Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

by Laura Spinney

  In Korea, as we’ve said, ethnic Koreans were twice as likely to die from the Spanish flu as their colonial masters, the Japanese. The flu-related death rate in Egypt, meanwhile, was roughly twice that in Britain. In March 1919, Koreans rose up in an independence movement that the Japanese quickly crushed (Koreans finally gained their independence after the Second World War), and in the same month Egyptians and Sudanese people revolted against their British ‘protectors’–a revolution that would lead to Egypt gaining its independence in 1922. By March 1919, meanwhile, tensions in India had reached breaking point, in large part due to the flu. In that country, however, they wouldn’t come to a head until the following month.

  GANDHI AND THE GRASS ROOTS

  Throughout the summer of 1918, Mahatma Gandhi was busy recruiting Indian troops to the British war effort. By the autumn he was worn out, and while at his ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, he suffered what he thought was a mild attack of dysentery. He made up his mind to starve the alien force out of his body, but gave into temptation and ate a bowl of sweet porridge that his wife Kasturba had prepared for him. ‘This was sufficient invitation to the angel of death,’ he wrote later. ‘Within an hour the dysentery appeared in acute form.’11

  It wasn’t dysentery, but Spanish flu–a gastric variety in his case–and it incapacitated Gandhi at a critical moment in India’s fight for independence. In 1918, he was forty-eight years old. He had returned to the land of his forefathers three years earlier, having spent two decades in South Africa learning the ropes of civil rights activism. Since then, his objectives had been twofold: to recruit for the British war effort, and to mobilise Indians by means of non-violent protest, or satyagraha. Some in the independence movement saw these goals as mutually exclusive. Not Gandhi. To him, India’s contribution to the Allied war effort was a bargaining chip that could be exchanged, once the war had been won, for some degree of self-rule–dominion status, at the very least. Satyagraha was the stick to that carrot, a reminder to the British that Indians were prepared to fight peacefully for what was rightfully theirs.

  Two of the earliest satyagrahas that Gandhi organised on Indian soil took place in Gujarat–the state in which he had been born, and where he built his ashram on his return from South Africa. The first, which got underway in February 1918, mobilised the textile workers of the largest Gujarati city, Ahmedabad, against low pay. A few months later, he persuaded the peasants of Kheda district, who had been pushed to the brink of starvation by the failure of the monsoon, to protest against the government’s demands that they continue to pay a land tax.

  Both satyagrahas had resulted in some if not all of the protesters’ demands being met, and by the time he fell ill Gandhi was being seen in intellectual circles as a future leader of the nation. The trouble was, he lacked grass-roots support. In Kheda he had mobilised thousands, not hundreds of thousands. He considered it a start, the political awakening of the Gujarati peasant. But just how far he had to go was brought home to him that June, when he returned to Kheda to urge the peasants to enlist in the army. They refused. ‘You are a votary of ahimsa [non-violence],’ they pointed out. ‘How can you ask us to take up arms?’

  When the second wave of the Spanish flu erupted in September, it was exacerbated by drought. Water was desperately short that hot, dry autumn. ‘People begged water,’ one American missionary reported. ‘They fought each other to get water; they stole water.’12 In the countryside, cattle died for lack of grass, and bullocks had to be watched lest they leap into wells chasing the scent of damp. The first annual crop was due to be harvested, and the second sown, but with half the population sick there was not the manpower to complete these tasks. In Bombay Presidency, the province to which Gujarat belonged, staple food prices doubled. The government only halted the export of wheat in October, the month in which the epidemic peaked. By then, people were jumping moving freight trains to steal grain, and famished refugees were flooding into Bombay city, where cholera preyed on them too. Rivers became clogged with corpses because there wasn’t enough wood to cremate them.

  The colonial authorities now paid the price for their long indifference to indigenous health, since they were absolutely unequipped to deal with the disaster. In the presidency, their public health provision did not extend beyond the cities, and was anyway underpowered since many doctors were away at war. Nursing was in its infancy in India, and the only trained cohort of nurses was in Bombay city. Though more people were dying in cities than in rural areas, therefore, it was only in cities that help was to be had. Villages and remote communities were left, for the most part, to fend for themselves.

  The government appealed for help, and it duly came–mostly from organisations with close links to the independence movement. Many of them were active in social reform, meaning they were well placed to mobilise dozens of local caste and community organisations. They raised funds and organised relief centres and the distribution of medicines, milk and blankets. In general, their efforts did not extend far beyond the urban centres either, but Gujarat was an exception. In that state, which is sometimes known as the cradle of free India–not only because Gandhi was born there, but also because of its long history of resisting colonial rule–something unusual happened.

  While the municipal authorities in Ahmedabad were refusing to allow a school to be turned into a hospital (despite taxes having been raised to augment the salary of the city’s health officer, something the local press was quick to point out), a pro-self-rule organisation that had helped organise the Kheda satyagraha, the Gujarat Sabha, set up an influenza relief committee to respond to the desperate need in the outlying villages of Ahmedabad district. Ambalal Sarabhai, one of the mill-owners who had held out against Gandhi’s demands on behalf of the textile workers the previous February, even contributed funds to it.

  Several hundred kilometres further south, in Surat district, freedom fighters also stepped into the breach–notably, three idealistic young men named Kalyanji and Kunvarji Mehta, who were brothers, and Dayalji Desai. They had been followers of the first leader of the independence movement, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who was not against violence if it helped to achieve self-rule (Kunvarji Mehta had even assembled a bomb, though he had never detonated it). Over time, however, they had been won over by Gandhi’s more peaceful methods. All three belonged to castes native to rural Gujarat–the Mehtas were middle-caste Patidars, Desai was a high-caste Anavil Brahmin–and during the 1910s, they had given up their government jobs to start ashrams in Surat. Their goal was to educate youngsters from their respective castes about India’s struggle for freedom and the need for social reform–especially of the caste system.

  The two ashrams–the Mehtas’ and Desai’s–now provided the manpower for a district-wide flu-relief operation. Funded by national pro-independence organisations, the Mehtas set up a free dispensary. Their students made the deliveries; Kalyanji himself went from house to house on a bike. They removed corpses for cremation. And when the Surat branch of Tilak’s organisation, the Home Rule League, launched a vaccination programme, the two ashrams once again provided the volunteers. Their efforts were complemented by those of Surat’s municipal commissioner who, more active than his counterpart in Ahmedabad, set up two travelling dispensaries and created an infectious-diseases ward at a local hospital.

  What the student volunteers were vaccinating people with is not clear. Two vaccines were prepared that autumn, in two government laboratories, but they were made available in a very restricted way, and it wasn’t until December–by which time the worst of the epidemic was over–that a new vaccine was distributed widely and free of charge. The medicines they dispensed were probably Ayurvedic. Western medicine wasn’t yet widely accepted in India in 1918, and most people still relied on Ayurveda when ill. The efficacy of these medicines–like that of the vaccines–was questionable, but the students carried them out to the remotest villages in the district, and this brought them into contact with ‘backward’ social groups–including, for th
e first time, adivasis.

  The adivasis (they would later be designated ‘scheduled tribes’) greeted the students with suspicion–these outsiders belonged to castes that had long exploited them–and many refused the medicines they brought. Some questioned the efficacy of Ayurveda, others argued that the only possible response to the sickness was to try to pacify the gods whose ire they had evidently provoked. Kalyanji Mehta’s patience and pragmatism won them round, and many eventually took the medicine (his brother would go on to acquire the reputation of a miracle worker, for his efforts to improve their lives). The relief operation in Surat district is conservatively estimated to have reached 10,000 people–Hindus, Muslims, Christians, tribesmen and untouchables alike–and it earned the young freedom fighters the respect of the city-dwellers of Surat, Ahmedabad and Bombay, who read about their exploits in the papers.13

  At Gandhi’s ashram, meanwhile, several prominent members of the independence movement were laid low with flu that autumn, including the doughty widow Gangabehn Majmundar, the teacher of spinning on whom Gandhi was pinning his hopes for making India self-sufficient in cloth; his friend, the Anglican priest Charles Andrews; and Shankarlal Parikh, who had played a key role in the Kheda campaign. Gandhi was too feverish to speak or read; he couldn’t shake a sense of doom: ‘All interest in living had ceased.’

  Medics came to give him the benefit of their advice, but he rejected most of it. Many of them remonstrated with him over his vow not to drink milk–the result of his disgust at the practice of phooka, in which air is blown forcefully into a cow’s vagina to induce her to lactate. Supported by Kasturba, one doctor argued that on those grounds, he could have no objection to drinking goat’s milk, since phooka was not practised on goats. He gave in, but bitterly regretted it later. To abandon one’s guiding philosophy in the interests of living was unacceptable to Gandhi: ‘This protracted and first long illness in my life thus afforded me a unique opportunity to examine my principles and to test them.’ It’s hard to say for sure, but his recovery may have been slow because he developed pneumonia. Before long, news of his illness–and of his obstinacy–spread, and the mouthpiece of the Gujarat Sabha, Praja Bandhu, castigated him: ‘Mr Gandhi’s life does not belong to him–it belongs to India.’

  Gandhi was still unwell in November when he received the news that Germany had been defeated. The thought that he could now abandon his recruitment campaign came as a huge relief, but hardly had he begun to recover than he read in the papers about the publication of the Rowlatt Report. This was the incendiary document in which Justice Sidney Rowlatt of the viceroy’s legislative council recommended the extension of martial law into peacetime in India. Throughout the war, civil liberties had been suspended, meaning that Indians could be arrested without charge and tried without a jury. Rowlatt found that levels of sedition and terrorism justified maintaining that situation. Indians had expected more freedom; instead they got more repression.

  Rowlatt’s bill passed into law in February 1919, triggering a wave of unrest. Gandhi was still weak. ‘I could not at that time sufficiently raise my voice at meetings. The incapacity to address meetings standing still abides. My entire frame would shake, and heavy throbbing would start on an attempt to speak standing for any length of time.’ But there was no question of him not rising to the occasion. To channel the disenchantment against what he called those ‘black acts’, he called for satyagraha. Dayalji Desai and Kalyanji Mehta answered his call in Surat. These two, whom caste barriers would normally have kept apart, were now united in the fight for self-rule under the nickname ‘Dalu-Kalu’.

  The satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act culminated in the tragic events of 13 April 1919, when Brigadier General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire into an unarmed crowd in Amritsar, killing nearly 400 people, according to the government (more than 1,000 by other estimates). The British historian A. J. P. Taylor claimed that the Spanish flu led directly to this incident, by raising tensions in the country, and that it marked ‘the decisive moment when Indians were alienated from British rule’.14 Ten days later, an editorial appeared in the pro-independence Young India that reflected the nation’s darkening mood. Entitled ‘Public Health’, it expressed the feeling on the streets of Bombay that a government that allowed 6 million to die of influenza (the contemporary estimate of the Indian death toll), ‘like rats without succour’, wouldn’t mind if a few more died by the bullet. In May, just before he gave up his knighthood in protest over the Amritsar massacre, the poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote to a friend that the British were guilty of ‘the same kind of ignorance of the eternal laws which primitive peoples show when they hunt for some so-called witch to whom they ascribe the cause of their illness while carrying the disease germs in their own blood’.15

  In 1920, a special session of the Indian National Congress party was held in Calcutta. The Mehta brothers were among those who accompanied Gandhi in a special train from Bombay. When he promised self-rule within a year if Congress backed his call for nationwide satyagraha, Kunvarji Mehta was inspired. He returned to Gujarat and later delivered five towns to the cause. Half a million workers are estimated to have gone on strike in 1921, and many more in subsequent years. Gandhi’s promise turned out to be premature; the bitter struggle for independence would drag on until 1947. But in 1921, thanks in no small part to the Spanish flu, he was the undisputed head of the independence movement, and he had grass-roots support.

  21

  Melancholy muse

  Those who think about the Spanish flu at all often wonder why, when it left a cluster of tombstones in almost every graveyard in the world, it didn’t weave a similar vein through the art of the time. The artists who attempted to depict it, to hitch up that train of zeroes to some notion of human suffering, are disconcertingly few. Why? It’s a question that’s received very little attention–one that’s ripe for research. For now all we can do is sketch out the terrain and raise some hypotheses.

  The first thing to be said is that art was not the same after the flu. The artistic waters didn’t flow on smoothly, their surface untroubled. There was a rupture as violent as the parting of the Red Sea. All across the arts, the 1920s saw a desire to sever the link with Romanticism, to strip back, pare down, and slough off the exuberance of an earlier, misguided age. Painters and sculptors revisited classical themes. Architects jettisoned ornament and designed buildings that were functional. Fashion did something similar, dismissing colours and curves, while music underwent a number of parallel revolutions. Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg created a whole new musical system, dodecaphonics, while Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky–under the influence of jazz–set out to replace feeling by rhythm.

  It was a decade in which the artistic world turned its back on science and progress–a decade in which artists said, we had nothing on the ancients, after all. This new pessimism is usually attributed to the war. We’re told it was humanity’s response to death on an unimaginable scale. But there had been another, much bigger massacre against which all the achievements of science had proved helpless: the Spanish flu. It isn’t possible to disentangle the effects of flu and war on the psyche of those who were alive then, but perhaps it isn’t necessary. The challenge is more modest: to demonstrate that the Spanish flu contributed to that psychological shift.

  The silence that is perhaps the most puzzling is the literary one. In his study of the flu in America, for example, Alfred Crosby noted that none of the ‘supposedly hypersensitive’ writers emerging just then in his country dealt with it–neither F. Scott Fitzgerald (who was caught by the tail end of it, while he was finishing off his first novel, This Side of Paradise), nor Ernest Hemingway (whose girlfriend, Agnes von Kurowsky, nursed flu-stricken soldiers in Italy), nor John Dos Passos (who came down with it on a military transport crossing the Atlantic), nor the doctor William Carlos Williams (who made sixty calls a day at the height of the crisis). Why did these writers ignore it?

  To quote Maurois again, ‘The minds of dif
ferent generations are as impenetrable one by the other as are the monads of Leibniz.’ Two things are worth noting, however. First, almost any writer you can name, who was adult in 1918, was touched either directly or indirectly by serious illness. Fitzgerald had TB, as did Anna Akhmatova and Katherine Mansfield; Hermann Hesse was turned down for military service in 1914, a dubious honour he shared with Hemingway; Tagore lost his wife and several of his children to disease; and both Luigi Pirandello and T. S. Eliot had wives who were considered insane. When Klimt waved a shotgun at the men who came to relieve him of Medicine, he was arguably ‘speaking’ for all of them.

  Second, writers who were adult in 1918 had grown up in the Romantic tradition epitomised by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which he began writing in 1912 though it was not published until 1924. In this novel, the disease afflicting the residents of an alpine sanatorium represents Europe’s moral decay on the eve of the First World War. For the Romantics, disease was symbolic–a metaphor for the sickness of the soul. It wasn’t interesting in its own right, perhaps because they were bathed in it. It was too close to them; they couldn’t see it. Things were changing, however. A year after The Magic Mountain came out, the British writer and regular invalid Virginia Woolf wrote an essay called On Being Ill, in which she asked why literature had not explored the rich terrain of illness: ‘Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed… it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.’