This book is about the interaction between Tropical Medicine, the colonial state and colonial enclaves. The epistemologies and therapeutics of Western science and medicine informed the practices of colonialism in the tropical world from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The European conquest and colonization of the non-European world was imbued with the dread of ‘tropical diseases’ and simultaneously sustained by the practices of settlement in these tropical colonies. In analysing these two processes together, this book investigates the links between Tropical Medicine and colonial enclaves.

The perception of the ‘tropics’ itself changed from the abundant and the paradisiacal in...

There were many ideological, political, military and medical reasons for hill-stations in tropical colonies. The urgency of the question of the Europeans’ long-term survival in the tropics engaged medical discourses in Britain as well as in the tropical colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹ The eighteenth century represented a period of optimism about acclimatization and it had been generally a period when racial categorizations had not assumed absolute rigidity.² By the third decade of the nineteenth century acclimatization theories were eclipsed and there were serious doubts about the survival of the Englishman in India over a few generations. The...

This chapter traces the expansion of tea plantations in the three ‘tea districts’ of northern Bengal: the Darjeeling hills, its foothills, the Terai, and contiguously in the plains of Duars. While the enclave of Darjeeling was constructed as a European escape from tropical diseases, the plantation enclave was created through modes of heroism and adventure associated with the colonization of ‘diseased’ lands. The plantation system of Darjeeling and Duars marked a break from the existing agrarian policies and practices of the colonial government in India. Agrarian revenue represented the mainstay of income for the colonial government. From the mid-nineteenth century,...

As we have seen in Chapter 2, Darjeeling was incorporated into the wider colonial polity and economy of north Bengal over the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, it also sustained its role as a resort for exclusive European medicalized leisure in the late Victorian period. As its popularity became wider, the town stretched to accommodate various demands on its multiple identities – as a European social enclave and seasonal administrative centre, as the social and medical hub for the planters of the Darjeeling, Duars and Terai. As they did over many other institutions of British privilege, the Indian elite, especially the Bengalis, staked...

In nineteenth-century medical, management and official discourse, the foothills of the Darjeeling (and the plains beyond), Terai and Duars were represented as sites of disease, fevers and fatalities. Malaria and blackwater fever, a particularly vicious form of fever, were widely prevalent among the planters as well as the labourers, although the indigenousMecheswere supposed to have been immune from them. This chapter studies a particular historical moment in the formation of the plantation enclave, when its modes of functioning were challenged by a team of malariologists who were commissioned by the government of India to find out why malaria...

In this chapter, I will examine public health and medical infrastructure in the tea plantations in the context of their physical location and economic position as enclaves of specialized medical attention. An analysis of disease, medicine and health in a plantation economy can be made from an understanding of public health in a privileged area of colonial economy. Were the public health measures, which were not undertaken in rural India due to lack of financial resources, carried out in the tea plantations? Official discourse and planters’ perspectives emphasize the view that the plantations were a privileged, segregated sector so far...

This chapter studies the dynamics between colonial enclaves and Tropical Medicine in the twentieth century. Despite the acceptance of germ theory, British Indian medical discourse and practice never abandoned miasmatic and climatic theories of disease. In colonial India, Tropical Medicine continued to connect diseases with specific ‘zones’ and ‘localities’. Research in Tropical Medicine reiterated the importance of ‘local factors’ constructed through ecological, climatic or cultural modes. From their contribution to Tropical Medicine, through the ‘experiments’ and verification of disease theories in their localities, to the contribution to the control of archetypical ‘tropical’ disease in Bengal and India generally, the tea...

So far we have discussed the impact of colonization and consequently medical policies in two different, contiguous enclaves: the hill-station of Darjeeling and the tea estates in its adjoining regions of northern Bengal. The town of Darjeeling, originally conceived of as a European sanitary enclave, invited from the very beginning traders, immigrant labourers and Indian civil officials and servants; and with its development came the greater colonization of the entire Terai and Duars areas. As we have seen, the town of Darjeeling was neither an indisputably healthy hill-station, nor was it a white enclave. Certain areas within Darjeeling were marked...