03-31-2005, 10:34 PM
India: Author of its own Misery
As Europeans in Victorian India felt themselves relatively more secure from an early and miserable death, their lives snuffed out prematurely by cholera or the plethora of fevers to which Emily Eden alluded, the more pathetic or perverse Indian mortality appeared to Western observers. Death and the manner of dying seemed to epitomise India's intrinsic weaknesses, its social and cultural peculiarities, its dismal distance from the resplendent heights of European health and sanitation.
http://www.fathom.com/course/10701057/session3.html
http://www.fathom.com/course/10701057/139_flash.html
<img src='http://www.fathom.com/course/10701057/139_famine.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
Villagers in Rajputana in 1899. Nearly a million villagers died in the locally and British administered sections of Rajputana. Mike Davis, in his book Late Victorian Holocausts cites Pierre Loti, who arrived at Rajputana in 1899 by train to a haunting scene of wailing emaciated children: "Oh! look at the poor little things jostling there against the barrier, stretching out their withered hands towards us from the end of the bones which represent their arms. Every part of their meagre skeleton protrudes with shocking visibility through the brown skin that hangs in folds about them; their stomachs are so sunken that one might think that their bowels had been altogether removed. Flies swarm on their lips and eyes, drinking what moisture may still exude..."
As Europeans in Victorian India felt themselves relatively more secure from an early and miserable death, their lives snuffed out prematurely by cholera or the plethora of fevers to which Emily Eden alluded, the more pathetic or perverse Indian mortality appeared to Western observers. Death and the manner of dying seemed to epitomise India's intrinsic weaknesses, its social and cultural peculiarities, its dismal distance from the resplendent heights of European health and sanitation.
http://www.fathom.com/course/10701057/session3.html
http://www.fathom.com/course/10701057/139_flash.html
<img src='http://www.fathom.com/course/10701057/139_famine.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
Villagers in Rajputana in 1899. Nearly a million villagers died in the locally and British administered sections of Rajputana. Mike Davis, in his book Late Victorian Holocausts cites Pierre Loti, who arrived at Rajputana in 1899 by train to a haunting scene of wailing emaciated children: "Oh! look at the poor little things jostling there against the barrier, stretching out their withered hands towards us from the end of the bones which represent their arms. Every part of their meagre skeleton protrudes with shocking visibility through the brown skin that hangs in folds about them; their stomachs are so sunken that one might think that their bowels had been altogether removed. Flies swarm on their lips and eyes, drinking what moisture may still exude..."