On the epidemiology of the plague / by E. H. Hankin.

  • Ernest Hanbury Hankin
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the epidemiology of the plague / by E. H. Hankin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/44 page 61
    that a pilgrimage must have occurred at Nassik in August of 1344, and in view of the great antiquity of Indian religious customs!, we may safely surmise that in the spring of that year numbers of fakirs emerged from Garhwal, and travelled by various routes through the plains of India to the sacred shrine. But on referring to Indian histories no explicit mention of plague in that year could be found. Elphinstone’, however, states that a rebellion broke out in Ma‘bar in 1341, and that an army sent by the Emperor of Delhi to suppress it was so wasted by the ravages of a pestilence that it was forced to return’ This statement seems to imply that the pestilence appeared soon after the rebellion, namely in 1341, and hence could not be connected with the movements of the fakirs in 1344, But a further examination has shown me that the contrary is the case. In a contemporary history, known as the Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi‘, it is stated that on receipt of news of the rebellion an army was despatched to Ma‘bar. Afterwards the Emperor returned to Delhi for reinforcements. When he again left Delhi, probably in the autumn of the year, a famine was commencing. When the Emperor was still three months’ march distant from Ma‘bar, according to the traveller Ibn Batuta, pestilence broke out in the army, and the greater part of it perished. The Emperor himself and many nobles were attacked. After halting at Deogiri (a few marches east of Nassik) while suffering from the disease the Emperor returned to Delhi. He travelled through Malwa, by what appears to have been the ordinary route to Ma‘bar, and reached Delhi still weak from his illness (Tarikh-t Firoz Shahi)’. 1 Alberuni, a Persian writer, was born in a.p. 973, and lived at the court of Mahmud of Ghazni. In his description of India he refers to ‘‘the Tree of Prayaga...the place where the waters of the Jaun join the Ganges, where the Hindus torment themselves with various kinds of tortures.” Prayaga is the place now known as Allahabad. With little doubt his statement refers to the tricks of fakirs at the pilgrim festival that is still held there. See Alberuni’s India by Dr E. C. Sachau, London, 1888, Vol. 1. p. 200. 2 History of India, Fifth Edition, 1866, p. 406. 3 The word “waba” used to describe this outbreak is translated as “cholera” in Elliot’s translation of Ziaud Din Barni. The word is more usually translated as pestilence and is commonly employed for plague. The known comparatively recent origin of the chief cholera deity in the United Provinces is one reason, among others, for doubting _ whether at the time we are discussing cholera was so prevalent a disease as it has since become. From Ziaud Din Barni’s and also from Ibn Batuta’s accounts it appears that the Emperor, when attacked, remained ill from the pestilence for some months, a fact that agrees better with the view that the malady was plague, and not cholera. 4 By Ziaud Din Barni. See a translation in Elliot’s History of India by its own Historians, Vol. 11. p. 243. 5 loc. cit. p. 244.
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