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Business News/ Opinion / Déjà View | The Bombay Fever
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Déjà View | The Bombay Fever

The Bombay Fever that came back to India in September 1918 ravaged the country like no other disaster before or after

Nurses care for victims of the ‘Spanish Flu’ amidst canvas tents during an outdoor fresh air cure, in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1918. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesPremium
Nurses care for victims of the ‘Spanish Flu’ amidst canvas tents during an outdoor fresh air cure, in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1918. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

It all began, some say, on the 10th of June 1918. Seven policemen in Mumbai, then Bombay, including at least one chap who worked in the docks, were admitted to a hospital with a non-malarial fever. Five days later, employees of a shipping firm, W&A Graham and Co., also fell ill. Soon banks and offices in the city fell empty as employees, in droves, reported sick or stayed at home. By the 3rd of July, less than a week after the initial outbreak, 230 people a day in the city were dying of this outbreak of influenza.

And then, just as it had appeared, the disease vanished. A total of 1,600 lives had been lost and, according to John Andrew Turner, the city’s health officer, a million man-days of work were lost to the city’s economy.

Turner was relieved somewhat, but also concerned. Where had this flu come from? How had it spread so quickly? How could he be prepared for another attack if he knew so little about it?

But then India, in the early years of the 20th century, was no stranger to pandemics. Public health services were still poor, much of rural India had no access to doctors or hospitals, and a combination of weather, malnutrition and famine made Indians particularly susceptible to breakouts of plague, cholera and influenza.

So the flu scare of June 1918 didn’t unduly rattle anybody. It came. It went. No big deal.

And then in September 1918 the Bombay Fever came back to the city.

      ***

This year the world marks a 100 years since the outbreak of the First World War. Countless books, documentaries, apps, websites and live events are being organized. India too has joined in with a number of new books, special editions of magazines, and a website or two. By now the untold story of the million-plus Indian soldiers who fought the war has been widely written about. And no doubt in four years’ time we will have another storm of content and media around the centenary of the armistice.

However, 2018 will mark the centenary of yet another event that, arguably, had an even greater impact on India. It may not have shaped Indian politics or left a mark on the Indian freedom struggle, but the Bombay Fever that came back to India in September 1918 ravaged the country like no other disaster before or after.

When you read about it, the great global flu pandemic of 1918 has some intriguing parallels with the First World War. For instance there is still debate about how it actually broke out. Where did it start? The pandemic was due to a particularly vile mutation of the regular flu virus. But was it one mutation or three?

Was it taken by Chinese labourers to the trenches and then broadcast from there? Or did American soldiers take it to the trenches from their army camps back home? (There is consensus that soldiers going back home took the virus with them.)

Even its most popular moniker is misleading: the Spanish Flu. There was nothing particularly Spanish about it. Just that Spain was neutral during the war, and an uncensored Spanish press was allowed to report about this deadly disease racing through communities.

It also manifested itself in bewildering ways. Some victims would drop dead, mid-sentence, without any warning. Others would suffer for days, blood sometimes shooting out of their noses in jets.

Like in Bombay, many other places in the world saw a mild flu first, followed by a second, more deadly version. (There may have been a third attack, but that is also a matter of debate.)

No country on the planet suffered as much from the 1918 flu as India. Estimates of the death toll in India alone vary anywhere from 10 to 25 million. The latest estimates for deaths in the British-controlled parts of India put it at around 14 million. There are no reliable estimates for deaths in the rest of India. But many millions of lives must have been lost there too.

Thus India accounted anywhere from a half to one-fifth of the total global death toll. What is more astonishing is that most of these lives were lost just in the space of around 12 months. The disease quickly dissipated by 1920. In other words, more Indians died of Bombay Fever in 1918-19 than did soldiers and civilians combined during the whole of the First World War.

And yet there is remarkably scarce literature on India’s experience of this global tragedy. John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza, a bestselling history, has four references to India, none of them substantial. Most journal papers I could dig up were preoccupied with competing estimates of Indian dead.

So what was the Indian experience of this flu? How did it change urban and rural communities? If there are any budding non-fiction writers out there, you have around four years left to come up with a perfectly timed book.

Every week, Déjà View scours historical research and archives to make sense of current news and affairs.

Comment at views@livemint.com. To read Sidin Vadukut’s previous columns, go to
www.livemint.com/dejaview

Follow Mint Opinion on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Mint_Opinion

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Published: 28 Nov 2014, 03:56 PM IST
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