Malaria in Colonial South Asia: Uncoupling Disease and Destitution

319 Pages·2020·5.715 MB·English

by  Sheila Zurbrigg

MALARIA IN COLONIAL
SOUTH ASIA
This book highlights the role of acute hunger in malaria lethality in colonial
South Asia and investigates how this understanding came to be lost in
modern medical, epidemic, and historiographic thought.
Using the case studies of colonial Punjab, Sri Lanka, and Bengal, it traces
the loss of fundamental concepts and language of hunger in the inter-war
period with the reductive application of the new specialisms of nutritional
science and immunology, and a parallel loss of the distinction between
infection (transmission) and morbid disease. The study locates the final
demise of the ‘Human Factor’ (hunger) in malaria history within pre- and
early post-WW2 international health institutions – the International Health
Division of the Rockefeller Foundation and the nascent WHO’s Expert
Committee on Malaria. It examines the implications of this epistemic
shift for interpreting South Asian health history, and reclaims a broader
understanding of common endemic infection (endemiology) as a prime
driver, in the context of subsistence precarity, of epidemic mortality history
and demographic change.
This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of public health,
social medicine and social epidemiology, imperial history, epidemic and
demographic history, history of medicine, medical sociology, and sociology.
Sheila Zurbrigg is a physician and independent scholar based in Toronto,
Canada. Her health history research investigates rising life expectancy in
South Asian history in relation to food security. She has served as Short-Term
Epidemiologist for the World Health Organization, Smallpox Eradication
Program, Uttar Pradesh, and Coordinator, Village Health Worker Program,
Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. She has held appointments as Adjunct Professor,
International Development Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova
Scotia, Canada; Visiting Scholar, York University, Toronto, Canada; and
Visiting Scholar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Her work
with traditional village midwives in rural Tamil Nadu (1975–1979) led to the
analysis of child survival in contemporary India in relation to food security
and conditions of women’s work. In 1985, she turned to South Asian health
history research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council (Ottawa). Among her published work is the book Epidemic Malaria
and Hunger in Colonial Punjab: ‘Weakened by Want’ (2019).

MALARIA IN COLONIAL
SOUTH ASIA
Uncoupling Disease and Destitution
Sheila Zurbrigg
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Sheila Zurbrigg
The right of Sheila Zurbrigg to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-27214-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-29557-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
FOR THE VILLAGE MIDWIVES OF
RAMNAD DISTRICT, REMEMBERED

CONTENTS
List of figures viii
List of tables ix
Abbreviations and acronyms x
Glossary xii
Preface and acknowledgments xiv
Introduction 1
1 The ‘Human Factor’ transformed 18
2 The 1934–1935 Ceylon epidemic and its epistemic
aftermath 43
3 Hunger eclipsed: nutritional science in colonial South Asia 78
4 The larger sanitationist context 113
5 Colonial retrenchment and ‘selling’ vector control 143
6 Malaria and the W.H.O.: the ‘Human Factor’ set aside 169
7 Allure and legacies of the germ paradigm 200
8 What was lost 229
Appendix I: malaria transmission in Punjab 262
Appendix II: an epidemiological approach to
hunger in history 264
Bibliography 268
Index 294
vii
FIGURES
0.1 Mean annual Oct.–Dec. fever death rate (per 1,000),
1868–1940, 23 plains districts, Punjab 3
2.1 Mean annual rainfall (inches), Ceylon 46
2.2 Spleen rate (per cent), Ceylon, 1922–1923 47
2.3 Nov.–Apr. death rate per 1,000, Ceylon, 1934–1935 49
2.4 Per cent increase in total mortality, by division, Ceylon,
Nov. 1934 to Apr. 1935 51
2.5 ‘Epidemic Figure’ map of 1934–1935 Ceylon malaria epidemic 56
3.1 Mortality, by month, Bengal province, July 1943–June 1944 95
7.1 Mean annual crude death rate, crude birth rate (per 1,000),
11 plains districts, (East) Punjab, 1920–60 210
viii
TABLES
2.1 Crude death rate (per 1,000 population), infant mortality
rate (per 1,000 live births), Nov. 1934–Apr. 1935, extent
harvest failure, by district, Ceylon [Sri Lanka] 53
2.2 Infant mortality rate, estate and non-estate sectors, Kegalla
district, Ceylon [Sri Lanka], 1930–1940 57
7.1 Death rates (all causes) in the malarious and non-malarious
areas of Ceylon [Sri Lanka] during the second semesters,
1944–1948 and 1953 212
7.2 Percentage of population protected against malaria by
residual spraying of insecticides and semestral death rates
(all causes), Ceylon, 1944–1953 212
ix