The Plague Search Parties

Pune, 1897: Rand's plague committee, the anger in Tilak's Kesari, and the board from the Deccan to London

In the spring of 1897 W.C. Rand's plague committee sent British soldiers house to house through Pune, and the city's anger found words in Tilak's weekly Kesari. This scene-setter lays out the board this chapter plays on, from the plague year to a railway junction in Tirunelveli on 17 June 1911: the Deccan, the exiles of India House in London, the Tamil south, and the bomb. Tilak and Savarkar are context here, named for what they were and not re-treated.

The Soldiers at the Door

It is a morning in April 1897, in a lane in the Budhwar Peth quarter of Pune. A woman is standing in her own doorway while British soldiers go through her rooms. They lift the bedding. They turn the cooking vessels over. They pull the clothes out of the wooden chest. One of them holds her husband's arm and looks at his neck and under his armpits for swellings.

She is not accused of anything. Nobody in the house is ill. This is a plague search party, and it has the law behind it.

Outside, a lime wash is going onto the walls of the next house. The bedding from an earlier search is burning in the street. Somewhere down the lane a man is arguing, and losing. His mother has a fever that is almost certainly not plague. She is going to the segregation camp at the racecourse anyway.

The officer whose signature sent those soldiers into that lane was Walter Charles Rand, a member of the Indian Civil Service, chairman of the Pune Plague Committee. Two months later, on the night of 22 June 1897, two brothers shot him on a road outside Government House.

What follows in this chapter is the fourteen years that ran out of that lane. The line goes from Pune to a hostel in north London, and on to a socialist congress in Germany. Then to a shipping office in Tuticorin, a theatre in Nashik, and a railway junction in the far Tamil south on 17 June 1911. This lesson lays out the board. The people come next.

Why the Search Parties Happened

Bubonic plague reached Bombay by ship in the second half of 1896. It moved inland along the railway. By the first months of 1897 it was in Pune.