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Amelia Bonea, Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 70, Issue 1, January 2015, Pages 144–146, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jru009
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Understanding the ways in which ideas and practices of public health were shaped by the imperatives of the colonial state and in particular, that state's responsibility for the neglect of public health in colonial India, have been some of the most important problems that have preoccupied historians of medicine in South Asia. Scholarly assessments of this conundrum have been varied. Some historians have emphasized the culpability of the colonial state, drawing attention to the general lack of interest in providing public health measures and infrastructure for the Indian population. By contrast, others have located the failure to establish a functional and comprehensive public health system in local opposition to Western models of sanitation and local reluctance to pay higher municipal taxes. Nandini Bhattacharya's book provides a fresh and nuanced perspective to this ongoing debate by examining the practices and ideologies of tropical medicine in two little-explored colonial enclaves: the hill-station of Darjeeling, summer capital of the Bengal Presidency, and the adjoining tea estates in northern Bengal, with their increasing population of migrant laborers, many of whom hailed from eastern Nepal. This is a highly effective choice of setting, one that allows the author to unravel the intricate mechanisms of power, which shaped public health policy and practice in colonial India.
