Colonial photography is both partisan propaganda and empirical evidence. The ‘work’ photography was required to do during the epidemic was extremely varied and did not represent a single perspective (Arnold, 2021; Sarkar, 2021; see also Jennings, 1903). Many photographs may simply have served the owner’s desire for a record of his or her years of Indian service (hence their incorporation into personal albums); others more clearly served a public, propagandistic purpose. Some photographs appear, in the new age of handheld Kodaks, to have been snapshots taken by amateurs, while a substantial number, including several of the hospital staff in Poona and of plague operations in Bombay, were the work of F. B. Stewart, a professional photographer based in Poona’s cantonment. In one of the images Stewart took at the plague hospital, in early 1898, Europeans sit at the centre of a wide panorama—two white male doctors (Drs Lloyd Jones and Adams), but also a woman doctor (Dr Marion Hunter), with a Eurasian medical officer (Dr Erasmus Dias) between her and the Nursing Superintendent, Mrs Wheatley (Figure 1).
Ranged on either side of them to the left and right are the English nurses: like the doctors, they are individually named in some copies of this image. Behind them and at the sides are the Indian subordinates—from clerks and compounders to the cook with his rolling-pin, the dhobi (washerman) with his buckets, the chowkidars (watchmen) and so on. In its composition, this photographic image is akin to many other group photographs then and since—some sit on chairs, some stand, some perch on benches at the back, others occupy the ground in front. But in the context of British India, the composition evokes another visual idiom—the conventional photograph of the European household, with sahib and memsahib seated at the centre and their Indian servants arranged around them with the uniforms or objects that signify their respective functions.15
The iconography of the plague hospital thus resonates with the photographic conventions of colonial domesticity, suggesting, contra Ranajit Guha, that the British were ‘at home’ in empire (Guha, 2009), or that the orderliness and domestic harmony of the plague camp stood in implicit contrast to the chaos and confusion, the dirt and disease, of the ‘native town’. Perhaps, too, at a time when Poona was in almost open revolt against colonial anti-plague measures and the city’s plague commissioner had only recently been shot, such images offered reassurance (if only to the British themselves) that not all Indians were antagonistic to their rule and to the rationality of the colonial sanitary order. But this was also an optical articulation of an idealised colonial hierarchy: it is clear who (defined by race and occupation) is in charge, who is peripheral or subordinate. White women (15 nurses and one doctor) occupy the same central position and superior status as their male colleagues (two white doctors but also, this being the 1890s, a Eurasian doctor).
But there is more to be gleaned from this photograph. Seated on the ground at the front of the picture are a row of Indian women, the faces of some barely visible from the saris drawn over their heads, sitting barefoot or in sandals, and in many cases openly returning the camera’s scrutinising gaze. If it were not for the photographs and the way in which they are composed, we might have little sense from textual sources alone of these women’s presence or the significant role they occupied. They have no utensils or instruments to signify their function, nor are they named individually or by caste.16 But, from other sources, we know that these unnamed women, 60 in number, made up more than half of the hospital establishment and four times the number of English nurses, and that they were Marathi-speaking ‘ward ayahs’ or ‘ward women’. They almost certainly came from one of the dalit castes of the region, probably Mahars.17
Were they therefore mehtaranies? Nowhere were they officially designated ‘sweepers’ (Hunter, 1898, p. 1014). Indeed, the use of the term ‘ayah’ is, like the composition of the image itself, more suggestive of the European household and the Indian ‘nurse’ assigned to look after white infants. The ward ayahs appear in several of the snapshot photographs of the hospital as well; their presence was clearly no accident. They evidently command less status than the male ‘ward assistants’, who, with their watchchains and buttoned-up jackets, appear immediately behind the doctors in this photograph. The position of the ayahs was surely closer to that of the ‘ward boys’ who stand at the rear. Hunter (1898, p. 1012) observed that each ward was under the supervision of an ‘English nurse, who had two or more ward-women under her to keep the ward clean, wait upon the patients, and do all the rough work’. A more patronising account, published in the British Medical Journal, indicated that these ‘native women’ were present at the hospital from start, administering medicines, applying poultices and doing ‘the rough work’ (British Medical Journal, 1899). Despite their initial ignorance and lack of understanding of hygiene, in time ‘these ward women … showed admirable qualities. Although they often did stupid things, it was marvellous how much good work was got out of them’ (‘Personal Experiences’, 1899, p. 25).
Because we know so little about them, it is impossible to say how the women were recruited. Had they previously worked at Sassoon Hospital? Were they already ‘ayahs’ in European service? Were they the wives and daughters of the male Mahars at the plague hospital who dug graves and performed other essential tasks? Nor do we know what became of them after they stopped working in the plague wards. But perhaps the conspicuous presence, to which these photographs so visibly allude, of two sets of ‘polluting’ women—English nurses and dalit ayahs—from opposite ends of the colonial spectrum of race, caste and class but here brought into close proximity, further accounts for high-caste antipathy to the plague hospital.
Dr Hunter
Marion Hunter appears in several of the Poona plague hospital photographs and in both the Adams and Jones albums (Figure 2).
She generally looks anxious (not at home in empire after all, perhaps), even out of place. She seems less confident than many of the nurses and even the ayahs who assist her in the wards. In the group photographs, she sits somewhat awkwardly, as if in a limbo of race, class and gender, between the white nurses and the male doctors, between the dalit women at her feet and the male hospital assistants behind her. Parachuted, as it were, into Poona, she is perhaps doubly an outsider—a stranger to India and a solitary woman doctor in a male-dominated medical domain.
Who was Kate Marion Hunter? In her early 30s, Hunter had qualified as a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries before attending the London School of Medicine for Women, where she enrolled for a Diploma in Public Health—‘doctor’ was therefore a courtesy title but one Hunter used of herself. A star pupil, she was singled out in the school’s annual report as being ‘foremost’ among its 26 present or former students. Other graduates became practitioners in Britain or missionaries overseas, but she had been ‘chosen by the India Office to go to Bombay to assist in dealing with the plague outbreak’ (London School of Medicine, 1898, p. 16). However, one likely reasons why, despite her lack of practical experience, she was selected ‘as a special case’ was because she had an influential uncle. She was the niece of Sir William Hunter, one of the leading administrators of nineteenth-century British India (Skrine, 1901), a man of considerable clout at the India Office, and who, one might reasonably assume, was keen to recommend his niece’s name for consideration. Much was made in London and India of her family connection: one newspaper report of her arrival in Bombay at the end of October 1897 (along with other doctors and nurses) mentioned the fact of her being Sir William’s niece twice in a single column (ToI, 1 November 1897, p. 3). What Marion herself made of this emphasis on her privileged family status is unclear. It is possible that she found it an embarrassment; it could, as we will see, be used against her. Certainly, she made no mention of her family in her speeches and writings, and after she left Poona in March 1898 she never returned to India. Before her departure, she wrote of establishing a fund for the widows and orphans left by Poona’s plague, but there is no evidence that it materialised.18 Her subsequent work back in London concerned the hygiene and health education of pre-school children (Times, 9 January 1909, p. 9).
When Hunter reached Poona in November 1897, the city was experiencing a second deadly wave of plague; mortality was soaring (ToI, 25 December 1897, p. 5). The plague hospital was flooded with more than 400 cases, among them ‘Portuguese’ (Eurasians, for whom there was a separate ward), Indian Christians, low- and high-caste Hindus. Hunter was given charge of the children’s wards and some of the women’s, and it is in these that she appears in several photographs. By the time she left the following March, the epidemic had largely abated, and the number of patients had fallen significantly (Marsh, 1899); by then, too, the hospital seems to have been more positively regarded by leading citizens of Poona, including Gokhale (ToI, 2 April 1898, p. 5). So favourably was her work viewed by her superior, Dr Lloyd Jones, that it was proposed that a separate hospital should be established under her supervision for women and children alone.19 This did not materialise but at the farewell party held in her honour in March 1898 her contribution was warmly praised. In an address one of the hospital assistants said she had taken ‘a keen interest’ in her work and ‘exerted herself to save the lives of the plague stricken’. Lloyd Jones described her as ‘an agreeable colleague’, ‘hardworking and conscientious’. She was, he said, ‘unremitting in her attention to her wards, and her ward ayahs reached a high state of efficiency’, a further indication of how closely doctors, nurses and ayahs worked together in the sanitary enclave. In response, Hunter thanked her colleagues, including the Indian hospital assistants ‘who were always willing to get up day and night to do what was wanted’. She further commended the ayahs, ‘who had been devoted in their care and attention’, only regretting that, knowing nothing of their language, she ‘could not thank them all as she would wish’. Her remarks were then translated into Marathi for the benefit of the hospital assistants—the ayahs were not present (ToI, 7 March 1898, p. 3).
But not everything was as harmonious as the speeches might suggest. In her farewell speech, Hunter frankly admitted that in Poona ‘she found herself as a female medical officer rather awkwardly placed. It was difficult to get known. In the case of a male doctor he had his club and could soon make friends’ (ToI, 7 March 1898, p. 3). Further, not all her colleagues valued her presence. There is a photograph of Hunter in the hospital’s rudimentary bacteriological laboratory (Figure 3). She is elegantly dressed, her topi for once laid aside, and she looks less anxious than in some of the other photographs; she sits with two male colleagues, Drs Marsh and Lloyd Jones. The copy of this photograph in the Jones album (578/4: 21), in which Hunter looks directly at the camera, is simply labelled ‘The Laboratory of the G[eneral] P[lague] H[ospital]’. In a slightly different version of this image in the Adams album (photo 12), she looks towards Lloyd Jones, and, after referring to the two male doctors in the picture, Adams has written underneath, ‘Miss [sic] Hunter doesn’t seem to be doing much’. Below another photograph in his annotated album (photo 8), Adams notes: ‘This was my babies ward till Miss Marion Hunter L.S.A. (niece of Sir W. Hunter) came to the Hospital when I gave over charge to her much against my will’. In a further caption (photo 9), Adams remarks, ‘This is my children’s ward & Miss Marion Hunter L.S.A. & Dr Lloyd Jones are seen, together with a table on which are antiseptics ready for Miss Hunter to open up an abscess.’ It is clear Adams deeply resented that she had been put in charge of wards for which he had previously been responsible. He evidently felt that he, a real doctor rather than a licentiate, trained at Edinburgh University and Middlesex Hospital, and an IMS officer, was far better qualified than Hunter. He was, however, ordered to leave the Poona hospital (perhaps he was a difficult colleague) and transferred in January 1898 to a remote corner of Sind (ToI, 4 February 1898, p. 5). After Poona, it must have felt like a punishment posting.
Hunter’s empathy for India and Indians—if empathy there ever was—seemed to have evaporated once she left India. On returning to London, she gave several talks on ‘fighting the bubonic plague in India’. In one of these, held in a Bayswater drawing-room in March 1899 under the auspices of the Women’s Industrial Council, she was extravagantly introduced as the ‘health commissioner in charge of the women’s hospital’ in Poona. In her speech, Hunter observed that ‘like all Eastern cities’, Poona was ‘badly built, with little or no attempt at efficient drainage’. On the outbreak of plague, first in Bombay, then in Poona, the ‘panic-stricken’ ‘natives’ either ‘fled in terror’ or ‘resisted all the precautionary and remedial measures that were adopted’. By the time she left, Poona had been ‘overhauled and cleaned as it never had been before’, and in effecting this transformation, to her mind, European agency was clearly paramount (Times, 22 March 1899, p. 7). An extended version of her talk was published later that year in the Nineteenth Century. The article repeated and enlarged upon many of her most prejudicial remarks. One paragraph, for example, asserted that ‘in dealing with the natives’,
it has to be borne in mind that an Englishman [sic] meets with innumerable difficulties on account of: (1) caste prejudices; (2) superstition and fatalism; (3) native ignorance and distrust of all sanitation; (4) the dishonesty of many native officials, combined with a perfect genius for misrepresenting Government’s orders to suit their own ends; (5) the existence among natives of a freemasonry, which enables them to conceal sick or dead friends in a truly wonderful manner. That they themselves keep the epidemic alive by their conduct never seems to occur to them. (Hunter, 1898, p. 1009)
Such sentiments might almost have been penned by her uncle at his most censorious, or by one of the European civil and medical officers in Poona—Barry, perhaps, or Rand—so hostile was its description of the sanitary condition of the city, so flagrant its assertion of Indian fatalism, so insistent its claim to the indispensability of Europeans in rescuing Indians from their miserable plight. Even allowing for the linguistic conventions of the time, her resort to the phrase ‘an Englishman meets…’ seems to deny her own female experience and to replicate the assertive masculinity and racial cliches of colonial rule. However, when she turns to describing her own experiences, there is a partial shift of tone. She mentions that women doctors and nurses carried out checks on female rail passengers and in house-searches, signals that both nurses and ayahs played important roles in the plague camp, refers regretfully to the death of two of the English nurses, and observes that in Poona Hindu women ‘suffered most from the disease’, possibly because they were ‘more constantly indoors than men’ (Hunter, 1898, p. 1013). But nowhere in the article are we given a sense of her social isolation as a white woman doctor, the closeness of her engagement with the ayahs and other Indians, or the hostility she experienced from the resentful Dr Adams. Had all this been quickly forgotten, or did it appear of lesser consequence once back in the imperial metropolis?
Conclusion
Dr Hunter spent barely four months (November 1897 to March 1898) at the Poona plague hospital. Her experiences of the epidemic and of the prophylactic and remedial measures taken against the disease were even more limited than those of Alice Corthorn who stayed in India substantially longer (four years). During Hunter’s time in Poona, thousands died of plague but even this was only a fraction of the millions who eventually perished from the disease. In that sense to refer to ‘Dr Hunter’s plague’ in the title of this article is an absurdity. But I have done so for a purpose. As we can see from her Bayswater talk and Nineteenth Century article, she was taken, despite her limited experience, as having an authoritative voice, a position on India, empire, disease and medicine that warranted attention and commanded respect. I have no evidence that the photographs of the plague camp circulated widely in Poona or had any impact on Indian opinion there. But when reports of her talks appeared in the press or in medical journals, when a photograph of the hospital staff appeared in a London illustrated paper, with her seated at the centre, she became—to the imperial metropole—the female face of the heroic fight against India’s bubonic plague.20 Sometimes the grand ideologies of empire were built on such slender foundations and on such selective acts of appropriation.
That aside, Hunter’s brief incursion into health and disease in India generated historical evidence that crosses the conventional divide between visual and textual material. She did not take photographs herself, but, as the subject of a number of them, her presence there (and the comments made by Dr Adams) help to give meaning and context to the Poona plague hospital and to the situation and experience of medical women in British India; read alongside textual sources, they testify to the intimacies and antipathies of race and gender in the colonial sanitary enclave. Certainly, there is no uniformity here, no complete congruity between the discursive and visual evidence. Rather different conclusions can be drawn from her farewell speech, from her published article, from newspaper reports and the official archive. There are many tensions, incongruities and enigmas in Dr Hunter’s plague. But, at the same time, the ensemble effect, the coming together, in photographs as in lived reality, of dalit ayahs, a white woman doctor and English nurses makes for a striking demonstration, not just of the merits of a conjoined use of visual and textual material, but also of the overlapping complexities of race and gender.
