Death before Victoria
Attitudes to death and dying varied widely in India between the 1780s and the 1820s, but one of the most striking characteristics is the extent to which Europeans were very much aware of their own sense of vulnerability and mortality. Almost all of the European visitors who went to India in that period comment on the number of cemeteries and burial grounds. They seem to see this as a very significant representation of the kind of threat that India posed to them personally. In addition to that, one is struck by the memoirs of many British travellers in India and the many British residents in India who are conscious of their own vulnerability to particular diseases. You have to bear in mind that, particularly from 1817 onwards, there was a major series of cholera epidemics, which spread very widely through India and neighbouring countries before spreading to the west, and a large number of Europeans as well as Indians died in those cholera epidemics.  | | Richard Bomford | | This faded photograph, collected by a rifleman in the British army in India, shows the consecration of a burial ground in the Jopa Murree Hills in 1899. |
There was something extremely sudden about death from cholera. It was a very violent disease, and people who appeared to be healthy one morning could be dead by the next day as a result of the disease. Therefore, there was an extreme sense of how uncertain life was for many British people in India at that time, and there was a large amount of medical literature which, in a sense, exemplifies that sense of vulnerability. Such literature described in rather graphic detail the horrors of dying from cholera. So, in that period between 1817 and the 1830s, there is a very strong sense of Europeans being particularly vulnerable to a disease which was emanating from India itself. Changing attitudes to death and dying
During the course of the nineteenth century, particularly from about the 1840s and 1850s onwards, British attitudes towards death in India changed in two or three significant ways. Firstly, the wealthier strata of Europeans--the civil servants, the army officers and their families--found that their lives became more secure, and the chances of their dying from a fatal disease were much less than they had been in the period before 1840 or 1830. So in many ways they appeared to live a more secure lifestyle. By contrast, the levels of sicknes--and to some extent mortality--remained very high amongst the poorer Europeans, particularly the British soldiers in India of whom there were many tens of thousands in the second half of the nineteenth century. And they suffered severely from sexually transmitted diseases, from dysentery, to some extent from typhoid and cholera. This was seen in many respects in the eyes of the superior officers and elsewhere as indicative of the laxer morals and the lower status of these poor Europeans. The impact of famine
Famine was one of the most important factors in the incidence of mortality in India during the nineteenth century. There were major famines from time to time during the course of that century, and they were particularly severe from the mid 1860s right through to the end of Victoria's reign in 1901. These famines were partly about the failure of the rains. They were also about the incidence of epidemic diseases and the underlying economic poverty and deprivation of the Indian population. In the eyes of the British, or at least some of them, the scale of Indian mortality during the course of this famine was not just about natural causes but was also about social and cultural factors. rtant famine-relief measures introduced by the British and funds collected for famine victims, the view of many British people in India was that in some way the Indian people were responsible for their own suffering, hardship and mortality. You quite often find very critical comments made of the way Indians, for reasons of caste, would not accept cooked food in relief camps, or the fear they had that if they went to these relief camps they would be poisoned or otherwise harmed by a seemingly malevolent government. From the British perspective, although there was a certain amount of humanitarian concern, there was this striking belief that Indians in certain ways were passive and pathetic in their attitudes to death. The impact of Indian death rituals
Broadly speaking there are two attitudes one can discern in British--and particularly in official--attitudes to Indian death rituals and practices in the nineteenth century. One is a tendency to sensationalise and exoticise these, to see them as extremely strange, very peculiar and in many ways as dangerous or as indicating the depravity of Indian society as they regarded it. Clear examples of this from the early nineteenth century was the discovery and condemnation of female infanticide, which was believed to be very widespread in parts of northern and western India, as well as the practice of suttee, the burning of widows on their husbands funeral pyres, which the British actually formally outlawed in 1829. Suttee, taken along with certain practices at pilgrimage centres and the cult of "thuggee," as it was seen, tended to create, in the minds of many Europeans, the view that Indians in some ways had peculiar practices, peculiar beliefs, peculiar ides which contributed to this kind of cult of death in Indian society. But one has to set alongside that, the fact that in many ways the British government in India, particularly after the mutiny and rebellion of 1857, was very reluctant to involve itself in death practices. This was partly from a fear that if it intervened in Hindu or Muslim rituals, it would provoke a political backlash, and the British were simply not prepared for political reasons to entertain that degree of intervention. Mortality and responsibility
There comes a point when the mass mortality associated with famine, perhaps understandably, becomes almost impossible to grapple with. To think in terms of 3 or 4 million people dying over the course of a few months is very difficult for any one to come to terms with. But there is also a sense in which the response to that, was to claim: 'It is not our responsibility. It is the responsibility of the Indian people themselves. They brought this upon themselves either because of their apathy, their lethargy or because they were improvident or foolish'. |
