In the 50 or so years before Victoria's accession, Europeans in India seemed to be haunted by visions of their own mortality. In a sense this reflected the high levels of sickness and mortality among Europeans of all ages and classes, but it also expressed a sense of the collective vulnerability of the white population and its feeling of exile in an alien land. Maria Graham, one of the most discerning observers of India in the opening years of the nineteenth century, captured this mood in her comments on the English burying ground in Calcutta, the extensive Park Street cemetery, in 1809, barely 40 years after it had first opened:

There are many acres covered so thick with columns, urns, and obelisks, that there scarcely seems to be room for another [she wrote]; it is like a city of the dead; it extends on both sides of the road, and you see nothing beyond it; and the greater number of those buried here are under five-and-twenty years of age! It is a painful reflection ... to consider the number of young men cut off in the first two or three years of residence in this climate.

Richard Bomford

"Life is passing away and we are in the wrong place." Graves throughout India mark the passing of Europeans afflicted by disease. This monument was erected at Meerut cemetery in the late nineteenth century in memory of the son of the mourner. Meerut is a town in the north-western Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. It was a major military outpost and has passed into history as the location of the outbreak of the 1857 sepoy rebellion, the Indian Mutiny. The majority of the graves in this church date from before 1857, the days when the army belonged to the British East India Company and not to the British crown. The days when the British were most vulnerable from the onslaught of diseases such as cholera and typhoid.

Nearly 30 years later, Emily Eden, travelling through northern India with her brother, Lord Auckland, the Governor-General, witnessed at first hand some of the ravages of the 1837 famine and its pitiful victims. Although there were sights from the picturesque to the sublime that did excite her somewhat grudging admiration, she could not but feel that 'life is passing away, and we are in the wrong place'. India--for Europeans--was a land of 'shattered constitutions': 'every inch of the plains in India [she wrote] has its fever, only there is not time to catch them all'. It was, she remarked to her sister, a 'melancholy' thought to reflect on how many among the small band of Europeans had died in the short time she had been in India.

Melancholy, mutiny and cholera
One of the factors that seemed to make India such a 'melancholy' place for Europeans in the early nineteenth century was the prevalence of epidemic diseases--and specifically cholera--which had burst forth from Bengal in 1817 and wrought huge destruction among Indians and Europeans alike. The suddenness and violence with which people died of cholera--to be in apparently rude health one day and a lifeless corpse the next--made this disease a particularly shocking exemplar of the precariousness and unpredictability of European existence.

In his account of his travels in Rajasthan in the early 1820s, James Tod, soldier, diplomat and historian, mingled glowingly Romantic descriptions of landscape and scenery with mournful recollections of how many, not least among his fellow officers, had perished in the prime of their lives to this foul disease. When it first appeared among the East India Company's armies in north India, Tod recalled:

we flattered ourselves that it was only the intemperate, the ill-fed, or ill-clothed, that fell victims to it, [but] we soon discovered that murri [the sickness] was no respecter of persons, and that the prince and the peasant, the European and the native, the robust and the weak, the well-fed and the abstinent, were alike subject to her influence.

But as the age of Victoria advanced, this extreme sense of European vulnerability and mortality, this melancholy prospect of the British in India, seemed steadily to retreat, or at least to redefine itself. Due in part to improvements in sanitation and personal hygiene, the European elite (led by the civil servants, the army officers and their families) began to appear less susceptible to fatal diseases and to the epidemic tides that periodically scourged the rest of India.

Richard Bomford

"We soon discovered that the murri was no respecter of persons, and that the prince, peasant, the European and the native, the robust and the weak, the well-fed and the abstinent, were alike subject to her influence." James Tod's words were all too true for British soldiers in the early part of the nineteenth century. An example can be made of the 17th Light Dragoons regiment, which landed in India in 1808. They finally returned to England in 1823, a quarter of the strength at which they arrived. Cholera had decimated their forces: they lost 800 men to cholera and other diseases and only 150 in battle. This image of the Gymnasium Group "G" Company was taken between 1889 and 1901, a time when the British existence in India was under significantly less threat from disease. At the close of the Victorian era, the British in India were living in relatively good health.

of 1857-8 created a new and unexpected sense of vulnerability, and exposed European civilians, including women and children, to physical attack, and brought a new upsurge of mortality from such diseases as smallpox, cholera and dysentery. But the uprising was met with stern repression and did not dent British determination to hold on to India for an indefinite future. Unlike the mournful necropolis on Park Street 50 years earlier, the memory of those who had died in the rebellion seemed to strengthen this collective resolve, celebrated as at the Mutiny Memorial in Cawnpore, in white marble, with an angel or two in loving attendance.

The threat of death receding
Medical writers, who had dwelt so vividly on the horrors of cholera in the 1820s and 30s, and, it must be said, on the gothic horror of their own treatments (violent purges, bleedings and gum-rotting mercurials), began by mid-century to make much more reassuring noises. Although white women still died in childbirth and delivered themselves of sickly infants, and though Europeans of all ages and classes suffered debilitating bouts of dysentery and malaria, it became possible for W. J. Moore to write a best-selling manual of family medicine (first published in 1874) which suggested that, for Europeans, a relatively normal family life was, in medical terms, perfectly possible. In a similar work published in 1883 Hunt and Kenny urged European women in places like India to be cheerful and 'make light of the petty discomforts of tropical life'.

Richard Bomford

A view of Murree, from the Murree Hills. Such hill-stations afforded the opportunity to escape the heat and swelter that spread disease.

With improved transport--steamships, railways and the Suez Canal--Europeans could spend less of their working lives in India, could travel in relative comfort, and seek periodic rest and an eventual retirement back in Britain. More immediately to hand, the opening up from early in Victoria's reign of Indian hill-stations created at least the illusion that even in the tropics it was possible to escape the 'withering heat and enervating damp of the plains' and enjoy a near normal life in 'temperate' surroundings. As Richard Burton remarked with exaggerated flourish on a visit to the Nilgiris in 1850, even orphan European children in the hills possessed a freshness of complexion that contrasted:

 

wonderfully [with] the cadaverous waxy hue which the European epidermis loves to assume in the tropics. Most brilliant look the ladies; the gentlemen are sunburnt and robust; and the juveniles appear fresh and chubby, quite a different creation from the pallid, puny, meagre, sickly, irritable little wretches that do nothing but cry and perspire in the plains.

The health of the poor and the native

	Thinking Points
	Why do you think that the European sense of vulnerability in the face of death and disease receded as the nineteenth century wore on? Which do you think was the more influential factor: improvements in sanitation, or desensitisation to the scale of Indian fatalities?

The health of poorer Europeans, especially the rank and file of British regiments who were stationed in India in large numbers after the mutiny, made less rapid progress. The outbreak of cholera that attacked 20,000 white soldiers and their families in 1861 (and resulted in more than 1,200 deaths) was indicative of this, but even this epidemic episode was by then considered sufficiently shocking to demand--and receive--urgent remedial action. A royal commission into the sanitary state of the army, prompted by Florence Nightingale fresh from Scutari, and reporting in 1863, strenuously pressed the need to reform hygiene in the army and gave new emphasis to an equation of sanitation with civilisation. Spending much of their time in barracks, living bored and (in the eyes of superior officers) dissolute lives, white soldiers continued throughout the century to suffer high levels of sickness, not least from venereal diseases, dysentery, and malaria (though they died in less prodigious numbers than their pre-mutiny comrades in arms).

Their continuing susceptibility to disease, in an age of growing confidence in the ability to prevent or contain disease, remained a significant marker, as much of their perceived moral weakness as of any actual physical infirmity, and not until the 1890s and 1900s were substantial advances made in the prevention and treatment of syphilis, typhoid and malaria.

Late Victorian Holocausts/Verso

Burning plague victims in Bombay, 1898.

By the opening years of the twentieth century the understanding of disease had advanced enormously: cholera, apparently no longer to be dreaded, could be described as 'easily preventible', and even malaria was subject to a drug (quinine) that was allegedly able to 'both control and cure the disease'. Europeans had not ceased to fall sick and occasionally die in India, but the contrast with a century earlier was striking and could not but be seen as evidence of a superior civilisation at work. 'A hundred years ago', wrote G. M. Giles of the Indian Medical Service in 1904, 'a prolonged residence in the Tropics was regarded with well-founded horror'. Now, he went on to argue, with the right knowledge and sensible precautions, Europeans could easily be spared the fate of their forefathers.

But Indians were not spared. In the closing years of Victoria's reign, bubonic plague spread rapidly across India. Between 1896 and the end of 1901, 688,000 Indians died (284,000 of them in 1901 alone), but not a single British man, woman or child died of plague in that period.