Dr Hunter’s Plague: Gender, Race and Photography in British India

Abstract

From politicians to physicians, the opening years of India’s plague epidemic (1896–1900) have conventionally been treated as a male-dominated sphere of activity. This article argues for the centrality of female actors—as doctors, nurses and ‘ward ayahs’—and across the social spectrum from dalits to Europeans. Photography demonstrates the prominence and diversity of women’s plague roles; it helps to complicate a text-based narrative of plague at the intersection of gender, race, class and colonialism. Images augment and not merely document. The value of combining visual and textual sources is underscored by focusing on a single institution, the General Plague Hospital in Poona (Pune) and on a woman doctor, Marion Hunter, whose photographic presence and whose views in and after India highlight the tensions and contradictions of a gendered as well as racialised imperial presence.