The Otherness of India
Death confirmed Indians' 'otherness' in other ways, too. Colonial policies and attitudes towards dead and dying Indians, often in the name of sanitation and public health, was a frequent cause of tension and, at times, confrontation. There was, for instance, a long-running debate in Bombay in the 1850s as to whether Indians were to be allowed to bury their dead (especially still-born or very young infants) within their own backyards. A draft bill declared this practice to be 'prejudicial to the public health and welfare'' and called for its prohibition. 
Late Victorian Holocausts/Verso | This illustration from Kipling's famous short story "William the Conquerer" which was published in 1896, is an insight into one aspect of the British self image. This image appeared in the Ladies Home Journal of January 1896 and was etched by the American artist W. L. Taylor. A tall and dignified British Officer is making his way across the eastern scrub surrounded by plump and grateful native children. | | | |
But Jugannath Sunkersett, an Indian member of the Governor's Council, was quick to point out that the draft bill, while giving an unlimited power to the [city's] Conservancy Board, will no doubt create very great alarm among all classes of the [Indian] people, and it will be the most unpopular measure that was ever attempted in this place, and, consequently [he warned], it ought to be well considered before it is adopted. Parsis, Hindus and Muslims alike would, he argued, be offended by the bill, if it were ever made law, and if suitable alternatives were not first offered for the appropriate disposal of the dead. The Governor's Council decided that it was indeed useless to proceed, and the bill was dropped, but not before a European member of the Council, a Mr Corfield, had argued that the needs of public health ought to be upheld, regardless of religious objections: I am as loath [he wrote] as any of my colleagues to interfere with the religious or caste prejudices of our Native fellow subjects; but where measures affecting the health, indeed the existence, to a great extent, of the whole community, are concerned, I need not point out that it is the duty of all to waive those prejudices as far as possible for the public good... If such measures are deemed necessary in a climate like that of England for the preservation of the public health, I should say they must be doubly necessary here. Religion and sanitation
Similar debates resurfaced from time to time across Victorian India. In some cases, most evidently during the course of the plague epidemic in western and northern India in the 1890s and 1900s, intervention on sanitary grounds could take extreme forms--directed not only against the prohibition of religious fairs and pilgrimages and the destruction of property, but also at the physical examination of travellers, the forceful removal of suspected plague victims to hospital and the rapid disposal of suspected plague corpses, making scant allowance for customary death rites and observances. But, more commonly, at least before the 1890s, when it came to Indians, political pragmatism prevailed over sanitary imperatives. Thus, in the mid-1860s the Government of Bengal similarly debated the wisdom, or otherwise, of trying to ban the practice of leaving the sick and elderly to die on the banks of the Hooghly. If one believed some European detractors, this practice was little better than that earlier Indian trinity of sati, female infanticide and thugee. But the prevailing wisdom in government circles was that it was slowly dying out under the salutary influence of advancing education, and to try to ban it would be to 'evince a reckless disregard of Native feelings and prejudices'. If, remarked one senior official, a Hindu believed that he would gain everlasting salvation by dying on the banks of the river, 'I very much doubt whether any Government, and least of all an alien Government, should prevent his being carried there'.  | |
| Knowledge Test | | | Now that you have completed this free seminar, see what you have learned by answering a few short questions on "Death in Victorian India." | | |
The impression I have is that the nature of this mass mortality, and the way in which Indian death practices and rites were seen to be strange and exotic, created an enormous social, cultural and even political distance between the British who ruled India and the majority of their Indian subjects. It was seen to be an uncrossable divide which posited the Indians as a kind of alien presence in their own land, and yet exemplified the British as in some way standing for sanitation, order and civilisation.
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