Multiple speculations about the plague’s origins in Bombay began to emerge soon after Dr Viegas’ findings were made known. Dr Waldemar Haffkine1, a prominent microbiologist, proposed that since the outbreak had commenced near the docks, it was highly probable that the infection was introduced by sea and carried by traders in their clothes or goods. Haffkine also entertained the thought that it could have been introduced by traders from northern India since plague was endemic along the southern slopes of the Himalayas.2
Prior to 1896, plague was indeed known to exist and to be more or less endemic in Assyria; Arabia bordering on the Red Sea; Mesopotamia, in the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates; northeast Persia, around the southern coasts of the Caspian; Uganda, on the southwest shores of the Nyanza; Garhwal and Kumaon, on the lower slopes of the Himalayas, bordering on Tibet; on the eastern side of Lake Baikal in Siberia, near the Mongolian and Manchurian frontiers; at Solenko in Manchuria; Yunnan, the hilly district in South China just north of Tonkin; Pakhoi, a Chinese port in the Gulf of Tonkin; and various towns between Pakhoi and Yunnan.3
This being the case, the outbreaks of plague in India before 1896 were believed to have had their origins in the southern Himalayas – an area of the two districts of Garhwal and Kumaon stretching across almost 29,000 square kilometres and at elevations from 457 to over 3,353 metres above sea-level.4
Natasha Sarkar
The Last Great Plague of Colonial India
May 2024
A number of fakirs who habitually resided near two sacred shrines at Garhwal and Kumaon were known to travel through Garhwal and the plains to places of pilgrimage where festivals would be held at twelve-year intervals.5 The Garhwali fakirs never travelled to the Bombay Presidency6 except on the occasion of these twelve-year festivals at Nasik.
They travelled by different routes; an established route being: Gangotri (in Garhwal)-Haridwar-Gorakhpur-Patna-Rewa-Banda-Chitrakoot-Jhansi-Indore-Bhusawal-Jalgaon-Dhulia-Punchbhatti-Tirmook-Nasik. This amounted to a distance of about 3,460 kilometres which was covered in a little over five months with an average of about 22 kilometres a day. It is possible that some fakirs took a more direct route to Bombay and from there, by train to Nasik.
If we reckon the twelve-year intervals, we notice that the Nasik festival was held in 1812 – the year of a plague outbreak in Gujarat, and again in 1836 – the year of the Pali Plague.7
The plague in Pali originated in the month of April in the village of Taiwali (southeast of Pali), from where it was imported into Pali. Reported sightings suggest that a party of wandering fakirs – gosains – upon their return from Dwarka (in Kathiawar) stopped in the village long enough to infect its inhabitants.8
Of the eight twelve-year festivals held during the nineteenth century at Nasik, three coincided with the plague outbreaks in western India and these were the only outbreaks that occurred in the region.9
Not surprisingly, when plague hit Bombay in 1896, not a few competent authorities held the view that the disease was brought to Bombay by pilgrims from the villages of the Kumaon hills.
This hypothesis drew support from the fact that in July and August of 1896, about 2,000 fakirs headed for Bombay city10 on their way to Nasik. For the most part, they encamped at the temple of Walkeshwar at the extremity of Malabar Hill (in south Bombay). In the daytime, they would beg for alms among the Banias and the Bhatias in Mandvi, the section of the city where the plague first made its appearance.11
R.H. Vincent, police commissioner of Bombay, confirmed that the sadhus from Kumaon had indeed come down from the Himalayas between May and August and had taken up quarters in Mandvi.12
In early August, some Banias of the area got together and paid for the railway fares to Nasik for about 800 fakirs. The festival was to commence on the thirteenth of the month. So when plague cases surfaced around this time, it came as no surprise that the outbreak was mostly confined to the Bhatia and Bania communities that had been in contact with the Garhwali fakirs; and by the twenty-fifth of the month, three suspicious deaths from fever and pneumonia occurred in Walkeshwar where the fakirs had taken refuge.13
But the Kumaon hills as the source of infection in 1896 had been contested for lack of evidence in favour of epidemic plague in Kumaon at the time. The fakirs might have taken at least ten to fourteen days to reach Bombay from the hills during which plague cases would have occurred among them en route.14 If indeed the fakirs did pass through several places before their arrival in Bombay, the immunity of those places to the infection was bound to be questioned.
It is possible that the fakirs might have contracted the infection upon their arrival in Mandvi. But it is equally possible that the disease could be carried from place to place by persons who themselves escaped the disease or who were not the first to be affected in the places to which they had carried the infection – a fact noticed at the time of the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death.15
The evidence in favour of international trade routes – through Hong Kong in particular – was linked to a man who contracted plague there and ended up in Bombay via the SS Bormida in March 1899. That being the case, the likelihood of similar cases having occurred in 1896 seemed reasonable.
Hong Kong in the late 1890s. Photo:
University of Colorado Boulder Libraries/Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Furthermore, very early in the 1896 epidemic, rats were found dead and cases among men rapidly followed in the neighbourhood of a certain warehouse in Mandvi – the place where it all began! The building was found to contain goods that had been imported from Hong Kong, not to mention that plague was epidemic in Hong Kong shortly before Bombay was infected.16
The general consensus lay with this theory about the plague’s origins. Dr Ismail Jan Mohamed and Dr Bhalchandra Krishna Bhatavadekar17 were in fact convinced that it was the importation of Chinese crackers from Hong Kong that introduced the infection.18 Others like police commissioner R.H. Vincent even speculated that dead rats had been shipped in from China, perhaps inadvertently, in boxes of sugar.19
But such reasoning was unsatisfactory. That the clothes of infected persons in China were bundled up along with some of the goods that were transported to Bombay also appeared to be wildly unreasonable, but surprisingly this theory did garner some support since the disease in its early phase attacked the Lohanas who were mostly employed on board the steamers that came into Bombay from China. Some of these Lohanas were even in the service of the Banias, sparking concerns of having infected the Banias in turn.20
Trade connections with the Gulf were also suspected since it was nearer Bombay than China; reinforcing the point that the passenger traffic from and to the Gulf had been more frequent than with China. Besides, a number of country boats plied between Bunder Abbas, other Gulf ports, and Bombay. If the plague travelled via West Asia, it was highly likely that it could have been brought in through one of these vessels.21
But despite the brisk commercial intercourse between Bombay and Busrah – the export centre for Turkish Arabia spanning centuries – there had been no recorded evidence of the disease ever having found its way down the Persian Gulf from the Turkish Arabian littoral.22
The Hong Kong epidemic of 1894 was common knowledge and ships leaving the Fragrant Harbour were quarantined in Singapore. When this – the 1894 outbreak – was declared to be under control, the quarantine was lifted. And in 1896, when plague reappeared in Hong Kong, the Government of India did not receive any information. As a result, quarantine was not reimposed.
Egypt faced a similar situation. Ships from Hong Kong now enjoyed pratique in both Egypt and India.23 Widespread official opinion believed that it was this outbreak of 1896 that reached the shores of Bombay.
Excerpted from chapter 1 of The Last Great Plague of Colonial India by Natasha Sarkar.
Natasha Sarkar is an academic who has engaged in teaching and research across Asia and the United States.
Footnotes
1. Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, born in a poor Russian family in Odessa on March 15, 1860, had a keen interest in natural science that made him go to Paris to work under Louis Pasteur. He eventually went on to develop a plague vaccine in Bombay.
2. W.M. Haffkine, The Bombay Plague (Bombay: The Education Society’s Steam Press, 1900), 68.
3. C.J. Martin, ‘Discussion on the Spread of Plague’, British Medical Journal 2, no. 2654 (11 Nov. 1911), 1249–63.
4. E.H. Hankin, ‘On the Epidemiology of Plague’, The Journal of Hygiene 5, no. 1 (Jan. 1905), 48–83. Also, see R. Nathan, The Plague in India, 1896, 1897 (Simla: Government Central Printing Office, 1898), and Natasha Sarkar, ‘The Outbreak: Traders and Wandering Fakirs Under the Scanner in Nineteenth-Century India’, The Quarterly Review of Historical Studies LII, nos. 3&4, Oct. 2012–Mar. 2013, 83–93.
5. Nathan, Plague in India; G. Hutcheson, ‘Mahamari’, Transactions of the Indian Medical Congress held at Calcutta in December 1894, 304.
6. The Bombay Presidency was an administrative subdivision of British India from 1843 to 1936. It comprised four revenue divisions and twenty-four British districts, including numerous Princely States under the protection of the Government of India. The various districts were classified as follows: Sind districts—Karachi, Hyderabad, Shikarpur, Thar and Parkar, and Upper Sind Frontier, forming the Sind division; Gujarat districts—Ahmedabad, Kaira, Panch-Mahals, Broach, and Surat; Konkan districts—Thana, Bombay city and island, Kolaba, Ratnagiri, and Kanara; Deccan districts—Khandesh, Nasik, Ahmednagar, Poona, Sholapur, and Satara; and Western Karnatak or South Maratha districts—Belgaum, Dharwar, and Kaladgi. See Nathan, Plague in India, 95–96.
7. Hankin, ‘On the Epidemiology of Plague’.
8. Report of the Bombay Medical and Physical Society’s Transactions for 1839, Vol. 2, 1.
9. Hankin, ‘On the Epidemiology of Plague’.
10. The city of Bombay was the capital of the Bombay Presidency – the western presidency of British India – and the headquarters of all the administrative departments.
11. P.C.H. Snow, Report on the Outbreak of Bubonic Plague, October 2, 1897, 2.
12. Native Newspaper Reports (NNR hereafter)-Bengal, Hitavadi, December 30, 1898, 11.
13. Report of the German Plague Commission, 1899; Snow, Report on the Outbreak of Bubonic Plague, 2; NNR-Bengal, Hitavadi, 30 December 1898, 11.
14. Wesley Clemensha, Plague from the Sanitarian’s Point of View (Calcutta: The Baptist Mission Press, 1903), 5.
15. Hankin, ‘On the Epidemiology of Plague’.
16. Clemensha, Plague from the Sanitarian’s Point of View, 6.
17. Bhatavadekar was an eminent doctor and corporator in the municipal corporation of Bombay city. He would go on to play an important role in popularizing the plague vaccine among the masses.
18. IPC, V, 11.
19. The Bombay Gazette (BG hereafter), October 2, 1896, 5.
20. BG, 26 September 1896.
21. MSA, GD (Plague), Vol. 332, 1898, T.S. Weir, Health Officer, Bombay, to P.C.H. Snow, Municipal Commissioner, September 27, 1897, 46–47.
22. BG, October 7, 1896.
23. Ratna, Uncertain Life and Sure Death, 274–75.