Representation and Remembrance

Abstract

Despite India losing between 12 and 20 million people to influenza in 1918–19, the highest mortality anywhere in the world, the epidemic has been remarkably neglected in recorded memories and historical narratives of the period. This great mortality and its subsequent remembrance were largely subsumed in, or overshadowed by, Indian participation in the First World War and official memorialisation of its casualties, actual or incipient famine across large parts of the subcontinent, the economic and administrative disruption caused by the war and a new phase of nationalist militancy against British rule, led by Mohandas Gandhi, centring on the Rowlatt Satyagraha and Amritsar massacre of April 1919. Unlike its vigorous interventionism against the plague epidemic of the 1890s, the colonial regime believed itself powerless to check the spread of influenza and adopted few preventive or remedial measures, and so had scant reason to celebrate its own role. That said, some Europeans and Indians did record or recall their deep sense of personal loss, the shock of witnessing mortality on such an unprecedented scale and the impact on their lives of India’s devastating ‘war fever’.