For he has health has hope; and who has hope has everything - Owen Arthur
Dirty Indians is a term used often to deride and describe desis usually by westerners and by western studied Indians on India. Why dirty? Because majority of Indians have had no home toilets, many pee in the open, spit and throw garbage at Will, seen diseases ranging from plague to malaria to cholera ravage them and the roaming of street beggars reinforce this opinion. Was this how Indians described as savages by colonial civilised British existed over centuries and was this a new phenomenon that arose after some events in history? British are credited with bringing in western medicine to India, hailed as harbingers of public health. Were these facts and if so, what was their intentions in bringing medicine to India? Let’s study.
Yajur Veda thousands of years ago spoke of a disease free world and the importance of a healthy mind. Atharva Veda has hymns for a healthy disease free life and for protection from natural disasters. Proof that Health and health care have been part of India since time immemorial. Hospitals and village nurses had existed and there are Buddhist references to them in 6th venture BCE. King Ashoka built hospitals across his empire. Arabian and European travellers in 600 CE speak of students learning medicine. Charaka, a court physician of King Kanishka, Dhanvanthri, the patron saint of Indian medicine and Sushruta, the father of Surgery who wrote the Sushruta Samhita are some of the famed exponents of health that have survived time. And British propaganda. Uneducated King Akbar tried to amalgamate Unani with Ayurveda and Sanskrit medical texts were translated to Arabic, Persian and Urdu. Tamil texts like Tirumandiram espoused the cause of preventive health by yoga, pranayama and diet. No less are the numerous texts on the various forms of Yogas that have become a craze across the world along with Ayurveda.
Recollect Super power India of the 17th century contributed to 25% of the total gdp of the world. It was not just another agrarian economy but a manufacturing paradise whose goods were traded across the continents in hundreds of huge ships run by them. Local systems of medicine like Ayurveda, Siddha , Naturopathy and even unani were widely practiced. Even villages were self sustaining and had experienced nurses to care for the sick.
Excavations in Mohenjodaro and Harappa prove Indians lived in comfortable homes with plumbing , sanitation and Bathrooms around 3500 BCE. Town planning was in existence and the best examples are ancient cities and villages of Tamilnadu which were built around a temple in squares, had tanks for bathing and sanitation facilities. Hindus throughout history were the cleanest, bathing twice a day, washing feet on reentering homes, brushing with neem sticks, using herbs for body and hair wash and wore washed clothes every day. Cleanliness was and exists as part of hindu philosophy and a must before prayers or entering temples. How was this brought down by the British?
Simple. A person who has been denied access to his homes, to work and to his land, he became evacuated. Poverty and inflation was imposed as the colonialists looted and exploited the Hindus. They became so poor that they can’t afford a meal a day let alone buy foods with nutrition. Once non existent malnutrition became common with no access to vegetables and fruits. Water supply became non existent and social sanitation a rarity. Statistics say that the British spent a meagre $ 5,000,000 a year for about 25-30 crore people..an allotment of less than two cents per person. You need to remember that this allocation was primarily meant to protect the British civilians and army and locals were not the focus. Worst the British dismantled the existing local indigenous medicine and turned people a hapless lot. Double tragedy. It was estimated that 34% of Indians living in cities were absent from work on any day, from illness or injury claimed Sir William Hunter,DG of Indian Statistics. Mission accomplished by British.
Yes. British built the Madras General Hospital in 1664. So the hospital will cater to sick British soldiers. Later it became a medical facility for the local British. Though built on Indian tax payers money, it opened doors to Indians as patients a hundred years later. Though it was free to the British locals, indians who funded the construction and maintenance of the hospital had to pay to receive treatment. Stuck by poverty caused by taxation that brings about ill health, the torture continued by fleecing Indians to pay for consultation and medicine. Other hospitals later came up in Kolkata and in Mumbai. It was estimated that the hospitals added to the revenue of the British empire in millions and saw a vertical rise over the next century. Hospitals were limited to metropolitan cities and rural health was totally ignored despite huge profits from the mega hospitals. Eminent Hindu physicians and surgeons wrote Ramanandra Chatterjee , were compelled to spend their best years of lives in subordinate positions as assistant surgeons, while raw and callow British youth Lorded over them and drew four or five times their pay. We need to relate to the situation in British India Army where no Indian was commissioned as an officer and was always subordinate to the British. Such system was extended to hospitals too.
Worst was yet to come. Instead of supporting public health, British encouraged alcohol and narcotics. When the British came, Will Durant’s writes, India was a sober nation. Warren Hastings said, “The temperance of the people was demonstrated in the simplicity of their food and their total abstinence from spirituous liquors and other substances of intoxication”. Even as the first trading posts of East India Co was established, saloons selling rum were opened and the Company made handsome profits. Later when the Government took over, a license system was established so as to stimulate sale of alcohol. Opium was sold in #7000 shops spread over India while it was grown and sold exclusively by the government. A law passed by Central Legislature in 1921 banning growth or sale of opium was not acceptable to the Crown but instead two to four thousand acres of soil meant for raising food crops were given for growing opium. British believed that by ruthless drugging of Hindus can undermine their health and character. In 1925, the Government retrenchment commission declared the importance of safe guarding opium sales as an important source of revenue. British were the forerunners of modern mafias in Italy and South America involved in drug trading and trafficking.
Weakened and pale, 4 crore Indians were almost always without food claimed, Sir William Hunter. He was a British so was making a modest estimate. Weakened by starvation and malnutrition, people became susceptible for diseases. Infections destroyed lives. Epidemics became common. In 1901, 2.72 lakh dies by imported plague. In 1902, 5 lakh people died. In 1903, 8 lakh died. In 1904, 10 lakh died. In 1918, there were 125,000,000 cases of influenza and 12, 500,000 deaths. We are not accounting to starvation deaths caused by forced famines including the Bengal Famine running to tens of millions.
Check the average death rate between 1916 and 1925. In England the death rate was 13 per thousand per year. In United States, it was 12 per thousand. In India, it was 32. In 1921, the infant mortality was 666 per 1000. In Bengal, 50% of children died before the age of eight. Lt Col Dunn with the Indian medical service believed then that one half of deaths in India because of illness were preventable.
Yet, many credit Britishers for introducing Western medicine into India. They had to introduce it as they believed in it for the sake of their British in India. At no point did they ever think of serving or benefiting Indians through hospitals or take effort. Their singular contribution of the British was that instead of murdering all Indians they choose to let them die a natural death by their miserly governance or in some cases remain paralysed in mind and body during existence. Sadly this revolting actions of a self proclaimed empire is now hailed as landmark in Indian history and britishers are credited for their contribution to her modernisation by historians and Indian Lutyens who obviously imagine themselves as British as their contempt for anything Indian continues.
Keyserling ranked India as the head and summit of the highest civilisations in history. Romain Rolland said: “ I have not found in Europe or in America, poets, thinkers and popular leaders equal or even comparable to those of India today”. Yet when British left India, they had left her in ruins. Sadly, six decades of rule after independence was not a marked departure from British rule primarily due to the rule by Britishers in Indian garbs and without tenderness to Indian sensibility had continued to rule us.
Indian health systems badly need a departure from its imitation of the British.
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