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Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical medicine in colonial India By Nandini Bhattacharya. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012.
The Postcolonialism across the Disciplines Series seeks to span "the traditional range of disciplines... in postcolonial studies but also those less acknowledged" (front matter). Nandini Bhattacharya's Contagion and Enclaves does this admirably by considering how state actors, medical practitioners (British and Indian) and planters governed colonial enclaves and tea plantations in the Darjeeling hills of northern Bengal, through the intersection of political economy and "tropical" medical "therapeutics." Bhattacharya asserts, "Despite the richness of recent historiography on public health and Tropical Medicine in colonial India, historians have not analysed the discourse and praxis of medicine within colonial enclaves and the communities they engendered." She thus provides a "social history of disease within two such enclaves," which "argues that disease and its control was linked to the essential modes of colonial functioning, in practices of settlement, governance and in economic productivity." In Bhattacharya's terms, the "book studies disease control as a mode of colonial power, governance and intervention in... special zones of economic interest and social habitation" (8-9).
Bhattacharya's first primary focus is "colonial governance through the control of disease" among, and medical research on, the mostly immigrant Nepalese labourers in tea plantations producing for export. This governance of plantations as "sites of private enterprise" involved constant negotiation between colonial government and planters (9-10, 16-17). Plantation medicine was enacted through a racialized and class hierarchy between a small number of British physicians who treated Whites and supervised labourer "care" during epidemics, overworked mostly high caste Bengali "doctor babus" responsible for labourer health, and Indigenous ojha (healers) who likely enacted most "daily medical care" (71, 74-81, 192).
The book's second primary focus is "practices of settlement and medicine," and "medicalized leisure," predominantly for the British, in "the sanatorium enclave" of "the hill-station of Darjeeling" (10, 20)....