Nandini Bhattacharya. Contagion and Enclaves

It is possible that readers might come to this fluently written history of turn-of-the-century Darjeeling in hopes of settling into a tale of raj nostalgia, a book to accompany high tea served in one of the many manicured gardens across India's network of colonial hill stations. Those readers would be disappointed. Instead, in this often understated book, Nandini Bhattacharya serves up a devastating critique of the brutal logic of place, health, and labor under colonial rule. By tracing the history of the colonization of the Darjeeling Hills in north Bengal, Contagion and Enclaves illuminates the links that connected otherwise distinct spaces of labor, leisure, and tropical medicine in India. Maintaining a tight analytic focus on the making of Darjeeling, the book offers a comparative survey of distinct, if adjacent, colonial enclaves. Darjeeling was initially built as a colonial hill station—a socially and racially exclusive remote climatic zone designed to maintain and restore the health of colonial white power. Yet the climate that initially offered colonials a refreshing and restorative contrast to the “heat and dust” of the plains below soon came to be seen as dreary and wet. Bhattacharya argues that the changing fortunes of climate were part and parcel of a larger logic. Darjeeling was initially designed as an enclave to cater exclusively to white colonials who needed to recover their health compromised by tropical conditions. However, over the course of the early twentieth century, Darjeeling expanded to become a “coveted site for medicalized leisure for affluent Indians” (p. 91). In losing its exclusiveness as a site of whiteness, the very climate that was initially seen as health-giving came to be seen as health-sapping. From Bhattacharya's perspective, the very facts of nature are only legible when read through the lens of colonial power.

Ancient history · Archaeology · BENGAL · Colonialism · Ethnology · Geography · White (mutation) · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine