Paper short abstract:

During 1860–1930, diseases like kala-azar, malaria, and cholera killed 2,00,000 people in the northeast frontier of British India. This paper attempts to integrate medical, economic, and environmental history to examine how epidemics shaped labouring bodies and the colonial resource frontier.

Paper long abstract:

By the end of the nineteenth century, Assam, a province in the northeast of British India, had become a colonial resource frontier supplying tea, timber, elephants, and minerals. However, diseases like kala-azar (Visceral leishmaniasis), cholera, and malaria since the 1860s were constant obstacles in stabilizing and expanding the frontier. Largely due to epidemics, Assam’s population stagnated around five million during 1891-1911. The colonial government relied on indentured labourers from Central India to work on tea plantations in Assam. Cholera and malaria were major killers among the tea plantation workers. Kala-azar, on the other hand, took a huge toll on the peasants outside plantations. As the peasants abandoned their villages and cultivated fields to settle in newly cleared forests, the agrarian and forest frontiers perpetually ebbed and flowed and imperial revenues were threatened.

Despite such influences of diseases in the province’s economic conditions, extant scholarship has made scarce attempts to analyse epidemics and resource frontiers as a composite unit of analysis. This article attempts to show how diseases contended with the colonial state-making in Assam. The article will attempt a methodological exercise of integrating three strains of history – economic, medical, and environmental – to examine the nature and extent of the crisis caused by epidemics in the resource frontier of British India. It will foreground the lived experience of the peasants and tea plantation workers who had to negotiate simultaneously with the burden of diseases and the expectations of a revenue-seeking colonial state.

Key Words: Disease, Kala-azar, resource frontier, peasants