When Gandhi battled an epidemic
His directives on how to contain the South African plague can be useful for Covid-hit India
Ihave written in these columns about Gandhi’s response to the plague epidemic in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1905. When after an abatement, the contagion was threatening to reappear, he wrote an article in his journal Indian Opinion on January 16, 1905, which bears substantial reproduction. “Once again the dark clouds are gathering. It will be to the great benefit of our people if they bear in mind the following rules; otherwise there would be immense harm. What is more, it might be used as an argument for enacting more severe laws against us: (1) No one should think that the government will harass the patient after removing him to the hospital. (2) The government should be immediately informed in case of a sudden attack of fever or asthma. (3) A doctor should be immediately consulted. (4) Everyone should stay where he is without becoming panicky. (5) Those who might have come in contact with a plague patient should not try to conceal the fact but should come forward to have their clothes etc, disinfected. (6) One should not, under any ci r cumstances, have one’s bedroom attached to the shop to save money. (7) One should not stock any goods for sale in one’s house. (8) One should keep one’s house scrupulously clean. (9) Every house or room should be well-lighted and well-ventilated. (10) One should sleep with the windows open. (11) The clothes worn by day as well as those used during the night should be kept clean. (12) The food taken should be light and simple. (13) Lavish dinners and feasts should be stopped. (14) Dry earth or ashes should be provided in latrines where buckets are used; and everyone should after easing himself cover the night soil thoroughly with these so that no flies sit thereon. (15) Lavatories and urinals should be kept clean. (16) The floors and other parts of the house should be washed clean with disinfecting fluid mixed in hot water. (17) No article from an infected place should be used elsewhere. (18) More than two persons should not sleep in a room of normal proportions. (19) One should not sleep in the kitchen, dining room or the larder. (20) Walls should be plastered with cement in order to keep out rats. Care should, most of all, should be taken to see that foodstuffs are kept beyond their reach. (21) Those who always work indoors should go out into the open air and walk a couple of miles daily for exercise.”
One can see behind each of the items he has listed the presence of the rat. It is a plague-resisting list. Yet, the notes of caution, in points 4, 5, 11, 12, 13 , 14 , 15, 16 , 17 and 18, read like they have been written for our present Covid-19 pandemic.
If Gandhi spelt out in no uncertain terms the responsibilities of individuals and of society, he did not spare the municipality its share of the blame. The municipality’s allwhite officers believed and led others to believe that the spread of plague among the Indians was due to their insanitary ways — an impression that Gandhi sought strenuously to dispel by writing in the South African press and lobbying with members of the House of Commons and political leaders such as Dadabhai Naoroji in Britain and Gopal Krishna Gokhale in India.
The town council, at that time, had begun to take insensitive, callous and medicallyuncalled-for steps such as shifting patients to canvas sheds in an open field about 13 miles from the city. Gandhi pilloried the council for its initial sluggish response to the epidemic and — most important— its treatment of the spread (until Gandhi made it realise the error of its ways) as something to do with the colour of the sick man’s skin. He was fighting plague and prejudice. I must remind readers that Gandhi had, a little earlier, worked with chosen volunteers, to minister to 23 victims of the plague outbreak in that city. All the victims were of Indian origin, working in a gold mine just outside the city. Twenty one of the victims died, as did the sole nurse the municipality had provided. Rigorous hygiene and luck helped Gandhi and his colleagues, including a brave doctor, William Godfrey, to survive.
So, is this narrative merely a historical recall?
No historical allusion should be regarded as “merely” that, for history, when accurately and fairly recalled, without exaggeration or embroidering is not a story, but the living truth of the present in the past and the living past in the future.
But that truism apart, this narrative is vital for we can be sure that the world is going to live with this pandemic for a long while, as will the need to fight both the virus and, where they occur, our mistakes in handling it.