹⁵ 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 2002 by Howard Phillips and David Killingray that the 1918–19 pandemic has ‘yielded a relatively poor historiographical harvest’, though, given how much new material has appeared since then, that is now questionable. Globally, the pandemic no longer seems to fit the ‘forgotten’ tag once almost universally applied to it.Footnote ¹⁶ 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’.Footnote ¹⁷ In India, accounts of cholera and plague over the previous century vastly outweighed the scanty volume of material, personal and public, generated by influenza.Footnote ¹⁸ Widespread illiteracy is an insufficient explanation for this.Footnote ¹⁹ Although influenza 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’.Footnote ²⁰ How can twelve million people die, and yet apparently leave so little trace?

One plausible explanation might be that British India was an unmodern 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 subjects. 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 1918–19 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.Footnote ²¹ 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 accentuated by, imperial misrule. Nobody in government, it might be said, was particularly concerned about the twelve million deaths in 1918–19 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 1973 which looked at the period 1871 to 1921 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 crescendo of death’ that culminated with the influenza epidemic of 1918–19.Footnote ²² 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 1919, 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 drainage 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 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 1918–19 influenza epidemic is an argument about botched modernisation and ‘tatterdemalion’ health services sufficient to account for what happened to India and its apparent historical neglect?Footnote ²³

II Influenza in context

1918 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 1890 and lingered on for several years. Interestingly, in the light of 1918, 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.Footnote ²⁴ A few medical reports were written about the disease, but, until it recurred with such virulence in 1918, influenza was, one sanitary commissioner confessed, ‘regarded with apathy and scepticism by the vast majority of the [medical] profession’ in India.Footnote ²⁵ By the time influenza had petered out, India was overwhelmed 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 1858 and the run-up to Independence and Partition in 1947. Unprecedented though it appeared at the time, in retrospect the 1918 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.Footnote ²⁶ Firstly, there was great alarm that by spreading to India in 1896 from Hong Kong and potentially moving on to Europe, plague was re-enacting the apocalyptic 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 administrations rapidly adopted extraordinarily wide-ranging and draconian measures 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 backtrack 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 profoundly 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 commission and forming a bacteriological department to examine this and other diseases and find urgent solutions to their spread.Footnote ²⁷ 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 opposition 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 1918–19 epidemic it was in part because it had been chastened by its previous experience of plague.Footnote ²⁸

By the outbreak of war in 1914 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.Footnote ²⁹ And, even if famine had not disappeared entirely, it seemed to be in abeyance. Many issues – malnutrition, infant mortality, women's health, tuberculosis – 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 1917 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 ‘phenomenally low’ levels. Plague deaths were at their lowest since 1898, having consistently declined since 1905: indeed, plague had ‘almost vanished’ from the city's vital statistics.Footnote ³⁰ India's great eastern metropolis could, it seemed, now anticipate a new age of public health.

Then in 1918, 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 1907.Footnote ³¹ 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 1913 is to be regretted.’Footnote ³² But then, when the influenza crisis had passed by early 1919, 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.Footnote ³³ From such a perspective, even in the 1920s, influenza appeared as a temporary aberration, not a regular or indicative feature of the epidemiological landscape.

Moreover, unlike plague, and before it cholera, both of which had erupted from the East to menace the West, in 1918 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 1933. India's expertise in medical science had grown enormously since the 1890s 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 prepared in three of India's leading bacteriological laboratories, there was little confidence in its effectiveness.Footnote ³⁴ In December 1918 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.Footnote ³⁵ Compared with recent discoveries in, and treatment of, malaria, plague, typhoid, among other diseases, there was, from the perspective of India's medical experts, nothing about the influenza epidemic to celebrate and memorialise. It was an unhappy episode, not a meaningful 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.Footnote ³⁶ 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 War that helped give the epidemic its global dynamic and its local character.Footnote ³⁷ 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 1914 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 53,486 were killed and 64,350 wounded, a heavy loss but one that might seem of relatively little demographic significance compared to the influenza death toll.Footnote ³⁸ 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 enormous strain the Indian economy and its creaking infrastructure were under by 1918.

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 1918 – associating the arrival of the epidemic in India with the protracted and enervating Mesopotamia campaign.Footnote ³⁹ 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 1918 when influenza first struck, and the disease quickly impacted on the number of men available or willing to present themselves for enlistment.Footnote ⁴⁰ Once the disease had become established, troop movements and army barracks were central mechanisms in the India-wide dissemination of the disease.Footnote ⁴¹ Many of India's volunteer soldiers 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 principal recruiting ground.Footnote ⁴² India was also a victim of the wartime ‘famine of tonnage’, one of the several forms of ‘famine’ to which India was becoming subject by 1918.Footnote ⁴³ 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 1918 reached record levels for food-grains, cloth, kerosene and other essentials.Footnote ⁴⁴

In the countryside, famine in a more literal sense stalked several provinces.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although it is frequently argued that the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 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 attendance, food and clothing are in defect.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Even among Indian soldiers, who might otherwise have been regarded as relatively fit and with access to reliable medical attention, fatalities from influenza and pneumonia were remarkably high.Footnote ⁴⁷ Many women in this age group, particularly 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.Footnote ⁴⁸ As I. D. Mills has remarked, in India in 1918 famine and influenza constituted ‘a set of mutually exacerbating catastrophes’.Footnote ⁴⁹ 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’.Footnote ⁵⁰

One of the problems India faced was that many officers of the Indian Medical Service (numbering barely 700 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 the Great War military health took precedence over civilian needs.Footnote ⁵¹ Some members of this elite medical service had died by 1918, others had yet to revert to their civilian posts. This exposed the underlying fragility 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 1918 are evident from an MD thesis on the Indian epidemic submitted to the University of Edinburgh in 1920 by a Scottish doctor, Thomas Herriot. Herriot had qualified in 1912 with a specialist interest in disease prevention which involved him in intensive laboratory work. He was drafted into the British Army in February 1915 and made a temporary captain in the RAMC a year later. Transferred to the Indian Army in 1918, in the summer of that year he was put in charge of the military 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.Footnote ⁵²

The first wave of the epidemic reached Punjab in August 1918: 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.Footnote ⁵³ 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 parasites 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’.Footnote ⁵⁴ 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 populations already worn out by disease and hunger.Footnote ⁵⁵ In this specific context, Klein's argument for appending 1918–19 to the earlier history of India's burgeoning mortality since the 1870s seems apposite. In 1918 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 ventilation’, an environment in which influenza and pneumonia thrived.Footnote ⁵⁶ Victims were wracked with pain; some, delirious with fever, proved hard to control. Their temperature rose to 102 or 103 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 recovery. For those who did survive, convalescence was painful and slow. Herriot drew some consolation from the fact that of the 214 cases he treated only 21 died: 1 in 10, a relatively low proportion of those hospitalised.Footnote ⁵⁷ 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.Footnote ⁵⁸ 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 invalided out of India and returned, broken in health, to Edinburgh.Footnote ⁵⁹ He died, aged 62, at Berwick-upon-Tweed, in October 1949.

Herriot's personal account of the virtual breakdown of medical services in Jullundur could be taken as indicative of the more general paralysis of modern societies and modern states around the globe in 1918. 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 benefit.Footnote ⁶⁰ 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 factories slumped as half the workforce lay sick and dying or had fled.Footnote ⁶¹ In the Kolar goldfields in Mysore there were 13,600 cases of influenza (roughly half the workforce) with 960 deaths.Footnote ⁶² The high court in Calcutta was unable to function, as judges, lawyers and jurors were absent sick.Footnote ⁶³ 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.Footnote ⁶⁴ 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: 22,549 bodies were cremated in Calcutta's half-dozen burning grounds in 1918, more than sixty a day, while in Bombay, amidst wartime shortages, it was hard to find enough wood to consume so many corpses.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the countryside 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 economic conditions aroused popular anger in ways not seen since the height of the plague years. There were riots across the Madras Presidency in September 1918, not over influenza or any government attempts to control it, but over steep and sudden rises in food prices, exacerbated by shortages, speculation and hoarding.Footnote ⁶⁶ By the same token, sickness and death among the poorer classes partly explain why such protests 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.Footnote ⁶⁷

In the early plague years the popular and middle-class reaction had been against excessive state intervention. In 1918 the complaint was that the government was too lethargic and inactive.Footnote ⁶⁸ 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’.Footnote ⁶⁹ 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.Footnote ⁷⁰ 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 1890s 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.Footnote ⁷¹ The demonstrable 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 services and recommend their own medicines and tonics,Footnote ⁷² leaving IMS officers to rail against such ‘questionable remedies’.Footnote ⁷³

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.’Footnote ⁷⁴ 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 1918 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’.Footnote ⁷⁵ 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?’Footnote ⁷⁶ 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 1918 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’.Footnote ⁷⁷ 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.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Government of India's sanitary commissioner insisted that, whatever ‘wild rumours’ might say, influenza was not a ‘war disease’. ‘Such wild 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 [1918].’Footnote ⁷⁹ 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.Footnote ⁸⁰

Influenza also connected with the unfolding political crisis as nationalist politicians sought to capitalise on Britain's weakness and India's hardship 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 1917, 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.Footnote ⁸¹ 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.Footnote ⁸² It might be excessive to argue that agitational politics drove endemic hunger from the newspapers’ front pages, or that, imperial violence supplanting epidemic violence, the Amritsar massacre of April 1919, with its nearly 400 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 1916–22, influenza in India could be subsumed within a more compelling story of patriotic suffering and aspiring nationhood.Footnote ⁸³ Where Klein appended the epidemic to a sustained crisis of mortality dating back to the 1870s, others at the time and since have incorporated influenza into other narratives: 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.Footnote ⁸⁴

By the time the full demographic toll from the epidemic had become apparent through the decennial census in 1923, 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 1918 was duly celebrated in India and the death of Indian soldiers memorialised in monuments from Neuve Chapelle to Basra and New Delhi.Footnote ⁸⁵ But there was no public thanksgiving for the end of the epidemic, no formal commemoration for influenza's twelve million ‘fallen’.

Influenza was clearly personal as well as political. It impacted massively 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.Footnote ⁸⁶ In one of many obituary notices the ‘untimely’ death from influenza of Syed Edroos, ‘a young man of fine disposition and much promise’ and son of a member of the Bombay legislature, was said to have ‘caused profound regret and sincere sorrow among all sections of the community’; but we learn little more.Footnote ⁸⁷ 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.Footnote ⁸⁸ 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.Footnote ⁸⁹ Gandhi wrote a letter in November 1918 to his son Harilal in which he noted that Harilal's family had been badly hit by influenza. But, with what almost seems like indifference, Gandhi added that ‘such news is pouring in from everywhere so that now the mind is hardly affected’.Footnote ⁹⁰ In a further letter to his English friend C. F. Andrews, the following January 1919, Gandhi remarked: ‘So you have been suffering from influenza,’ but he makes no further comment.Footnote ⁹¹ 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 shattered 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 1918 epidemic, corpses were dumped in the jungle for want of any other means of disposing of them. The bodies were found by leopards who acquired a taste for human flesh and so became man-eaters.Footnote ⁹² An anecdote that begins with human mortality becomes a story of animal predation: leopards, not people, change their behaviour. And even now interest in the 1918 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.Footnote ⁹³

For all the immensity of lives lost and the enormous suffering it occasioned, 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 progress. 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 historiography of the pandemic. But I doubt that for India we will ever quite escape from the characterisation of influenza as a ‘forgotten’ epidemic.