Medicine, Disease and Ecology in Colonial India : The Deccan Plateau in the Nineteenth Century

Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction: the land in history. 2. Material condition under colonialism. 3. Colonial subjection and sanitation. 4. Colonialism and disease. 5. Mortality. 6. Colonial medical measures and popular resistance. 7. Conclusion. Bibliography. Index.

"Colonial Deccan like the rest of British India had all the social, economic and material ingredients for the proliferation of epidemic diseases. Its population lived in the most unsanitary conditions, consumed contaminated water, and was crowded for space, living in wretched houses, extremely poverty stricken, sunk in debt, and suffered from serious food shortage and malnutrition. Diseases claimed lives on a regular basis even in the \'officially\' designated non-famine and non-drought years. Failure to look at the material condition of the masses was in fact a reflection of not only the oppressive nature of British imperialism in India but also the insensitivity of European colonizers. The existence of mass poverty and its denial by the colonial state made the situation worse. This book argues that the reason for dysentery, diarrhoea, and bowel complaints was really malnutrition, undernourishment, and the general poverty of the masses.

Even though all the diseases were intimately associated with colonial modernization, yet the British imperial medical establishment continued to blindly adhere to the non-contagion miasmatic ideology. When the imperial state created hundreds of miles of roads and railways, diseases like cholera, malaria, smallpox, plague, influenza, etc., travelled and proliferated everywhere. The absence of proper infrastructural response from the imperial establishment, made these epidemics even more deadly. This long-awaited study shows how the infrastructural changes brought about by British colonialism created ecological conditions for the diseases to become epidemic." (jacket)