Postcards: A Propaganda Tool During the Bombay Plague

When the bubonic plague hit Bombay in the 1900s, a new wave of “postcard-mania” was also on the rise. Under a tense outbreak, Britain soon discovered that this new postal medium was actually a great way to “send” a message.

A Ward From Bombay’s Plague Hospitals Photographed For Picture Postcards (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Discarding the envelope didn’t come easy. Many suspicions — like nosy servants reading letters and strict mailing etiquette — made it seem unlikely that people would ever be so open with their correspondence. But just one century later, in the 1900s, postcards became a media sensation that swept the world — one mass-produced image at a time.

With Love, From British India

In the early 19th century, British India’s postcards were a sought-after novelty. Now, people living in colonies could have their messages backed by a delightful new accomplice — printed photographs — sending a rush of excitement to families and friends back home who received them.

Bombay was, expectedly, India’s visual showstopper at the time. In the early 1900s, more postcards were sent from Bombay than anywhere else in the subcontinent. Plastered with images of railways, bridges, and vendors, these postcards depicted the city’s growth into a bustling port town that Britain was more than glad to claim credit for. In the streets, however, Bombay’s reality couldn’t have been more different.

In 1896, the first case of bubonic plague was detected in Mandvi, a thriving Jewish community in South Bombay. Soon, every dock, home, and warehouse was struck by its rapid spread and a death toll that claimed 1,900 lives each week. That same year, British India Post allowed the use of picture postcards.

The Plague Years

Bombay’s 20-year-long plague — and its overlap with the golden age of postcards — meant that a new medium of propaganda was wide open for Britain. Seven years into the plague, a photographer, Harry Soundy, set out to photograph Bombay’s patients for a postcard series. By then, the British government’s inoculation drives, isolation camps, and attempts to quarantine the infected had already failed. Over 100,000 people had died and many others fled the city. But Soundy’s camera needed to show otherwise.

As the owner of Clifton and Co, a prominent publisher of postcards, Soundry had to tell the world that things were better than ever in India’s metropolis. These photographs — neat hospital wards, airy facilities, clean beds, vaccination shots — that were later printed on postcards showed Bombay’s situation as one that was expertly under control. The reality, of course, was far different from this.

Mixed Messages

Soon after the plague outbreak, British administrators formed a committee to enforce control and sanitation in Bombay. Their extreme measures — forced entry, burning beddings, charred belongings, and marking residences — received backlash from local residents, newspapers and independence activists. Patients, often in a waning condition, were removed from their residences and forced into a plague hospital where survival rates were shockingly low.

In one postcard, the interior of such a plague hospital is photographed in full colour. But contrary to real life, patients here are staged as having their own beds with a British doctor and a nurse present in the ward. In another postcard, a local man is shown getting his vaccine from a European doctor with medical supplies neatly arranged on his table. But erasing the suffering of the local population is only half the story. On the back of a surviving postcard from the same series, a message reads:

“This is how these devils are taken care of when they have the plague, and as soon as they are well, they abuse the doctors and say they tried to kill them. The pity is that they don’t let them die.”

Through such surviving messages, we get a look into how Britain’s civilising mission, rather than Bombay’s suffering, became the defining focus. To businessmen and officials, such visual messages were all too important as well. One resident from the time, Huard, professed in 1906:

“Bombay was a trading city; knowledge of the plague would hurt trade. The representation that all was well was critical”

The affordability of these cards was another silver lining. Through this postal narrative, authorities could now ship off the news that they were doing everything they could, merchants could show there was no need to close ports since everything was being handled, and visitors could continue pouring in, believing there was nothing to panic about.

Omar Khan, a researcher who compiled these plague postcards, later said:

“Sure, the Bombay plague postcards were propaganda in a certain way, but more importantly, they were a reflection of history and the events at the time and are valuable for that reason.”

Today, most people see these cards as objects of nostalgia. But examining past accounts shows its politically-charged history. One where Bombay’s seedy underbelly of disease was masked, in more ways than one, by a shiny catalogue of picture postcards.