British Raj

The British Raj is presented as more than a vanished period of foreign rule: its image remains visible in Bombay, while practices and institutions associated with it persist in stories of medical exclusion and prison administration. The novel approaches this history through distinct perspectives—a cityscape seen by Lin, a historical account told by Abdullah, and Lin’s encounter with a jail whose routines are described as inherited from colonial rule. Together, these strands make the past legible not as a closed chapter but as a structure whose effects continue to shape ordinary life.

Historical Setting and Urban Imprint

Abdullah describes the British Raj as the period when Europeans controlled India from the Khyber Pass to the Bay of Bengal. That broad geographical reach establishes the scale of the authority under discussion, while the rest of his account focuses on how its hierarchies affected people with little access to resources. The novel does not present the period only through formal political history: its significance emerges through the conditions that Abdullah says shaped the lepers’ access to medicine and through institutions Lin encounters later.

The colonial past also survives as part of Bombay’s visible character. When Lin considers the city, he sees buildings with a romantic British Raj appearance standing beside modern mirrored business towers. The contrast places architectural traces of the past within a city of conspicuous modern development. Old and new do not appear in separate worlds; they occupy the same streetscape, just as historical arrangements and contemporary needs coexist in the novel’s account of the city.

Abdullah’s Account of Exclusion and Medicine

At the lepers’ camp, Abdullah explains that under the British Raj lepers ranked last among those competing for privileges and entitlements. Limited supplies of medicine, bandages, and treatment often ran out before reaching them. Famine and flood could further diminish even customary medicines and herbal remedies. In Abdullah’s telling, this repeated exclusion drove the lepers to acquire what they could not obtain through ordinary channels. Their skill at taking scarce supplies eventually produced surpluses, which they sold through a black market of their own.

Abdullah sets this network against the wider importance of medical supplies in a country where conflict was frequent. His account emphasizes that disease and wounds killed many men beyond those who died in battle. Because chemists, hospital pharmacies, and pharmaceutical wholesalers registered sales, unusually large purchases could draw the attention of police and governments. A traceable supply of medicines, especially antibiotics, could expose outlaws and revolutionaries. The lepers’ market worked differently: its sellers did not ask customers why they needed the goods, and it served anyone able to pay. Abdullah describes such networks in India’s great cities, with customers ranging from terrorists and separatists to ambitious outlaws.

This history gives the market a double character. It is a means of survival formed by people denied reliable access to care, but it also supplies people whose activities make them targets of state scrutiny. Abdullah’s closing formulation links the two sides: the lepers take life-saving resources for themselves and sell them to others who are also in danger of dying. The account does not make scarcity disappear or present the network as an uncomplicated remedy; it shows how exclusion can produce an alternative system that answers urgent needs while operating outside official oversight.

Colonial Inheritance in the Prison

Lin’s arrival at Arthur Road Prison supplies a different encounter with the British Raj’s afterlife. A commander invokes the jail’s British construction during the Raj and recalls its former use to imprison and punish Indian men. He then treats Lin as British, although Lin identifies himself as being from New Zealand. The exchange makes colonial history an active force within the present scene: the commander reads the prisoner through an inherited political category, and Lin’s correction does not change that judgment.

The prison’s day-to-day administration is also described as carrying forward a colonial-era structure. Lin learns that ordinary guards have little role in maintaining daily routines, order, and discipline; these duties belong to convict overseers. Long-term prisoners pass through successive stages: first as common prisoners, then into work such as the kitchen, laundry, prison industries, or cleanup gangs, and eventually, for some, into supervisory positions marked by a hat, belt, and bamboo stick. The system gives convicted long-term offenders authority over other prisoners, including power with grave consequences. In Lin’s account, this is not simply an old building bearing a historical name but an operating hierarchy attributed to the prison system inherited from the British Raj.

The Past in Present-Day Survival

The British Raj is also a reference point against which the novel measures later arrangements of care. Lin’s work in the Colaba hutments grows from limited first-aid training and a willingness to help, not from a medical qualification: he rejects the description of himself as a doctor and acknowledges that he is not adequately trained. When he cannot identify an illness, he refers patients to St. George Hospital, but many return without having received attention. The scene establishes a gap between formal services and the people seeking treatment, though it does not claim that this specific failure is a direct continuation of colonial policy.

The lepers’ resourcefulness remains relevant to present need. During the cholera emergency, the oral rehydration salts used by the community have been supplied through the lepers, and Doctor Hamid offers to arrange trained volunteers. This episode places informal provision beside the limits of the clinic and the strain of the crisis. Read alongside Abdullah’s account of historical exclusion, it shows how people at the margins can become essential suppliers of care, even when their own access to official resources has been precarious.

Narrative Significance

The novel’s treatment of the British Raj is built from different kinds of evidence within the story: an architectural impression, a campfire-like explanation of medical commerce, and the routines and assumptions of a prison. These are not interchangeable perspectives. Abdullah supplies a history of exclusion and adaptation; Lin encounters colonial inheritance as an immediate institutional and personal reality; the Bombay streetscape makes the period visible amid modern construction. Their conjunction gives historical time a continuing presence without reducing every contemporary hardship to one cause.

That distinction matters to the account’s ethical emphasis. The lepers’ black market is described in relation to deprivation and survival, while the prison’s inherited arrangements reveal how authority can be delegated and reproduced through routine. Lin’s uncertain position as an improvised caregiver offers a contrasting response to need: he recognizes the limits of his knowledge, refers patients onward when possible, and continues helping when formal treatment proves inaccessible. The British Raj therefore functions as both a named historical period and a measure of how power, scarcity, and institutions outlast the political order in which they were established.