BLUE DEATH IN BENGAL - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 45

Bengal but also embarking on an unprecedented outward course to the north and west, fol-
lowing the river. 19
For the early nineteenth-century European tourist, the uncultivated riverbanks of the
Ganges offered the gratifying sight of monkeys, buffalo, and occasional elephants wallowing
in the mud. On the river itself water-loving lotus flowers and lilies brushed along the boat's
hull, signs of the nutrient-rich ecology of the delta. “A paradise of flowers,” was one English-
woman's commentary on her pleasure trip from Calcutta to Benares. 20 At a bend in the river,
the source of these botanical offerings might hove into view. The local ghaut —broad stone
steps leading directly to the river—served as a kind of Indian town square and impressed for-
eigners as a grand forum of daily village life. From first light, people could be seen washing
clothes and bathing, while women bore jars of water on their heads back up the steps. At the
summit of the ghaut invariably stood a temple, where dedications were made to the sacred
river on which all these essential activities depended.
In 1817, this vivid, public life of the ghauts was transformed by cholera into a parade of
horrors. All along the Ganges River, the busy tempo of village life gave way to mourning
and public immolation of the dead. In the eyes of one English traveler, a clergyman named
James Statham, the cholera epidemic transformed the vibrant and picturesque river life of the
Ganges into a scene from Dante's Hell:
None but those who have witnessed the distressing sight can form an adequate picture of
human misery which the ghauts afford at the time when the cholera rages. The dead and
dying are all huddled together in a confused mass, and several fires are blazing at the same
time, consuming the bodies of the more rich and noble, who have just died, whilst the poor
creatures who are expiring feel certain that in a few minutes their bodies must share the
same fate, or be hurled into the flowing stream, to become the prey of waiting alligators, or,
what is worse, to be left on the beach, a prey to jackals and vultures, which infest the spot.
Fresh arrivals every hour multiply the misery, as groans and cries increase, while the stench
proceeding from the burning bodies, and the lurid gleams of the blazing fires reflected by
the water, and giving somewhat of an unearthly appearance to the features of the suffering
victims around, furnish a scene of woe which completely baffles the power of description to
portray. 21
An almost hysterical fear of this new, insatiable cholera—inspired by its shocking symp-
toms and territorial expansion—seeps through the restrained bureaucratic prose of British co-
lonial officials. The epidemical “cholera morbus” was an “evil,” “a horrid scourge,” “an awful
and desolating calamity” that “threatened to sweep of a large portion of the Native popula-
tion” if some means could not be found to counteract it. It was “a malady more destructive
in its effects, and more extensive in its influence than any other recorded in the annals of the
country.” As a consequence of this high mortality and general panic, the cholera threatened
social order, the proper running of the Indian economy, and thus company profits. “Much
mischief has arisen,” complained the Board of Revenue in Calcutta, “from the great alarm of
the people, their quitting their habitations and their proper pursuits.” 22 Death counts were
hazy, perhaps inflated, and suspiciously round. Certainly thousands, perhaps tens of thou-
sands, died in the first season. By the 1830s, at the beginning of the global cholera panic,
European estimates of Indian fatalities since 1817 would run into the millions, numbers im-
possible to verify. 23