STRANGE CASE OF QUARANTINE: CHOLERA EPIDEMIC AND GOTHIC IMAGINATION IN RUDYARD KIPLING’S “THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES” (1885)

1. Introduction

Diseases loomed in the gothic imagination of the long nineteenth century while being contingent on certain geographies. In Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), if the plague was dependent on “rhetorics of sympathy, miasma, and contagion” (Walters 324), then Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) personified Dracula as the Sligo cholera.an epidemic that occurred in Sligo, Ireland in the year 1832 (McGarry 39). And if the plague begins from Egypt and gradually invades the West in Shelley’s novel, so does Stoker’s Dracula threaten to arrive in England from the East (Transylvania, Romania). This production of binary oppositions, which envisions the East as unsanitary and a space that births diseases, recalls to mind Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism. Said defines Orientalism as a discourse by which Europe managed and produced “the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (3). He also relates Orientalism with an “imaginative geography” that ideologically produced and defined the Orient (52). Alexandre I.R. White extends Said’s argument to an ‘Epidemic Orientalism’ that is “able to produce a mythological vision of a sanitary Western world in need of protection from an unsanitary other” (24). However, this vision also required a similar mythologizing of the Orient. In the case of India, such act was easily possible due to the European belief which viewed it as a land of the occult. The “imagined Orient appealed” to “modern occultism,” a subject that interested Romantics and nineteenth-century Westerners alike (Partridge 614). In Rudyard Kipling, one finds the assimilation of the Epidemic Orientalist thought that attached mystery, savagery and supernaturalism to places in India that the English reader may not have visited in real life. In turn, this produces a Gothic atmosphere that hinges on rot, disease and insanitation.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay, British India, and after spending his days briefly but happily with his ayahs till the age of five, he was sent to England with his sister for further education. He returned in 1882 to work as a journalist for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore. Immediately after his return, there is a “panorama of disgust” in the young journalist’s eyes, which comes with the “conflation of Indian bodies and tropics” (Mukherjee 133). Alice MacDonald Fleming, Kipling’s sister, writes that her brother fancied being a doctor, considering it to be “an ideal profession” (4). However, when a friend of his aunt’s took him on a visit to the post-mortem, he became distraught and quickly gave up (Fleming 4). Yet, his interests remained. Gillian Sheehan notes that Kipling’s perspectival interest in medicine, sanitation and illness was retained through his work as a journalist. In an account of his visit to a cow-byre titled “Typhoid at Home,” published on 14 February 1885, Kipling writes how the gullies filled with “frowsy, fetid humanity” carry infections through the polluted milk and “pestilential surroundings.” Bhupal Singh, one of the earliest Indian critics of Anglo-Indian literature, finds it striking that Kipling, while having lived in India and knowing how “little mysterious” ordinary life is, still used the same pre-existing notions associated with Orientals that saw them as “all that is bizzare, weird, savage, or uncommon” (72). B.J. Moore-Gilbert asserts that the Gothic was a popular genre among Anglo-Indian writers during nineteenth-century India because it allowed for the expression of estrangement that the “exiled community” felt, and so they derived from the “often extraordinary nature of Indian surroundings” (188). Rudyard Kipling followed this tradition of writing and, in true imperialist fashion, legitimized his imagined world by justifying a mission of civilization. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee analyses that the imperial hero who triumphs over the disaster environment of India and its hordes of diseases becomes a key figure in Kipling’s palliative imperialism (135). In “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes,” he notes the use of tropical “outbreak narrative” and how the village depicted is “built around the notion of contagion and disease, specifically that of cholera” (161, 164). I add to Mukherjee’s analysis of the short story by showing how the constructed spatiality of a mysterious location known as the Village of the Dead makes the area a quarantine ground, which prevents the afflicted from leaving and threatens reverse colonization.

2. Quarantine as Power

Here, it becomes pertinent to contextualise the tale within the medical discourses of late nineteenth-century India. Sanitation, defined as efforts for the preservation of health and cleanliness, emerged as a colonial exercise actively opposed to the then-apparent conditions of India. The native climate and environment were associated with insanitation, putrefaction and disease, which, in turn, effectively evoked horror and disgust. The tropical environment of India was perceived as a space where medical observations could be carried out. Historian David Arnold notes how nineteenth-century India was acknowledged as a “tropical observatory, where diseases as varied as cholera, dysentery, leprosy and malaria” could be studied (23). The association of various diseases with India reveals how the Epidemic Orientalist discourse functioned. For the colonizers, survival on an alien and hostile (Indian) land became of utmost importance and attention.

Cholera, a bacterial infection and a water-borne disease, causes extreme dehydration due to enteric illness. Although cholera figured as one of the deadliest diseases in India, unfortunately, it was only deemed a contagious disease in 1893 by the British at the Dresden Sanitary Conference. The control and regulation of infectious diseases through measures such as the International Sanitary Conferences was considered necessary only when diseases like cholera arrived in Europe, albeit through colonial encounters, but it identified the colony and its people as “perpetual potential vectors of disease” (White 55, 61). For a long time, miasma or simply ‘bad air’ was believed to be the cause of many diseases. It comprised human “filth” and “effluvia” that were marked as “contributory causes of disease, alongside swamps, marshes, rotting animal carcasses, and decaying vegetable matter” (Arnold 74). While medical practitioners considered leprosy or smallpox as unrelated to the environment, the majority of the diseases, including fevers, “were seen to be in various degrees affected by the nature of India’s environment,” and importance was given to “climate and topography as determinants of disease” (Arnold 30, 35). Rudyard Kipling’s imperial hero is seen in “New Brooms” (1888) as tackling diseases in India, preventing deaths increasingly common in India.“for their lives and their surroundings, their deaths, were part of a huge conspiracy against cleanliness.” An unsanitary image of India was consolidated further when communicable diseases were linked with India’s environment.

In England, however, anti-contagionists like Charles Maclean in 1830 argued to abolish Quarantine Laws as he believed “pestilential contagion… to have no existence” and that “Quarantine Laws” only “increase(d) sickness and mortality” (1). Around the time when Kipling was developing his predilection for sanitation and medicine, J.M. Cuningham, the Sanitary Commissioner of India in 1873, was quick to disavow the practice of quarantine at various places in his Report on the Cholera Epidemic of 1872 in Northern India (1873). While calling it “an unmixed evil,” he believed quarantine had greater disadvantages when applied to Indian towns and villages because “distance from European supervision” increased (28). Even when Cuningham considers the possibility that cholera could be contagious, he quickly refutes the efficacy of quarantine (29). His theories regarding the origin of cholera stubbornly pointed to the wide array of meteorological conditions, soil, air and water of India, as he believed that India was “the home of the disease” (2). Here, epidemic disease becomes a defining mark of otherness that associates the colony with the potential danger of infection.

While Robert Koch’s theory of germ and the discovery of the cholera bacillus emerged in the 1880s, I could not find its influence on Kipling’s short story “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes,” ¹ which was published in 1885. Instead, in an address to students of the Medical School of Middlesex Hospital later in 1908, he enumerates the many privileges afforded to doctors, among which control over ships and ports is notable. Significantly, it points to the “power of quarantine” (Canale 3). Control over ships and ports meant that one could affect trade, holding the power of the economy in one’s hands. It evinces scepticism towards quarantine as an effective measure against disease, remaining only as a tool of authority. A decade after the publication of Kipling’s “Strange Ride,” quarantine was officially repealed in England in 1896, even when cholera was officially declared contagious. Jacqueline Isero summarizes that “a common fear” among the sanitationists, as opposed to contagionists, “was that quarantine could be employed arbitrarily as a means of government control” (17). It can, thus, be surmised that Kipling saw the same strict preventative measures of quarantine that came after an epidemic outbreak as a means of political power. Notably, this is similar to the view adopted by anticontagionists of the late nineteenth century (Isero 17).

3. “Insane Native”: Gothicizing Quarantine

Rudyard Kipling builds up a “sense of repugnance” while constructing India in his writings (Generani 34). “Strange Ride,” written by Kipling when he was only nineteen years old, was first published in the Quartette in Lahore, British India. The author carefully situates the village where “Dead who did not die but may not live” in a spacio-temporal reality, pinning the date of events of the tale as December 23rd, 1884 (Kipling, “Strange”). Kipling additionally inculcates realism in the story through a geographical mapping of the colony. He opens the tale by counting numerous strange institutions in India, and with the distance between them ––from the outskirts Calcutta to the deserts of Bikaner–– he links the oriental strangeness of the East to the West of the subcontinent. Drawing on pre-existing points of reference, such as Okara Station, which the Anglo-Indian reader may recognise, he overlays these with a gothic landscape which is remote and almost mythic. In doing so, he represents an imagined geography that is made tangible to the reader.

The protagonist Morrowbie Jukes is a Civil Engineer who, one night, suffers from a feverish delirium and starts a violent hunt for dogs: “My irritation gave way, after a short time, to a fixed determination to slaughter one huge black and white beast who had been foremost in song and first in flight throughout the evening” (Kipling, “Strange”). Having previously hung a dog’s carcass for other animals to devour, his behaviour in sickness prefaces a “harrowing narrative of contagion that signals a crisis of imperial masculinity” (Mukherjee 162). The adventure tale is also replete with Imperial Gothic themes since Jukes is kept at an ironic distance. While described by the frame narrator as an honest, rational and practical man, Jukes is at the risk of “going native,” which is a common anxiety expressed in the Imperial Gothic (Brantlinger 229). Verging on uncivilized and animalistic behaviour throughout the night, he embarks on the hunt by riding on his horse, ‘Pornic.’ He arms himself with a hogspear to kill the dogs that roused him from sleep that night. The feverish and violent hunt of dogs foreshadows the gruesome tale of disease and paranoia that follows the ride. After traversing the deserts––“a limitless expanse of moonlit sand”–– at the bank of the River Sutlej, Pornic slips along the slope, and they fall into a sandy crater (Kipling, “Strange”). Upon regaining consciousness, Jukes finds himself in a horseshoe-shaped crater, with a steep slope on one end and the river on the other.

Round the bottom of the crater, about three feet from the level of the ground proper, ran a series of eighty-three semi-circular ovoid, square, and multilateral holes, all about three feet at the mouth. Each hole on inspection showed that it was carefully shored internally with drift-wood and bamboos, and over the mouth a wooden drip-board projected, like the peak of a jockey’s cap, for two feet. No sign of life was visible in these tunnels, but a most sickening stench pervaded the entire amphitheatre—a stench fouler than any which my wanderings in Indian villages have introduced me to. (Kipling, “Strange”)

A well is dug in the centre of the crater, and the numerous semi-circular burrows signify the presence of a population. Immediately, the narrator describes an olfactory foulness and decay that constitute miasma. With the risk of infection, horror sets in the narrative even before the protagonist gains knowledge of the perils in the crater.

He finds Gunga Dass in the crater, who is a previous acquaintance of Jukes. Dass was a telegraph master in the service of the government. Having known him as a “Deccanee Brahmin” and a healthy, good-humoured man, Morrowbie Jukes is shocked to see the man completely transformed. Now a ghastly, filthy and skinny figure, whose only speciality in the present seemed to be catching crows as food, his “caste-mark, stomach, slate-colored continuations, and unctuous speech were all gone” (Kipling, “Strange”). With Gunga Dass, Kipling creates an image of degeneration, a trope common in post-Darwinian late-nineteenth century Gothic. It stood as an antithesis to the idea of civilization that the Empire wanted to project onto its colonies:

The biological decline of the individual organism, as it was assumed to be communicable, threatened the decline of civilisation. Paradoxically, civilisation itself was held to be at fault, since civilisation had created the degenerate and enabled his propagation through its suspension of the mechanism of natural selection. (Margree and Randall 218)

As shown later, Gunga Dass, after being afflicted with cholera and thrown into the village, changed negatively not only in his outer appearance but also inwardly, exhibiting a decay of morality along with health.

Dass explains how he arrived at the village two and a half years ago, along with two other men. A harrowing tale of disease follows: “In epidemics of cholera you are carried to be burnt almost before you are dead” (Kipling, “Strange”). As per Hindu religious traditions, the dead are cremated on ghats, which are constructed on the riverside. He continues, “Perhaps, [the cold air] makes you alive, and then, if you are only little alive, mud is put on your nose and mouth and you die conclusively… but if you are too lively they let you go and take you away” (Kipling, “Strange”). A superstition is at play as Gunga Dass is taken away by an unknown sect of people for protesting against the last rites being performed on him. They provide medicines and nurse him back to health. However, after recovery, Dass is put under the care of a stranger who transports him and a couple more men via rail and camels through the desert, before being thrown into the crater. He also reveals that the unknown group throws food at intervals from the slope's side. Escape is futile along the river as well, since a country-boat anchored in the river fires bullets at anyone who attempts escape. When Morrowbie Jukes is also fired at in his attempt to leave the crater, he recognises that the bullet belonged to a “Martini-Henry” rifle fired by “some insane native in a boat”.declared insane because they dared to use colonial measures of subjugation against the colonizer (Kipling, “Strange”). And even when the boat is absent during the night time, the quicksand along the sides deters escape. It is clear that the location for the Village of the Dead, which is assumed to be a century-old habitation, has been chosen carefully by the sect. Surrounded by walls of sand on three sides and quicksand on the remaining, care is taken to keep the inhabitants isolated. The unknown natives take every measure possible to disallow escape from the crater, yet they also provide supplies. If Rudyard Kipling saw quarantine as a power, the Imperial Gothic tale shows a case of reverse colonization.

There is, however, a gothic subversion of power as the ‘insane native(s)’ deploy imperial machinery along with the support of environmental factors like miasma and insanitation to terrorise the White man. Morrowbie Jukes fears contact within the quarantined space of the village, not only with the inhabitants, whom he declares as beasts, but also with the miasmatic air, sandy soil and water of the village. He describes with disgust his coffin-like den that exuded miasma: their “sides had been worn smooth and greasy by the contact of innumerable naked bodies” (Kipling, “Strange”). Darwinian law of the survival of the fittest runs through Jukes’ mind as he believes himself to have left civilization behind––“I had left the world, it seemed, for centuries” (Kipling, “Strange”).

If the ailment of cholera and malnutrition causes harm to the body, it also strains the mind in “Strange Ride.” “The mind, with its normalities as much as its deviances, cannot function in the Victorian novel without due deference to the containing body that carries and sustains it. The illusory separation of mind and body is a post-Victorian conception, and one with little grounding in the physiological medicine of the nineteenth century” (Hughes 188). The union of mind and body in the Victorian tale also meant a simultaneous degradation of both. Sickness of the body paralleled sickness of the mind. As shown with Gunga Dass, he and his fellow villagers seem to have undergone complete degeneration under the nightmarish quarantine. Maniacal laughter and silent cowering are soon followed by the villagers hunting down Jukes’ horse as food. With actions verging on cannibalism, since Jukes considers his horse more human than the villagers, boundaries between human and animal are continually blurred. Patrick Brantlinger explains that the late Victorian worries about decline in their culture, institutions, religion and race were expressed as “apocalyptic themes and images” in the Imperial Gothic, despite the authors still being in favour of the Empire (230).

Gunga Dass’ actions become far more minacious as the tale progresses. It is revealed that another Englishman lived in the Village of the Dead for eighteen months and had figured out the safe parts of the quicksand to step on. But as soon as he had figured and sketched out a plan of escape, Dass shot him in the back, incorrectly assuming that he would be left alone in the village. Again, Gunga Dass is shown incapable of rationality, and his murderous actions construct foreboding and dread. Overcome with horror when seeing “the yellow-brown mummy” of the corpse, which was kept in one of the burrows by Gunga Dass, Jukes finds a map in the dead man’s notebook (Kipling, “Strange”). Even though Jukes had discerned the truth about Gunga Dass, he finds no alternative but to seek his help in understanding it. Following the dead man’s instructions, they attempt to escape during the night. Gunga Dass hits him with the gun barrel, rendering him unconscious, and escapes on his own. It is only then that Jukes’ loyal servant Dunnoo, ² the “dog-boy,” comes to his aid with a rope and helps him climb the slope of the crater (Kipling, “Strange”). Although Morrowbie Jukes successfully escapes the Village of the Dead, horror remains in the narrative because there is no complete restoration of order. Gunga Dass, the murderer, remains at large in the end. An anxiety lingers: civilization is fragile and may devolve into the bestial republic at any moment.

4. Cholera, Superstitions and the Undead

The use of medicines, railways, camels and even the possession of English firearms in the native’s hand cannot be a mere coincidence. The systemic presence of cultic signs suggests an organised structure that keeps the Village of the Dead alive. Mukherjee argues that the bestial, “zombie republic” distorts the available imperial machinery, once significant of the “palliative imperialism,” and thus poses a “challenge [to] the empire’s authority” (Mukherjee 163, 165). The setting of the cholera epidemic is read as Rudyard Kipling’s representation of Indian superstitions because the rites of death have been performed so the dead cannot return to normalcy. It may also be read as a metaphor for India where the author shows “a self-defeating internal hostility” (Mukherjee 165; Frost 19). However, the “motifs of imprisonment” present in the works of Anglo-Indians like Kipling also reveal “claustrophobia and sense of exile” in the Anglo-Indian community (B.J. Moore-Gilbert 191). While extending this reading in the context of epidemics, it is pertinent to remember how isolation during quarantine is feared. Cuningham mentions that in the Cholera Epidemic of 1872, people feared quarantine and similar measures, thus often concealed the disease, some even preferring cholera to the quarantine (2, 28). “Strange Ride” uses gothic tropes of claustrophobic spaces to depict a confined site of quarantine, which further depicts horror through grave-like enclosures of sleep. Perhaps, by satirizing Indian self-governance through the cult of “insane native(s)” that oversee the Village of the Dead, Rudyard Kipling shows the colonized incapable of governance. “Within these confined sites, the subjects often experience violent anachronism, in which a sense of enlightened modernity is undermined by the return of atavistic presences and practices” (Wasson 2). The return to hunting, loss of civilization and the subversion of racial and colonial hierarchy signify the return of atavistic practices in Imperial Gothic. The confined space of quarantine ground also reflects an experience of illness where the patient may feel a loss of control over their body and surroundings. “Spaces may become oddly carceral, and the normal passage of time may feel halted” (Wasson 4). If temporary isolation is feared during quarantine, then Kipling also evokes horror through the stretching of the temporal limits of quarantine, making it an unending nightmare.

Although epidemical superstitions are not an Oriental phenomenon, colonial discourse in India suggested otherwise. W.H. Sleeman, an officer in the British-Indian army, records how, when cholera struck his district, Narsinghpur, in 1823, epidemics were believed by natives to be “inflicted by the Deity for some very general sin” that could “be removed only by prayers” (205). Furthermore, the accuracy of the ritual performed in worship of the disease deity was believed to either abet or amplify the spread of disease (203-5). The tone of amusement found in Sleeman’s early nineteenth-century account is replaced by that of disgust in R. Hartley Kennedy’s Notes on the Epidemic Cholera (1846), who sees native superstitions as having “most disgusting and debasing attributes” because black magic was used “every where” to “transfer [the disease] to some less liberal sinner” (7). Such a vast generalization is misplaced. Pamela K. Gilbert shows in her study of cholera epidemics from 1832-66 how religious believers in Britain, before the sanitation efforts of 1848, saw the sinfulness of its population resulting in God bringing disease as punishment (36). Superstitions related to cholera epidemics in Britain saw a decline only after the 1850s when Dr John Snow discovered contaminated water as the source of cholera, and attention shifted to sanitation in the epidemic of 1866 (Gilbert 38-41). Kipling attaches superstitions to the epidemic in “Strange Ride” because of an unwavering belief in the West’s progress and India’s primitiveness.

There is also an uncanny similarity between Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Rudyard Kipling’s “Strange Ride.” Certainly, there are similarities in the expression of the theme of the undead in Dracula and “Strange Ride.” Interestingly, the two stories also share an epidemical background of cholera. Marion McGarry (2023), an Irish historian and researcher, argues that Dracula from Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a personification of Sligo Cholera, a cholera outbreak that occurred in Sligo, Ireland, in 1832. Stoker, who heard his mother Charlotte Thornley’s account of the cholera epidemic in Sligo and also researched the outbreak further, percolated real-life horrors of people getting buried alive into his novel. She also remembers in her Experiences of the Cholera in Ireland (1873) how people believed that cholera came “from the East… that it rose out of the Yellow Sea, going inland like a cloud and dividing into two which spread North and South.” Much like Thornley, who calls Sligo ‘a City of the Dead,’ Kipling calls the imagined settlement in the crater ‘the Village of the Dead.’ Although Thornley, at the behest of her son, wrote down her account of cholera in 1873, it went unpublished. Jimmie E. Cain notes that “Stoker and Kipling could have well met and interacted since at least 1889” (149). Given the date of publication of “Strange Ride” being 1885, it is unlikely that Stoker or his mother’s account influenced Kipling. However, it is clear that both had “a pronounced enthusiasm for the British empire and a keen awareness of the geopolitical threats to British hegemony” (150). The coincidences remain interesting as they exhibit how the discourse of Epidemic Orientalism becomes tied up with the writers of the Imperial Gothic.

5. Conclusion

“The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” reveals how Rudyard Kipling’s gothic imagination is entangled with his affinity for medicine and sanitation. While partaking in the discourse of Epidemic Orientalism, the tale solidifies alterity as relating to putrefaction and disease. The imperial belief in the British Empire and its hegemony locates the East as the origin of both the cholera epidemic and occultist practice. The ‘Village of the Dead’ reflects the claustrophobia that comes with quarantine, and furthermore, represents the nineteenth-century debates and apathy towards quarantine as a preventative measure of cholera, only viewing it as a political power. The geography of the Orient that Kipling imagines finds itself articulating primitiveness, superstitions and mystery in the short story, even if his lived experience may have differed. It demonizes any prospect of Indian self-governance by showing quarantine horrors under the natives, exacerbated by images of putrefaction. Further readings of Kipling’s work through the lens of Imperial Gothic and epidemic disease will not only deepen our understandinf of the author, but also reveal the ways in which nineteenth-century Gothic is intertwined with medical discourse––a connection that may be of significance to both literary studies and the medical humanities.

References

Notes

1 The title “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” will henceforth be abbreviated as “Strange Ride.”

2 Dunnoo being the saviour is a nostalgic reference to Kipling’s childhood, as Dunnoo was the name of his pony bearer (Fleming 4).

The Grove
ISSN: 1137-005X
32
Num.
Año. 2025

STRANGE CASE OF QUARANTINE: CHOLERA EPIDEMIC AND GOTHIC IMAGINATION IN RUDYARD KIPLING’S “THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES” (1885)

Aqsa Eram
University of Lucknow,India