[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 72 (Spring 2021)]
Plagues, Vaccines and
Revolutionaries
When Waldemar Haffkine met Shapurji
Saklatvala in Colonial Bombay
Waldemar Haffkine (1860-1930) inoculating a community against cholera in Calcutta, March 1894 From May 1896, Bombay (now Mumbai) in colonial
India was hit by the world’s third great outbreak of
bubonic plague, which had arrived in the port from
China.
Though the British authorities were determined to
keep the port open regardless of the mounting death
toll, by October 1896 it became impossible for them
to just carry on denying the presence of the plague
any longer, after doing their best to ignore the
reports being sent their way by health officials and
local doctors.
As Alex Benham has noted, building on the scholarship
of David Arnold in his Colonizing the Body: State
Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-century
India (1993), the British Raj responded to this
outbreak in four ways which have eerie parallels to
the disastrous way our Tory government has
responded over the last year.
Firstly, when they finally faced up to the reality of
the outbreak they denied its seriousness - the official
announcement stressed the disease was merely of a
‘mild’ type, even though they were soon recording a
thousand plague deaths a month.
Secondly, Benham notes there was ‘a constant
prioritising of the economy over the lives of
racialised, colonised people. The British were
committed to preserving the function of the city’s
textile mills and its vast port, and were willing to
accept deaths as an unavoidable cost of doing
business’.
Indeed, ‘it was only when France threatened a total
ban on Indian trade and passengers and its ports that
Britain conceded to the necessity to act … quickly
enacting a domestic quarantine on Bombay sea
traffic, and then passing the Epidemic Diseases Act in
early 1897.’
Thirdly, they blamed the people who were dying for
the spread of the plague and what the British regime
which all its characteristic colonial racism regarded
as the ‘innate filthiness’ of their houses - rather than
their own failure as authorities to either provide
decent housing for its subjects, or act against the
plague earlier.
Finally, when those among the working population of
Bombay either fled for their lives, or resorted to riots
after their houses were demolished, the British
Empire resorted to detentions and executions – rather
than trying to protect and help those suffering,
Benham writes of the Raj’s ‘constant recourse to
coercion’.[1]
Yet amid the horrors of the plague emerged an
unlikely hero – the Russian-born bacteriologist
Waldemar Haffkine, hailed by Joel Gunter and Vikas
Pandey recently on the BBC website as ‘the vaccine
pioneer the world forgot’.
Born Vladimir Aaronovich Mordecai Wolf Chavkin in
1860, the son of a Jewish schoolteacher, Haffkine grew
up amid the virulent antisemitism of Tsarist Russia, but
despite poverty made it to the University of Odessa.
As the BBC report, ‘when Haffkine graduated in
zoology from the University of Odessa in 1884, his
reward was to be barred from taking up a
professorship there because he was a Jew. He had
already run into political trouble five years earlier,
amid pogroms, when as a member of a local defence
league he fought to stop Russian army cadets
destroying a Jewish man's home. Haffkine was beaten
and arrested but eventually released’.[2] What the BBC
don’t mention is that Haffkine’s politics were
somewhat more radical than this – according to one
writer, Haffkine
soon saw the injustices of the Tsarist regime,
which interfered constantly with the freedom
of the university, and he joined the
revolutionary underground movement known
as the Narodnaya Volya Party [People’s Will],
an illegal organisation set up in 1879. Some of
its members resorted to acts of terrorism in
their fight against the tyranny of the
monarchy. In 1882 Haffkine was expelled from
the university for sending a letter to the
Rector in support of Professor Mechnikov, who
was in disgrace with the authorities. In 1881
he was arrested and served a jail sentence,
and he was under police surveillance in Odessa
for eight years, and three times endured the
extremely harsh conditions of imprisonment
under the Tsarist regime.[3]
According to another writer, in 1882, Haffkine took
part in the successful assassination of Tsarist general
Major General Vasily Strelnikov.[4] After spending time
in Paris to get away from the heat on him as a
revolutionary in Tsarist Russia, Haffkine had a
breakthrough – he developed a pioneering vaccine
against cholera. This success soon led him to be
appointed State Bacteriologist of the British Crown.
Sent to India as a good place to test his new vaccine
in 1894, Haffkine won the trust of local people to
launch a mass vaccination programme firstly by
working with Indian doctors and secondly by publicly
injecting himself to show it was safe. In 1896,
Haffkine was called to Bombay and charged with the
task of developing a vaccine against the plague,
something which, against the odds, he successfully
achieved.
As one writer notes, ‘There was great antagonism to
the system, and many people were terrified that it
would actually give them the disease rather than
protect them from it. Professor Haffkine insisted always that vaccination
should be voluntary; then, as now, the rights of the
individual were sometimes protected. Perhaps,
though, had it been compulsory, it might not have
taken six years for the plague to be brought under
control’.[5]
As Gunter and Pandey note, ‘inside a year, hundreds
of thousands of people had been inoculated using
Haffkine's vaccine, saving untold numbers of lives. He
was knighted by Queen Victoria, and in December
1901 he was appointed director-in-chief of the Plague
Research Laboratory at Government House in Parel,
Bombay, with new facilities and a staff of 53 …
Between 1897 and 1925, 26 million doses of Haffkine’s
anti-plague vaccine were sent out from Bombay. Tests
of the vaccine's efficacy showed between a 50% and
85% reduction in mortality’, saving countless lives.[6]
This is not the place to go into the subsequent life
and work of Haffkine, and why in 1903 he (unfairly,
and almost certainly in part as the result of British
antisemitism) fell from grace and into subsequent
obscurity and neglect outside of India itself before his
death in 1930 in Paris. Rather it is to record the fact
that while working in Bombay amid the plague this
Russian revolutionary scientist met and quite possibly
influenced a young Bombay-born Parsi student,
Shapurji Saklatvala, who despite his privileges in life
had volunteered to help those suffering most during
the plague.
Shapurji Saklatvala
Saklatvala would later
become an important anti-imperialist and the
Communist MP for Battersea
North in London. In a speech
in 1927 he recalled that the
racism of British India meant
it was difficult enough to
even arrange to meet
Haffkine.
'In 1902 a plague was having a devastating
effect all over India. It was to be taken in
hand not merely as a grave problem, but as
something to save human lives. There was a
Professor Haffkine in those days, who was the
first man who, with some measure of success,
gave out an anti-plague serum for inoculation.
His experiments were being conducted on a
large scale. I was then associated as secretary
with an important committee of welfare
workers. The Governor of Bombay, who was
then himself staying out of Bombay,
immediately sent a telegram to Professor
Haffkine to go to him with certain facts and
figures because the matter was becoming of
vital importance.
Professor Haffkine asked me to go and assist
him. I gave up my work in the office, and I
went to the place where he was staying, and
that was his European club. People talk about
untouchability! Although I had facts and
figures at my disposal which were the result of
months of study, and the Professor had only
four or five hours at his disposal, I was
actually prevented from entering the white
man’s club.
Yet a representative of that race today talks
nonsense about untouchability among the
Hindus. Ultimately, when it could not be
helped, the messenger of the club, after
telephoning to various government officials,
took me to the back yard of the club, led me
through the kitchen and an underground
passage to a basement room, where the
Professor was asked to see me because I was
not a white man.'[7]
According to Sehri Saklatvala, whose chapter on ‘The
Plague Years’ in the biography she wrote of her father
The Fifth Commandment gives the greatest detail
about the relationship between Saklatvala and
Haffkine, ‘what a blessing’ Haffkine’s ‘presence in
India was to prove to be, not only for India but for the
whole of mankind’.
'And incidentally to this great cause,
circumstances were to bring this Russian
revolutionary, this brilliant and dedicated
scientist and humanitarian, into contact with
Shapurji Saklatvala. Was it perhaps Haffkine
who sowed the seed of revolution in the
fertile garden of Shapurji’s compassionate
nature? It seems to me to be highly likely, for
Shapurji was to work with the professor for six
plague-ridden years … Of course, in the
situation in which he was now working,
Professor Haffkine had neither time nor
energy for politics and devoted himself
entirely to his scientific research and his
unceasing efforts to inoculate as many of the
population as possible. But it is surely likely
that he talked to Shapurji about his
experiences when the two of them met.
It is, I think, safe to assume that, when
Shapurji was sent to a basement room in the
European club and Professor Haffkine had to
join him there, that some comment of the
situation must have been made. It is recorded
that the Professor was very critical of the
British imperialist authorities, noting as he did
the abject poverty, overcrowding and
insanitary housing in which the majority of the
Indians lived; he saw that the victims of the
plague were to be found mostly among the
poor, and scarcely any in the European or
wealthier quarters of the city. When Shapurji
presented him with the statistics, it is
inconceivable that no comments were made
and that no discussions took place between
the two men. Their outlooks had much in
common; and no doubt this close association
between the older idealist and scientist and
the young, compassionate student, must have
helped to form and to crystallise the
convictions of Shapurji.' [8]
If we can be forgiven one final quote from Sehri
Saklatvala, she reflects on the impact seeing the
devastation of the plague in Bombay from 1896-1902
must have left on her father, who subsequently
'spent his whole life thereafter struggling to
better the lot of those masses of people living
in destitution, want and humiliation. What he
saw in those years of the bubonic plague must
have remained always in his mind. It was to
those victims of circumstance that he
dedicated his life. The charitable and
benevolent community of Parsis, to which he
belonged, always sought to alleviate the
distress of the poor. This was not enough for
Shapurji. He sought not to alleviate but to
eliminate poverty entirely; and not only in
India, but all over the world. The 1917
revolution in Russia and the events following
upon it led him to believe implicitly that
communism could end abject poverty; it was
for this reason and this reason alone, that he
devoted the rest of his life to the propagation
of world communism.'[9]
Many have noted how comparatively well the early
Soviet Republic responded to the global pandemic of
not just influenza and cholera but also typhus in the
aftermath of the Russian Revolution.[10]
Here it seems we have another inspiring example of
how one individual Russian revolutionary scientist rose
to the challenge of defeating the bubonic plague a
couple of decades before – but also how the
experience of witnessing the devastation the plague
left in its wake inspired another figure to dedicate
their lives with sincerity and self-sacrifice to the
cause of revolutionary socialism, in order that such
barbaric catastrophes might one day become a thing
of the past.
Christian Høgsbjerg
[1] Alex Benham, ‘Another Nightingale: Coronavirus, Plague and
the Colonial Violence of British Neglect’, New Socialist, 25
August 2020, https://newsocialist.org.uk/another-nightingalecoronavirus-plague-and-colonial-violence-british-neglect/
There is a brief discussion of the plague in Bombay in Mike
Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the
Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 172-
175.
[2] Joel Gunter and Vikas Pandey, ‘Waldemar Haffkine: The
vaccine pioneer the world forgot’, BBC website, 11 December
2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-55050012
[3] Sehri Saklatvala, The Fifth Commandment: A Biography of
Shapurji Saklatvala and Memoir by his
Daughter, Originally published by Miranda Press, July 1991,
First digital edition, July 2012, p. 23.
[4] David Markish, ‘Dr. Waldemar Haffkine. The Savior Mankind
Never Knew’, https://mahatmahaffkine.com/en?l=1#history
[5] Saklatvala, The Fifth Commandment, pp. 26-27.
[6] Gunter and Pandey, ‘Waldemar Haffkine’.
[7] Saklatvala, The Fifth Commandment, p.21. For more on
Saklatvala, see Mike Squires, Saklatvala: A Political Biography
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990) and Marc Wadsworth,
Comrade Sak: A Political Biography (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press,
1998).
[8] Saklatvala, The Fifth Commandment, pp. 26-27.
[9] Saklatvala, The Fifth Commandment, p. 30.
[10] Vijay Prashad, ‘Either socialism will defeat the louse or the
louse will defeat socialism’, 24 April 2020, republished on
Monthly Review online, https://mronline.org/2020/04/24/eithersocialism-will-defeat-the-louse-or-the-louse-will-defeatsocialism/ and Charlie Kimber, ‘Russia 1917 - how a revolution
beat back a pandemic’, Socialist Worker, 8 May 2020,
https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/50023/Russia+1917+++how+a
+revolution+beat+back+a+pandemic
