On the outskirts of most Indian cities you still encounter the war graves of imperialism: the melancholy, unvisited Christian cemeteries which contain the serried ranks of monuments commemorating British subjects and their children buried there during the days of the Raj. Perhaps it is not surprising, or particularly shocking, that it was fear for European rather than Indian lives which drove the growth of tropical medicine in India. Mortality among British troops and civil servants remained appallingly high well into the later 19th century. Nor is it surprising that for the European mind, India was the seat of global infection. After 1818, cholera, the terrible 'westering' disease, moved out of its endemic haunts in Bengal and north India in the wake of British armies of conquest. Striking overland and along the sea lanes, it became the chief public health problem for 19th-century European governments and a potent source of popular fear and potential disorder. It seemed as if the horrid filth and turbulence of the Orient had infected the seamy underworld of the European city. In the 1890s, bubonic plague appeared in Bombay and threatened to slip into the commercial arteries of the world's greatest trading nation, arousing archaic panics about Black Death wherever it appeared. This theme of fetid disease and corruption stealing in from the East often surfaced in 19th-century literature - Dr Watson, an Indian Army doctor, first met Sherlock Holmes while he was convalescing from Indian enteric fever, which had caused his 'life to be despaired of'. In our century, only anxiety about Aids and social disintegration in Africa has brought a comparable merging of physical and political terror with fear of the Other.

LRB 8 December 1994 | PDF Download