Maura Chhun:1918 flu pandemic killed 12 million Indians, and British overlords’ indifference strengthened the anti-colonial movement, Updated April 23, 2020.
Is the global South becoming the fourth and final epicenter of the Covid 19 pandemic? This is an anxious question that inevitably draws attention to India, the world’s most populous country after China with 1.3 billion inhabitants.
This had already happened once before towards the end of the First World War. The author reconstructs how the influenza virus got from Kansas (USA) to Mumbai and the mass death it caused among the Indian population. The indifference of the British colonial authorities strengthened the anti-colonial liberation movement.