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The Logic of Location: Malaria Research in Colonial India, Darjeeling and Duars, 1900–30

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Nandini Bhattacharya
Nandini Bhattacharya
Affiliation:
Nandini Bhattacharya, Wellcome Research Fellow, Centre for Urban History, School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester, Marc Fitch House, 3–5 Salisbury Road, Leicester LE1 7QR, UK. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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This article explores the scientific and entrepreneurial incentives for malaria research in the tea plantations of north Bengal in colonial India. In the process it highlights how the logic of ‘location’ emerged as the central trope through which medical experts, as well as colonial administrators and planters, defined malaria research in the region. The paper argues that the ‘local’ emerged as both a prerequisite of colonial governance as well as a significant component of malaria research in the field. Despite the ambiguities that such a project entailed, tropical medicine was enriched from a diverse understanding of local ecology, habitation, and structural modes of production. Nevertheless, the locality itself did not benefit from anti-malarial policy undertaken either by medical experts or the colonial state. This article suggests that there was a disjuncture between ‘tropical medicine’ and its ‘field’ that could not be accommodated within the colonial plantation system.

Keywords

Tropical MedicineMalariaProphylaxisAnti-Malarial SanitationTropical Aggregation of LabourImmunityRacePlantation EconomyAnophelesSpecies SanitationLocal KnowledgeQuinisationS.R. Christophers
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 183 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 For instance, see Sheldon Watts, ‘British Development Policies and Malaria in India 1897–c.1929’, Past and Present 165 (1999), 141–81; Ira Klein, ‘Death in India: 1871–1921’, Journal of Asian Studies, 32 (1973), 639–59.

2 Arabinda Samanta, Malarial Fever in Colonial Bengal: Social History of an Epidemic, 1820–1939 (Kolkata: Firma KLM, 2002); Sandeep Sinha, Public Health Policy and the Indian Public: Bengal 1850–1920 (Calcutta: Vision Publications, 1998).

3 Randall Packard, ‘Malaria Blocks Development Revisited: The Role of Disease in the History of Agricultural Development in the Eastern and Northern Transvaal Lowveld, 1890–1960’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 27 (2001), 591–612.

4 Lenore Manderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870–1940, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); K.T. Silva, ‘Malaria Eradication as a Legacy of Colonial Discourse: The Case of Sri Lanka’, Parassitologia, 36 (1994), 149–63; Philip Curtin, ‘Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa’, American Historical Review, 90, 3 (1985), 594–613.

5 J.D. Isaacs, ‘D.D. Cunningham and the Aetiology of Cholera in British India, 1869–1897’, Medical History, 42 (1998), 279–305; Mark Harrison, ‘A Question of Locality: The Identity of Cholera in British India, 1860–1890’, in David Arnold, (ed.), Warm Climates and Western Medicine (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 133–59.

6 See Helen Tilley, ‘Ecologies of Complexity: Tropical Environments, African Trypanosomiasis, and the Science of Disease Control Strategies in British Colonial Africa, 1900–1940’, Osiris, 19 (2004), 21–38.

7 D.J. Bradley, ‘Watson, Swellengrebel and Species Sanitation: Environmental and Ecological Aspects’, Parassitologia, 36, 1–2 (1994), 137–47.

8 Isaacs, op. cit. (note 5).

9 F.M. Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900–1962 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

10 W.F. Bynum, ‘Reasons for Contentment: Malaria in India, 1900–1920’, Parassitologia, 40,1–2 (1998), 19–27: 21.

11 Klein, op. cit. (note 1).

12 Samanta, op. cit. (note 2), 151–77.

13 Mark Harrison, ‘“Hot Beds of Disease”: Malaria and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century British India’, Parassitologia, 40, 1–2 (1998), 11–18; see also, David Arnold, ‘“An Ancient Race Outworn”: Malaria and Race in Colonial India, 1860–1930’, in Waltraud Ernst and Bernard Harris (eds), Race, Science and Medicine (London: Routledge, 1999), 123–43.

14 Detailed Report of the General Committee of the Indian Tea Association for the Year 1901, (Calcutta: W. Newman and Co., 1902), 350–2.

15 L.S.S. O’Malley, Bengal District Gazetteer: Darjeeling (Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1907), 53.

16 A.N.J. Story to his mother, Looksan Tea Estate, 14 August 1892, fo. 321, Mss Photo Eur 275, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections [hereafter APAC], British Library.

17 H.E. Shortt and P.C.C. Garnham, ‘Samuel Rickards Christophers, 27 November 1873–19 February 1978’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 25 (1979), 179–207; see also Samuel Rickards Christophers, ‘John William Watson Stephens, 1865–1946, Obituary Notices of Fellows of Royal Society, 5 (1947), 524–40; J.W.W. Stephens later joined the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, see Helen J. Power, Tropical Medicine in the Twentieth Century: A History of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, 1898–1990 (London: Keegan Paul, 1999), 22.

18 S.P. James, ‘Malaria In India’, Scientific Memoirs by Officers of the Medical and Sanitary Department of the Government Of India, New Series No. 2 (Calcutta: Periodical Publications, 1902), 76.

19 Ibid., 77. See also ‘A Preliminary Report of the Royal Society Malaria Commission’, Indian Medical Gazette, 37 (1947), 101–2.

20 ibid.

21 Ronald Ross, who was in the neighbouring Terai while he was in the IMS, also noticed the great paucity of anophelines there. Ronald Ross and L.J. Bruce-Chwatt, The Great Malaria Problem and Its Solution: From the Memoirs of Ronald Ross (London: The Keynes Press, 1988), 194.

22 For a narrative of the controlled experiments at Mian Mir and the controversy between Ross and Christophers, S.P. James and, indeed, almost all of the Indian medical establishment, see W.F. Bynum, ‘An Experiment That Failed: Malaria Control at Mian Mir’, Parassitologia, 36, 1–2, (1994), 107–21.

23 Watts, op. cit. (note 1).

24 Rajit K. Mazumdar, The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003).

25 Ira Klein, ‘Development and Death: Reinterpreting Malaria, Economics and Ecology in British India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 38 (2001), 147–79.

26 Malcolm Watson, ‘Malaria and Mosquitoes: Forty Years On’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 87, 4505 (1939), 485.

27 Ronald Ross, ‘Medical Science and the Tropics’, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, 45 (1913), 435–8.

28 See Watson, op. cit. (note 26), 483.

29 The debate was initiated in Italy between Celli and Grassi; while the former advocated its use as prophylaxis, the latter favoured ‘radical cure’ of patients, by ‘curing all cases’ so that mosquitoes would not be infected and the cycle of transmission would break, Snowden, op. cit. (note 9), 50–1.

30 The segregation of Europeans from native quarters to prevent malarial infection was recommended by the first Royal Society Malaria Committee: Government of Bengal Proceedings, Municipal/Medical, No. 26–28 (December 1903), P/6565, APAC, 200–1. It became a regular practice in West Africa. See John W. Cell, ‘Anglo-Indian Medical Theory and the Origins of Segregation in West Africa’, The American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 307–35.

31 Government of Bengal, Municipal/Sanitation Proceedings Volume, B Proceedings Index, West Bengal State Archive (March 1907), 1; Detailed Report of the General Committee of the Dooars Planters Association for 1908, with Proceedings of Annual General Meeting in 1909 [henceforth Proceedings DPA] (Calcutta, 1911), APAC, ii.

32 S.R. Christophers and C.A. Bentley, Malaria in the Duars (Simla: Government of India Press, 1911), 2.

33 Ibid., 3–4.

34 ibid., 14.

35 Christophers and Bentley presented the argument at the Indian Medical Congress in Bombay in 1909. Samanta, op. cit. (note 2), 36. In his preface to the report of the League of Nations Malaria Commission to India, Christophers emphasised again this aspect of malaria in industrial locations. By 1927, the factor of the tropical aggregation of labour, or the human factor in malarial infection was an accepted scientific theory through reiteration in published work on malaria in India. For instance, see Patrick Hehir, Malaria in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), 45–9. The League of Nations Malaria Committee endorsed the theory of non-immune immigration into industrial locations as a principal cause of malaria. See Report of the Malaria Commission on its Study Tour in India (Aug. 23 to Dec. 28, 1929), (Geneva: League of Nations, 1930), 31.

36 S.R. Christophers, Enquiry on Malaria, Blackwater Fever and Anchylostomiasis in Singhbhum: Preliminary Investigation into the Conditions on the Bengal Iron Company’s Mines at Manharpur (Patna: Superintendent, Government Printing, Bihar and Orissa, 1923).

37 ibid., 29.

38 Christophers and Bentley, op. cit. (note 32), 23.

39 Christophers, op. cit. (note 36), 30. See also see S.R. Christophers, ‘The Mechanism of Immunity against Malaria in Communities Living under Hyper-Endemic Conditions’, Indian Journal of Medical Research, 12 (1924) 273–94.

40 Report of the Malaria Survey of the Jalpaiguri Duars [hereafter RMSJD] (Calcutta: Bengal Government Press, 1926), vii.

41 ibid.

42 Warwick Anderson, ‘Immunities of Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine, 1900–1920’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70 (1996), 94–118.

43 David Field Rennie, Bhotan and the Story of the Dooar War (London: J. Murray, 1866), 347–8.

44 See Asok Mitra, The Tribes and Castes of West Bengal (Alipore: West Bengal Government Press, 1953), 224.

45 Subhajyoti Ray, Transformations on the Bengal Frontier (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), 79. The myth of their immunity to malaria persisted in twentieth-century ethnographic accounts of the Meches. See Charu Chandra Sanyal, The Meches and the Totos: Two Sub-Himalayan Tribes of North Bengal (Darjeeling: University of North Bengal, 1973), 7.

46 Hehir, op. cit. (note 35), 39.

47 Proceedings DPA, 1926, (Jalpaiguri 1927), APAC, vii.

48 Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 164.

49 Ibid., 297.

50 Government of Bengal Proceedings, Municipal/ Sanitation, No.1–2 (March 1911), P/8686, APAC, 3.

51 Government of Bengal Proceedings, Municipal/ Sanitation, No. 14–15 (July 1910), P/8419, APAC, 30.

52 Tropical Medicine was one such modality of knowing the ‘local’, see B.S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4–5.

53 ‘Resolution No. 888–908, Government of India, Education/Sanitation’, Indian Journal of Medical Research, 1, 4, (1914), 591–2.

54 Isaacs, op. cit. (note 5); Harrison, op. cit. (note 5).

55 J. Andrew Mendelsohn, ‘From Eradication to Equilibrium: How Epidemics Became Complex after World War I’, in Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz (eds), Greater Than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine 1920–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 303–31.

56 Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); see also Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 427–36.

57 Mark Harrison, ‘Tropical Medicine in Nineteenth-Century India’, British Journal for the History of Science, 25 (1992), 299–318.

58 ‘Resolution No. 888–908’, op. cit. (note 53), 590.

59 Government of Bengal Proceedings, General/Sanitation, No. 1–2 (September 1914), P/9375, APAC, 4–9.

60 RMSJD, op. cit. (note 40), vi.

61 ibid.

62 Annual Report for the Director of Public Health, Bengal, 1920 [hereafter ARDPH], (Calcutta: s.n., 1922), 14.

63 ARDPH 1923, (Calcutta: s.n., 1925), 79.

64 ARDPH 1927, (Calcutta: s.n., 1929).

65 RMSJD, op. cit. (note 40), ix–x.

66 ibid., 5.

67 Ibid., 49.

68 Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India (London: H.M.S.O., 1931), 384–5.

69 RMSJD, op. cit. (note 40), 48. The factor of the cultivation of rice in the increase of malarial fever was acknowledged by C.A. Bentley, Malaria and Agriculture in Bengal: How to Reduce Malaria in Bengal by Irrigation (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1925).

70 ‘Jungle and Malaria in Bengal’, Indian Medical Gazette, 63 (1930), 639. See also Bhupendra Mohan Khan, ‘Records of Anophelines from the Bengal Dooars’, Indian Medical Gazette, 64 (1929), 496.

71 Bentley, op. cit. (note 69).

72 For the links between nationalist discourse on malaria and development, see Sinha, op. cit. (note 2), 104–48 and Samanta, op. cit. (note 2); see also, Klein, op. cit. (note 25).

73 See Bentley, op. cit. (note 69); see also, Samanta, ibid., 33–73.

74 Bentley, ibid., 125.

75 For criticisms by the medical establishment of his thesis that flooding, not drainage would solve the problem of malaria in the Bengal plains, see ‘Malaria and Agriculture in Bengal’, The Lancet, 206 (1925), 926–7. See also ‘Some Malarial Problems in Bengal’, Indian Medical Gazette, 48 (1913), 112–13.

76 For the consequences of the commercialisation of agriculture and malaria in Colonial Bengal, see Rajat K. Ray, ‘The Crisis of Bengal Agriculture, 1870–1927: The Dynamics of Immobility’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 10 (1973), 244–79.

77 ‘Seventy Second Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association Held at Oxford, July 26th–29th, 1904’, British Medical Journal, 2 (1904) 632–5.

78 ARDPH 1920, op. cit. (note 62), 15.

79 Helen J. Power, ‘Sir Leonard Rogers FRS (1868–1962): Tropical Medicine in the Indian Medical Service’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1993), 143–82.

80 Helen J. Power, ‘The Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine: Institutionalizing Medical Research in the Periphery’, Medical History, 40 (1996), 197–214. Government grants and public subscriptions far exceeded entrepreneurial patronage of research at the School. See Annual Report of the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine Institute of Hygiene and the Carmichael Hospital for Tropical Diseases For the Year 1924 (Calcutta, 1925), 2

81 Detailed Report of the General Committee of the Indian Tea Association, 1923 (Calcutta: s.n., 1924), 27.

82 Proceedings DPA, 1925 (Jalpaiguri: s.n., 1926), APAC, ix.

83 Ibid., xx; see also C. Strickland, Abridged Report on Malaria in the Assam Tea Gardens Indian Tea Association (Calcutta: Indian Tea Association, 1929).

84 Although the anophelines of Assam were distinct from those of Duars and Terai, common problems included the existence of rice fields and the cultivation of rice by plantation workers. See also C. Strickland, ‘The Mosquito Factor in the Malaria of Assam Tea Gardens’, Indian Medical Gazette, Vol. 60 (1925), 60.

85 C. Strickland, ‘Malaria on Ambootia Tea Estate near Kurseong and the success of some anti-malarial operations’, Indian Medical Gazette, Vol. 59 (1924), 119–20; see also C. Strickland and H.P. Chaudhuri, ‘More on Hill Malaria’, Indian Medical Gazette, Vol. 71 (1936), 267–9.

86 C. Strickland, ‘Notes on Malaria in the Hill-Stations in or near the Eastern Himalayas’. Indian Medical Gazette, Vol. 59 (1924), 549–50. Strickland emphasised ‘engineering works’ over ‘personal prophylaxis’.

87 C. Strickland and K.L. Chowdhury, Blackwater Fever and Malaria in the Darjeeling Terai (Calcutta: n.p. 1931), 3; D.N. Roy and K.L. Chowdhury, ‘The Parasitology of Malaria in the Darjeeling Terai’, Indian Medical Gazette, 65 (1930), 379–80.

88 Proceedings DPA, 1926 (Jalpaiguri, 1927), APAC, xviii.

89 Report of the Malaria Commission, op. cit. (note 35), 26.

90 Strickland, op. cit. (note 83).

91 The Ross Institute of Tropical Hygiene, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Supplementary Report to the Indian Tea Association, 1934, Mss Eur/F174/1212, APAC; see also Percival Griffiths, The History of the Indian Tea Industry (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 357.

92 B. Chatterjee, ‘Treatment of Malaria in the Present Emergency’, Indian Medical Gazette, Vol. 77 (1942), 701–2.

93 D.V. Rege, Labour Investigation Committee: Report on an Enquiry into Conditions of Labour in Plantations in India, (Dehli: Manager of Publications, 1946), 91.

94 The recruitment of Duars labourers cost ten per cent of those in Assam in 1894; J.C. Arbuthnott, Report on the Conditions of Tea Garden Labour in the Duars of Bengal, in Madras, and in Ceylon (Shillong: s.n., 1904), 4; see also Nitin Varma, ‘Coolie Acts and the Acting Coolies: Coolie, Planter and State in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Colonial Tea Plantations of Assam’, Social Scientist, 33 (2005), 49–72.

95 Helen Tilley, ‘Africa as a “Living Laboratory”: The African Research Survey and the Colonial Empire: Consolidating Environmental, Medical and Anthropological Debates, 1920–1940’ (DPhil dissertation: University of Oxford, 2001), 181–97.

96 Proceedings DPA 1929 (Jalpaiguri: s.n., 1930), APAC, x.

97 ‘The Campaign against Malaria in the Duars’, The Lancet, 172, 4429, (1908), 174.

98 Strickland, ‘Malaria on Ambootia Tea Estate’, op. cit. (note 85), 119–20.