Overview

Plague has attained pandemic proportions on three occasions in recorded history. It is within the context of the third, modern pandemic that this book unfolds: an outbreak which took over twelve million lives in India alone. Natasha Sarkar examines for the first time the full social history of this extraordinary medical crisis in India at the end of the nineteenth century, detailing the nature and progress of the disease within a complex colonial environment. Deep-seated colonial anxieties about governing India influenced and are disclosed in responses to the pandemic. Disease carriers were identified and labelled, and scapegoats stigmatized. Western Imperialism and its developments in biomedicine clashed with older indigenous medical systems.Sarkar also considers attitudes, approaches, and mentalities in indigenous Indian society. She explores what individuals and communities made of the disease, and how social prejudices surrounding it and its sufferers became increasingly heightened in a colonial environment. The plague crisis reveals disparate, heterogeneous voices across communities--the contradictions of a multi-religious, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural society. The last great plague of Colonial India is thus portrayed in all its political, social, economic, and demographic dimensions.

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9780198873228

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The Last Great Plague of Colonial India is a compelling work that revisits plague in the light of public and scientific deliberations in a complex colonial environment. It is a signifcant contribution to critical understandings of the synergy between science, policies, society and the social trajectory of disease during global pandemic situations. * Poonam Bala, Professor Extraordinarius, University of South Africa * This is a remarkably comprehensive and pulsating history of the plague of 1896. It narrates how the plague initially overwhelmed the authorities and residents in the unsanitary and crowded city of Bombay and how the city learned to cope with it through human resilience, scientific intervention, and urban planning. It then takes that narrative to other parts of India and various parts of the world. A story of fear, death, colonial governance, and resistance, The Last Great Plague in Colonial India leaves readers with the lasting legacy of the pandemic on India and the world. * Pratik Chakrabarti, National Endowment for the Humanities-Cullen Chair in History & Medicine, University of Houston * In this meticulously researched and fluently argued monograph Natasha Sarkar outlines the story of the last great plague epidemic in India in 1897 in vivid detail. State policy, indigenous responses, and the experiments of a scientist such as Haffkine unfold in a story that strikingly resonates with the present-day panic associated with Covid. The practices of innoculation, Ayurvedic medicine, missionary zeal and sanitation in cities are all explored with remarkable facility. This is a must read for students interested in the history of medicine and epidemic disease both globally and in Asia. * Vinita Damodaran, Professor of South Asian History and Director, Centre for World Environmental History, University of Sussex *

Author Information

Natasha Sarkar is a commissioning editor and independent researcher who earned her PhD in History from the National University of Singapore. She has engaged with teaching and research across Asia and the United States for nearly two decades. A recipient of several awards and grants, including the Rockefeller Grant-in-Aid, she has to her credit several publications and articles on history, gender, and science.

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