In a blog also released today, my colleagues and I present the numbers behind the currently unfolding cholera epidemics across Africa—and juxtapose rising cholera deaths with steep cuts in US foreign assistance. In many countries, that assistance played an important role in the response to past cholera outbreaks.
These numbers quantify the scale of the crises, highlight trends, and reveal policy gaps. Yet even the most carefully assembled datasets miss something essential—the lived reality of disease. As we worked on our analysis, my mind kept harking back to Margaret Bourke-White’s haunting photographs of cholera among those displaced by the 1947 Partition of India.
Bourke-White was a celebrated photojournalist who—among other things—was the first woman to be allowed to document combat during World War II. She was also among the few foreign correspondents to cover the frontlines of the Partition of India. In the summer and autumn of 1947, she photographed the violence, mass displacement, and humanitarian collapse caused by the division of British India into the new democracies of India and Pakistan. Tens of millions fled across the new borders between India and modern-day Pakistan to the west—the focus of Bourke-White’s work—and India and the then province of East Pakistan (later, Bangladesh) to the east.
In the crowded trains and makeshift refugee camps, cholera thrived. Bourke-White’s photographs of cholera victims—lying motionless on the ground, being carried through crowded camps—show gaunt faces, skeletal frames, parched lips. They show a child’s scared little face as she sits next to (I assume) her mother, who is splayed out on the ground while receiving an intravenous glucose drip. These photos are a visceral reminder of how powerless we can be against cholera’s ferocity. They also show the broader landscape: thousands of displaced people forced into unsanitary conditions, waiting for trains, water, or medical attention that too often arrived too late. And they show the shallow graves and the mourning relatives left behind.
What makes Bourke-White’s cholera photographs so unsettling is their intimacy. Her subjects are not anonymous masses but individuals caught in unbearable circumstances. One cannot but feel the grief and loss of these shattered families.
Epidemics, especially when entangled with displacement and conflict, often unfold invisibly to the outside world. Bourke-White put cholera—and the displaced people it consumed—on the global stage, reminding audiences that public health was inseparable from politics, borders, and human dignity.
Today’s cholera outbreaks in Africa make her photographs resonate anew for me. The datasets that underpin our analysis—case counts from the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, aid flows from USAspending.gov—reveal disturbing trends: mortality is climbing, US aid has contracted, and prevention efforts are faltering. But it is Bourke-White who shows us what a cholera death looks like, and who conveys the despair of bereaved families and the terror of displacement compounded by disease.
Bourke-White’s photographs compel us to remember that every unit in the epidemiological data is a person who has died. The numbers tell of scale; the photos of impact.
I am grateful to Emily Schabacker and Charles Kenny for feedback that helped shape this blog.
The Partition of India is one of the largest mass displacement events in recent history, with estimates suggesting that it displaced 12-20 million people. Here are some of my recommended resources if you’d like to read, hear, or watch more about it:
Economics papers
- Effects of the mass displacement on demographic composition by Bharadwaj, Khwaja, and Mian
- Effects on long-term development by Bharadwaj and Mirza
- The relationship between World War II combat experience and ethnic cleansing during Partition by Jha and Wilkinson
Podcast
A great episode of the Empire podcast–hosted by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple–that focused on Partition.
Books
- Urvashi Butalia’s great ethnography and oral history of Partition, The Other Side of Silence. which centers the voices of the marginalized–women, children, the lower castes.
- Two of my favorite novels on the subject: Tamas, by Bhisham Sahni, and Train to Pakistan, by Khushwant Singh.
- A curated list of Booker Prize-winning books on Partition.
Movies
There are many, but three of my favorites are:
- Meghe Dhaka Tara, a Bengali language film that focuses on the eastern front of Partition; the protagonist contracts another communicable disease that killed many during Partition: tuberculosis.
- Earth, a Hindi film that tells an intimate story of love, envy, and betrayal amidst the broader landscape of Partition.
- Khamosh Pani, a Punjabi language film that is a rare Indo-Pakistani joint venture. It tells of the long shadows of Partition.
