India: Author of its own Misery
As Europeans in Victorian India felt themselves relatively more secure from an early and miserable death, their lives snuffed out prematurely by cholera or the plethora of fevers to which Emily Eden alluded, the more pathetic or perverse Indian mortality appeared to Western observers. Death and the manner of dying seemed to epitomise India's intrinsic weaknesses, its social and cultural peculiarities, its dismal distance from the resplendent heights of European health and sanitation. ![[image]](139_suttee.jpg) | | © K.L.Kamat. All Rights Reserved | | Suttee stone at Uttara Kannada. |
There was, indeed, a long history (extending well back into the eighteenth century) to the Western perception of India as the author of its own misery. Early in the nineteenth century British missionaries and Benthamite reformers made much of the horrors of India--rituals of death that included the practice of suttee (the burning of wives on their husbands' funeral pyres, officially banned in 1829) , the crushing of Hindu pilgrims under the temple car of the god Jagannath at Puri, the practice of female infanticide (believed widespread in northern and western India), and the secretive thugee murders--all these served to sensationalize and exoticize Indian mortality even without the mounting tally of mass mortality from famine and epidemics on a scale unknown to Europe since the Middle Ages. The horrors of India
That Indians were the source of their own suffering--and thereby a source of real or potential danger to others--was often implied and not infrequently stated. W. W. Hunter one of the most influential and articulate of Victorian India's scholar officials, dwelt at length in 1872 on the horrors of the annual pilgrimage to the temple of Jagganath at Puri, the squalid and unsanitary nature of the town and its environs, and the thousands of departing pilgrims, ill-fed and scantily clothed, who carried cholera with them over large parts of India. Not only was the pilgrimage itself 'a homicidal enterprise' 'that turned Puri into a 'magazine of mortality'', but the ''over-crowded, pest-haunted dens'' in which the pilgrims congregated could at any moment, Hunter argued, become the centre from which the disease could spread as far as Europe and North America. The squalid pilgrim army of Jagannath with its rags and hair and skin freighted with vermin and impregnated with infection, may any year slay thousands of the most talented and beautiful of our age in Vienna, London, or Washington. Similar arguments were made about Indian servants, townsfolk and villagers communicating contagious diseases such as typhoid and smallpox into European homes. Even in famine times, when Europeans had little cause to feel personally at risk, they often found it hard not to blame Indians themselves for their own misfortune. Already by the 1780s Indian responses to famine were widely regarded as mere abject surrender to death and illustrative of a ''truly Asiatic apathy''. While many late-nineteenth-century officials busied themselves with organising famine relief and compiling statistics of migration and mortality, others saw in famine clear evidence of Indian improvidence and irrationality, the kind of ''ridiculous prejudice'', the ''simple obstinacy and foolish scruples'', that kept scores of near-starving people from accepting cooked food for caste reasons or from entering relief camps for fear of being poisoned by an alien and malevolent state 
Late Victorian Holocausts/Verso | Villagers in Rajputana in 1899. Nearly a million villagers died in the locally and British administered sections of Rajputana. Mike Davis, in his book Late Victorian Holocausts cites Pierre Loti, who arrived at Rajputana in 1899 by train to a haunting scene of wailing emaciated children: "Oh! look at the poor little things jostling there against the barrier, stretching out their withered hands towards us from the end of the bones which represent their arms. Every part of their meagre skeleton protrudes with shocking visibility through the brown skin that hangs in folds about them; their stomachs are so sunken that one might think that their bowels had been altogether removed. Flies swarm on their lips and eyes, drinking what moisture may still exude..." |
''More terrible, if possible, even than the actual want'', wrote an anonymous author in the Edinburgh Review in 1877, was ''the profound melancholy caused by the famine''. He condemned the ''moral helplessness and despondency'' shown by Indians in the latest famines and blamed their adherence to the 'massive evil' of caste, that 'great minister of death'. Even when food was available, and there were railways to speed its distribution, it was, the writer complained, almost necessary to force food down the throats of such a 'passively starving people'. It was ironic that while the British authorities vigorously crushed any manifestations of popular protest and violence, such as food riots and raids on private grain stores, they also simultaneously criticised Indians for appearing so fatalistic and supine where Europeans, it was presumed, would have shown greater resolution and ingenuity. The exoticism of caste and religion was invoked to explain what sheer exhaustion and long-term deprivation might more logically--and universally--have accounted for. A common humanity?
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| Thinking Point | | | On what grounds did Europeans blame Indians for their own misfortunes and suffering? | | |
This is not to say that Europeans were entirely without care or compassion. Substantial sums of money were collected from Europeans in India and abroad for famine relief, and there were individuals like William Digby who wrote angrily about the woeful failure of the British administration to act promptly and adequately in response to the wholesale suffering caused by the south Indian famine of 1876-8, in which at least 3 million people perished. And there were officials, missionaries and others who were far from indifferent to what was going on around them, though they often found it hard to express it. As one missionary wrote during the Madras famine, 'The half of the horrors of this famine have not, cannot, be told. Men do not care to reproduce in writing scenes that have made their blood run cold'. | |
| Thinking Point | | | Europeans in the late nineteenth century saw progress in medicine and sanitation as signs of a superior civilisation at work. How did they view the continuing susceptibility of Indians to disease and disaster? | | |
But many Europeans seemed unable to relate in terms of a common humanity to the nature and scale of the unfolding tragedy--perhaps they would have felt overwhelmed if they had allowed themselves to do so or would have been considered irresponsible and unmanly by a regime that demanded strict devotion to duty. In the main, the experience of famine seemed to heighten the colonial divide, to emphasise Indians' apparent inability to look after themselves. By their seemingly self-induced suffering they were made to forfeit a right to greater humanitarian assistance and freed the British of more than the modicum of state responsibility enjoined by an essentially laissez faire regime. Much has been written (with justice) about the interventionist nature of the colonial state, but it should be noted that exoticism--and the cultural distancing it created--was an influential factor in the self-circumscription of colonial power.
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