Epidemic disease, ecology and the colonial state in the Bengal Delta: An environmental history approach

Abstract

The Bengal Delta is amongst the most populous regions of the earth and was the site of powerful pre-colonial Muslim polities. Despite its ecological, demographic, and historical importance, however, it has remained underrepresented in the socio-political and environmental histories of South Asia. A spate of recent environmental histories focusing on the fluid riverine landscape of the Ganges basin have highlighted the potential of environmental history in narrating alternate histories in the region, such as Rohan D’Souza’s notion of ‘colonial hydrology,’ and Iftekhar Iqbal’s historical work on the fluvial landscape of the Bengal Delta. This shift in scholarship opens up novel avenues for historical research in the deltaic landscape of Bengal. The study of epidemics in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century India, especially in Bengal, has been carried out by notable scholars of the colonial period. However, the ecological regime of the Indian riparian landscape as a dynamic and contributing factor in the high incidence of epidemics is often absent in such works. On the other hand, many instances of modern scholarship exploring history of disease have also failed in this aspect. Following a focused literature on the history of epidemic disease, it can be seen that barring a few, most studies exploring epidemic disease history in Bengal (cholera and malaria) often fail to establish a conclusive link between ecology and incidence of epidemic disease, mainly due to the failure to include deltaic ecology as an important factor into their broader framework of analysis. Following the above observations as part of a detailed literature review, this paper will then set on to propose an ecological framework for the study of epidemic disease in the Bengal Delta, keeping in mind that epidemic disease is an integral subset field of the discipline of environmental history. The paper will argue that the basis of this framework rests on the appreciation of two aspects: the dynamic natural processes of delta formation in Bengal, and the means to assess the impact of anthropogenic activity in the Bengal Delta. In this regard, the study will borrow from the idea of the Bengal Delta as a ‘zone of anomaly’ in terms of colonial administration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the region was hit by severe cholera epidemics.