Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee (review)

The premise of Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s latest book, Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia, is simple, far-reaching, and riveting: disasters were crucial to the maintenance of the British Empire’s tropical holdings. Many of these so-called natural disasters had historical causes and consequences (a claim made by contemporaneous Indian scholars, writers, and activists). Still, the management of “natural” disasters became another way for the Victorians to legitimize empire, a rationalization that Mukherjee names “palliative imperialism.” The permanence of these tropical disaster zones yielded formal experiments in the literary realm.

In chapter 1, Mukherjee analyzes the appearance of disaster writing in three nonliterary realms: administrative, medical, and journalistic. Writing in all three fields produced the idea of tropical colonies as environments of inevitable and perpetual disaster (and colonized subjects as victims who were also, inevitably, to blame). Mukherjee explores how debates about the origins of disasters, as well as conflicting ideas about aid and intervention, were common to both imperial and anti-imperial British discourse, a paradox characteristic of liberal imperialism. Thus, administrative or medical discourse prescribed imperial interventions in the form of medical relief, technological solutions, or infrastructural development to ameliorate famines or epidemics. Meanwhile, these recommendations for aid were challenged by the investigative journalism of William Digby and Vaughan Nash, who published sensational exposés of administrative indifference or mismanagement of famine relief efforts as well as scathing critiques of imperial economic policies that contributed to or caused such disasters.

In chapters 2 through 5, Mukherjee takes a fresh approach to the usual lineup of Anglo-Indian authors. He argues that the writings of the Eden sisters, Fanny Parks, Philip Meadows Taylor, Rudyard Kipling, and Flora Annie Steel, unassimilable to metropolitan literary aesthetics, developed in the genre-bending ways they did due to the demands of living in environments of perpetual disaster. Among other things, Mukherjee’s readings show how Parks and the Edens revised the conventions of the picturesque to account for famines and epidemics in their travel diaries. Meadows Taylor developed a new novel form, the “bureaucratic romance,” as a stage for the heroic actions of palliative imperialism’s ideal civil servant. And Kipling’s “paranoid journalism” for the Civil and Military Gazette offered autobiographical accounts of tropical illness as well as nightmarish descriptions of unsanitary conditions and chronic disease (141). Throughout these readings, Mukherjee relies on reviews published in metropolitan periodicals to establish the skeptical reception of Anglo-Indian writing emerging from tropical disaster zones.

The stakes of Mukherjee’s argument are made quite clear: today’s neo-imperial benevolence vis-à-vis disaster is inherited from Victorian palliative imperialism. Put another way, on a global scale, palliative care remains integral to cultural domination. A former journalist himself, Mukherjee commences his book with critical analysis of the disaster rhetoric in Hurricane Katrina reportage. By the end, Mukherjee persuades us that imperialism created environments of permanent disaster, resulting in the creation of literary mutations to account for the lives—and deaths—there.