Neetija Mishra
Independent Researcher
E-mail: mishra.neetija18@gmail.com
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020
:
“Even so quickly may one catch the plague?” (Twelfth Night, Act I, sc v)
“Even so quickly may one catch the plague?” (Twelfth Night, Act I, sc v)
Abstract
To say that the history of Colonialism is as old as that of pandemics and epidemics would be no exaggeration. Different countries have been under the British regime from time to time, and history has been witness to its positive and negative impacts on the respective countries. The recent startling outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic involuntarily reminds one of the several pandemics and epidemics registered in the annals. In this context, it would be appropriate to consider the inherent inter-relation between colonialism and the spread of diseases, for the two, at first sight, seem to have a cause-and-effect relationship. Albeit it’s indisputable that COVID-19 has dealt a big blow to the global economy and caused massive casualties, yet pandemics have had a history of their own. The present paper aims to analyse how the cause and effect relationship often attributed to colonialism and the spread of diseases is interchangeable.
Keywords: pandemics, colonialism, epidemics, casualties
Apart from their chronicling in the pages of history, epidemics have had their share of representation, whether obliquely or directly, in the works of various writers in the history of English literature. As literature is predominantly a reflection of the times, hence coming across major events of those times is quite natural. In the 14th Century, the spread of the bubonic pandemic, the Black Death, devastated the whole of Europe causing the deaths of millions of inhabitants. The same finds a mention in the most celebrated work The Decameron by the renowned Italian poet and author Boccaccio. However, the author is quick to suggest in the Introduction to his work that the mention of the pandemic is confined only to the pages of the Introduction, and that the rest of the work does not carry any reference to the sufferings wrought by the Black Death.
But I would have you know, that you need not, therefore, be fearful to read further, as if your reading were ever to be accompanied by sighs and tears. This horrid beginning will be to you even such as to wayfarers is a steep and rugged mountain, beyond which stretches a plain most fair and delectable, which the toil of the ascent and descent does but serve to render more agreeable to them; for, as the last degree of joy brings with it sorrow, so misery has ever its sequel of happiness. (Boccaccio 1-2)
Following the Black Death, there were several recurrences of the pandemic throughout the history of Europe. The year of William Shakespeare’s birth saw the return of the plague that led to many casualties, as was recorded in the register of the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, just a couple of weeks after his birth: “Hic incepit pestis” (Here begins the plague). As the playhouses were shut down in 1592-93 due to the plague, Shakespeare, in the meantime, came up with two of his most famous poems “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece”. His play King Lear, which is often conjectured to have been written during the outbreak of plague in 1606, contains a fleeting reference to the deadly disease.
Lear curses his daughter Regan and her husband Cornwall with “Vengeance, plague, death, confusion”, and berates her as “a plague-sore or embossed carbuncle/In my corrupted blood”. (Smith)
Although the same may not elicit much fear, yet its mere mention was enough to affright the contemporary audience. His other works, however, covered the deaths of the main characters in different ways. In the play Othello, one finds Desdemona being smothered to death, while in Hamlet, the death of Ophelia is depicted in the form of her drowning.
As Europe was victimised by the Plague quite recurrently, hence one often finds its mention in the literature of the times. In his acclaimed work A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe presents a very vivid and elaborate narration of a protagonist named H.F. The work gives a lengthy and digressive narration of the experiences that H.F. had during the outbreak of the plague in 1665. The realistic touch in Defoe’s narrative often tended to give it the feel of a non-fictional work. However, it was only later that it was acknowledged as a work of fiction. Thus, throughout the history of literature, one comes across several representations of deadly diseases and their impact.
As the spread of diseases is brought on men by means of human interaction, the Kiowa myth, revolving around a stranger’s encounter with a personification of Smallpox would be the best depiction of its aftermath.
“What do you do?” Saynday repeated.
“I bring death,” Smallpox replied. “My breath causes children to wither like young plants in the spring snow. I bring destruction. No matter how beautiful a woman is, once she has looked at me she becomes as ugly as death. And to men I bring not death alone, but the destruction of their children and the blighting of their wives. The strongest warriors go down before me. No people who have looked on me will ever be the same.” (qtd. in Bewell 1-2)
The chilling exposition by Smallpox is an authentic account of the effect of the disease on any population that unfortunately came under its attack. From time to time, different places have witnessed the upshot of such epidemics. More the exchange of goods more had been the risk of the spread of these diseases. But then, despite the threat involved, colonialism flourished and continued to spread into many countries.
The mere mention of the term ‘colonialism’ is sufficient to summon up a plethora of literary references and connotations. Although the first image that strikes the mind is one of India under British rule, several other aspects begin to emerge, the moment one starts to attempt a deeper assessment to ascertain other features. The most fatal risk that colonialism involved was the coming together of natives of different nationalities. To emphasize their sway over the people, the colonizers began trading, or exchange of goods, which led to increased risk of contagion and hence the colonized masses’ vulnerability to diseases. Besides trading goods, the colonizers also imported slaves in large numbers to their motherland. European colonizers took approximately 11 million Africans to the Caribbean and North and South America by sail. The risk involved in this was that Europe in the 19th Century was witnessing a massive outbreak of such deadly diseases like cholera and influenza. Thus, the slaves unknowingly became carriers of those diseases and the transmission of diseases gained momentum.
As these diseases were mainly communicable, the only way to check its spread was isolation and avoiding of close social interaction. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the same is being termed as ‘Social Distancing’. But then, the colonizers did not pay heed to the consequences of such colonising expeditions, which eventually led to a spike in the casualties caused by it. As noted earlier, the impact of the havoc wreaked by pandemics could have been lessened, if not fully averted, had there been a decrease in cross-border movements. The uncontrolled spread of the several pandemics in history serves to attest the same appropriately
One of the deadliest pandemics registered in the pages of history, the Black Death caused the death of around one-third of the population of Europe. The extremely contagious pandemic that ravaged Europe during the mid-14th Century brought death to several renowned personages in English history.
Even the great and powerful, who were more capable of flight, were struck down: among royalty, Eleanor, queen of Peter IV of Aragon, and King Alfonso XI of Castile succumbed, and Joan, daughter of the English king Edward III, died at Bordeaux on the way to her wedding with Alfonso’s son. Canterbury lost two successive archbishops, John de Stratford and Thomas Bradwardine. Petrarch lost not only Laura, who inspired so many of his poems, but also his patron, Giovanni Cardinal Colonna. (Rogers 60)
The trading of goods via land and sea proved to be quite detrimental as infected traders unknowingly became the medium for the transmission of disease to denizens of other lands as well.
The pattern in which Smallpox had recurred from time to time throughout history suggests the dominance of colonisation and trade in the proliferation of cases across several nations. The introduction of Smallpox in Japan in the 6th Century was nothing but the by-product of excessive trading between Korea and China. In the 11th Century, the Smallpox was further spread in Europe as a result of crusades. The aggressive colonial expeditions of the Europeans coupled with their trading of Africa slaves in the 16th Century further aggravated the condition as the disease spread to different parts of Central and South America as well as the Caribbean. This further spread to North America in the 17th Century. With limited medical facility at hand as well as lack of enough awareness, diseases continued to spread unchecked across continents, infecting many and causing innumerable casualties.
The extensive outbreak of Cholera during British rule in India was a decisive phenomenon in the early 19th Century. It was looked upon as “a disease that flourished in the insanitary and crowded conditions of barracks and encampments” (Arnold 126). As the disease started taking a toll on the lives of a large number of British soldiers, the British government sprung into action and began strategising ways to counter the situation. This led to the facilitation of enhanced water-supply as well as sanitation, following which the spread of the disease was brought under control.
Though the Black Death is often counted among the worst pandemics in the history of mankind, the amount of suffering and loss of lives registered by the spread of Influenza during 1918-19 was simply unparalleled. Considering the massive scale and rapidity of its spreading, the recent COVID-19 pandemic is often being compared to the pandemic Influenza of the 20th Century. The fact that conquest and wars have forever had a dominant hand in the spreading of diseases is evident in the accelerated transmission of diseases during the First World War. As the War contributed to increased mobilisation of people, the risk of contagion became all the higher. The aftermath of the war was visible in not just the material destruction, but also the bane it brought along in the form of the outbreak of the pandemic as also a sense of gloom and delirium. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway gives an authentic description of the severity of the impact of the pandemic in the post-War era.
The continued sense of living death, of an experience that marks us with its shadow, echoes even after a pandemic passes. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, so often read as a novel capturing the aftermath of war- which it most certainly does- also records in its title character the physical and mental exhaustion that lingers after an illness. (Outka)
As the British gradually realised the immense importance of hygiene, their affinity for the same started to show up in their enforcement of various measures to tackle the spread of diseases.
The recurrence of pandemics across not just Europe but also the colonised countries drove the British to work out ways to enable improved access to sanitation facilities to the colonised. However, there is no doubt to the fact that it was just a garb to conceal their exploitation of the underdeveloped countries. The excessive preoccupation of the British with hygiene was used by them to play on the colonised under the pretext of civilisation. An instance to support this would definitely be the inhuman treatment of African slaves by the colonisers as depicted by Joseph Conrad in his novella The Heart of Darkness. The novella’s realistic narration gives a clear picture of the miserable condition in which the slaves were kept. The narrator Marlow’s words served to buttress the fact: “They were dying slowly- it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now- nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.”
Marlow’s insights were made with reference to the callous manner in which African slaves were chained together as though they were beasts. The so-called mission of civilisation proved to pose a more hazardous threat to their physical and mental well-being than their prior state.
As Alan Bewell rightly says, “the striking emergence of a British cultural emphasis on hygiene and discipline, on avoiding “unsafe” behaviour, can itself be seen as an anxious response to colonial disease.” (Bewell 19)
Nevertheless, the picture in India was completely different so far as the interpretation of diseases was concerned. Here, Mamatha K’s observations on the scene in colonial Malabar are of prime importance and can be considered true even in the context of the whole of India.
The local people of Malabar hardly shared a univocal perception of the causes of diseases. If the believers in ayurveda emphasised tridosa, some others believed that diseases emerged as a result of their Karma, due to the disgrace of gods and goddesses, or evil spirits, devils, etc. (K 630)
She emphasised the fact that as time passed by, the colonised gradually began to consider colonialism itself to be the cause of the spread of diseases. As Alan Bewell rightly asserts, the colonisers too gradually began to see through the shortcomings of their ambitious mission to colonise the “other”: “Although it took time, the British eventually grasped the fact, which modern epidemiologists have been rediscovering, that developed nations inherit the problems of emerging ones.” (Bewell 20) The primary cause of concern among the colonisers was the increasing mortality among Europeans as well as the civilians. This eventually led to the introduction of vaccination at a time when several pandemics like Cholera, smallpox, diarrhoea, and dysentery started taking a toll on the health of the colonised.
Whether we relate to it in the present context of COVID-19 or during the times of the earlier pandemics, mass cross-border movements have always been a matter of concern when there is a severe outbreak of a highly contagious disease in a particular geographical area. The pages of history are fraught with numerous mentions of wars and conquests that have occurred from time to time, and the upshot of the same was apparent in the massive outbreak of deadly pandemics. As we can very well deduce in the context of COVID-19, checking for mobility is the only key to curb the spread of the disease. However, the over-ambitious colonisers overlooked the fact and the consequence of it was the loss of innumerable lives across several continents. It was only when the colonisers started witnessing massive casualties among their troops that they realised the urgent need of spreading awareness regarding hygiene. They sought to accomplish this objective by means of colonising underdeveloped countries. Nevertheless, the predominant aim backing their expeditions was nothing but the exploitation of the resources and the denizens of those nations. Hence, one can rightly say that although colonialism expedited the spread of pandemics, the latter was also one of the prime causes among the British to take up their so-called mission of civilising the “other”.
References
Bewell, Alan. Romanticism and Colonial Disease, John Hopkins University Press, 1999.
- Mamatha. “CONTAGIOUS DISEASES AND THEIR ‘TREATMENT’ IN COLONIAL MALABAR”. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol.77, 2016, pp. 630-636. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26552691
Outka, Elizabeth. “How Pandemics Seep into Literature”. The Paris Review, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/04/08/how-pandemics-seep-into-literature/
Rogers, Kara. Senior editor. Infectious Diseases. New York: Britannica Educational Publication in association with Rosen Educational Services, 2011.
https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html
Arnold, David. “Cholera and Colonialism in British India.” Past & Present, no. 113, 1986, pp. 118–151. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/650982.
Smith, Emma. “What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Living With Pandemics”. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/opinion/coronavirus-shakespeare.html
Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Translated by J.M. Rigg https://flc.ahnu.edu.cn/__local/7/E7/75/6AB8DEBA692DD0CF6790CA70701_26DE4EC2_17EED4.pdf?e=.pdf
Neetija Mishra has completed M.A. in English from Shri Shikshayatan College, Kolkata, after graduating with Honours in English Literature from Deshbandhu College for Girls. She is also a content writer for short stints.