Epidemics by Joshua S. Loomis

Author:Joshua S. Loomis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2018-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

Religious Freedom, Imperialism, and Public Health

The Bengal region of India was the epicenter of every cholera pandemic of the 19th century due to the ongoing presence of V. cholerae bacteria in the warm waters of the Ganges River. India at the time was controlled economically, politically, and militarily by Great Britain. The British first established a formal relationship with India in 1612 when the ruler of the Mughal Empire gave the British East India Company (EIC) permission to “sell, buy, and to transport into their country at their pleasure.”26 Over the next several decades, the EIC built plantations and factories in cities all over the Indian subcontinent and used them to produce valuable commodities like tea, spices, cotton, opium, and silk.27 By the mid-18th century, the increasingly powerful EIC had pushed most of its European competitors out of India, allowing it to establish a near monopoly over the Indian economy. Such expansion created huge profits and a growing need for the EIC to protect its investments from domestic and international threats. At first, the EIC employed just a few hundred Indian soldiers as guards to watch over its trading stations in the major Indian regions of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. However, as EIC operations greatly expanded in the late 18th century, the private military force employed by the EIC grew to over 60,000. Those troops were trained as European soldiers and organized into large regiments called presidency armies. In addition to having cavalry and heavy artillery at their disposal, presidency armies were complemented by a relatively sizable and powerful navy.

As local Indian rulers and their subjects grew increasingly resentful of their British colonizers, armed resistance between the EIC military and various Indian groups became more commonplace.28 The violence peaked in 1857, when a group of Indian soldiers employed by the EIC mounted a mutiny in the region of Bengal. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 lasted for over two years and resulted in very high casualties for both sides. The EIC was eventually successful in suppressing the revolt; however, the situation exposed serious flaws in how the EIC was managing India. In response, the British crown dissolved the EIC and took direct military and economic control over the Indian subcontinent and its nearly 250 million inhabitants. The British government would retain control of India for the next 89 years, eventually ending as a result of the independence movement led by Mahatma Gandhi in 1947.

The acrimonious relationship between the British and their Indian subjects was exacerbated by the six cholera pandemics that spread throughout the Indian subcontinent during the occupation. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, one of the major factors that fostered the continued dissemination of cholera was the frequent migration of millions of religious pilgrims to the Ganges during various Hindu festivals. The largest of such events, the Kumbh Melas, have been held in four different cities on a rotating basis for many centuries.29 The two Kumbh Melas that take place along the Ganges (Haridwar and Prayag/Allahabad) typically attract enormous crowds of people from all over India.

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