Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

7. Recasting Disease and Its Environment: Indigenous Medical Practitioners, the Plague, and Politics in Colonial India, 1898–1910

191 7 Recasting Disease and Its Environment: Medical Practitioners, the Plague, and Politics in Colonial India (1898–1910) Kavita Sivaramakrishnan The plague arrived in North India in 1897, after being contained near the presidencies of Bombay and Bengal in western and eastern India where it had arrived earlier. In the early years, plague mortality in India had already touched 354,000 deaths, and between 1903 and 1907 there were a further 4.5 million deaths, half of which were in the province of Punjab in North India.1 This paper focuses on the outbreak of plague in Punjab in its urban manifestation in large populated cities like Delhi, Lahore, and Amritsar, with forays into examining its impact on smaller towns in Punjab’s districts. The plague created social and political conditions that briefly recast relations between various social groups in the urban setting. It also generated a debate and rhetoric in the public arena that employed the vocabulary of sanitation and hygiene, and also shaped perceptions regarding state medical intervention and medical practice that emerged in these years. Much of the evidence for this paper is drawn from vernacular sources such as newspapers, tracts, diaries, and pamphlets, along with an overview of government plague records and reports. The government records of the period were authored by civil and medical  | Kavita Sivaramakrishnan officials who were employed in framing Punjab’s plague laws and in implementing them in urban settings, and the vernacular sources were written mostly by publicists and indigenous medical practitioners or physicians who enjoyed significant social status and influence in urban settlements. These writings were addressed both to an emerging market of literate urban readers or public and indirectly to the local plague administration. The politics of the urban environment or its understanding and expression through plague-time writings and rhetoric is therefore crucial to locate plague-time ideas and alignments. The politics of urban sanitation, health, populations, and spaces in towns and cities was an important focus of concern for indigenous practitioners or physicians in the public arena. Indigenous practitioners were also critical mediators in regulating and mediating control of communities and neighborhoods. Their writings and rhetoric addressed these concerns by projecting an understanding of epidemic disease as a manifestation of the natural world, and this in turn helps us understand changing relations between the human environment and disease . Ideas and interventions associated with plague control in urban spaces, the circulation and movement of elements or their pollution or benefits such as of air, sunlight, and of populations, therefore formed a crucial part of writing on the plague by indigenous medical practitioners. The control of urban spaces through quarantines, plague reporting , and sanitary cordons was also increasingly important for the colonial administration during the plague in Punjab, and indigenous practitioners played a crucial role in mediating this control and responding to the initiatives that sought to implement such measures. Their own spokesmanship and networks, however, varied greatly in towns and cities. Urban publicist groups and in particular traditional intellectuals such as indigenous practitioners formed a crucial network of writers and publicists in the urban public arena and were associated with fast-circulating vernacular tracts and journals associated with public debate and engagements since the late nineteenth century. These writings responded to various aspects of colonial medical intervention and its relationship with urban spaces and environment. Recasting Disease and Its Environment |  Indigenous physicians addressed ideas regarding the need to avoid disease—a distorted representation of the natural environment—and the changes that had occurred in the urban environment. Recent writing on the third plague pandemic has tended to focus on the critical relationship between the colonial administration and Western medical doctors and scientists at the turn of the century in the context of colonial priorities as many “scientific” priorities were set aside.2 This work seeks to focus on the plague years from the perspective of indigenous physicians.3 Indigenous physicians addressed not so much the government’s epidemiological priorities as the political priorities inherent in government plague-time interventions, relating to controls over space or its “segmentation,” inspections, and segregation rather than therapeutic and “medical” interventions. The colonial government’s plague interventions in Punjab, as the initial section of this paper demonstrates, initially prioritized segregation and quarantines that were rapidly diluted in urban centers when they were met with threats of disorder and were followed by preventive initiatives and local mediation through physicians and public men...