Death in Bombay

 Death in Bombay, 1897

We have seen that Violet and Flossy Grant were born in the army cantonments

in Coloba, one of the seven islands of the Bombay Presidency, at the height of one

of the worst outbreaks of bubonic plague known in the city.

The British Raj (colonial) government wanted Bombay to be the first city of

India, second only to London, with its Gothic architecture and historic

monuments such as the Victoria Railway Terminus and St Thomas Cathedral in

the centre of the city.

But this was a façade, a showcase city built on a tiny cluster of low-lying islands

facing the sea. There was a small elite overclass and an impoverished working

population in the mills and the docks living in chawls (tenenents) built on badly

drained unpaved ground, often with stagnant water standing in the streets. The

plague infection, spread by flea-carrying rats in grain and other goods traded

from Hong Kong, arrived in Mandvi and Coloba in September 1896 and quickly

took hold throughout the city, with a death rate estimated at 61% by 1898.

George Grant, Reginald Peel’s father-in-law, would have been at the forefront

of the Army response, quarantining. disinfecting and segregating the lower-class

population, removing them to temporary hospitals and ‘plague camps’ and

razing the chawls to the ground in an attempt to cut off the rats’ breeding

grounds. This was in most cases an overkill response to an environmental

‘enemy’ that could not be beaten without an upgraded drainage and sewage

infrastructure, and since similar draconian measures were not applied in the

European districts, there was strong social discontent.

The government response was also hampered by religious tensions: the Jain

merchants and Muslim traders around the Mandvi port were opposed on

religious grounds to the killing of any animal, including rats, and eradication was

almost impossible in these districts.

George Grant’s wife Mary was pregnant from February to October 1897, while

also caring for the 4-year-old George, Jr and 2-year-old Arthur; although they and

Violet survived there is still a question mark over Flossy, who does not appear in

the photographs of the Grant family on the blog of 24 August 2013.

Acknowledgements are due to Cynthia Desmukh, Proceedings of the Indian

History Congress, 49, 1988, and Nadia Nooreyezdan, Atlas Obscura, 14 May 2020,

for some of the material in this post.