Plague Mortality and Control Policies in Colonial South India, 1900–47

Vempalli Raj Mahammadh

doi:10.1177/0262728020944293

Abstract

Focused on colonial South India, this article presents and assesses detailed archival records of public health measures in response to plague outbreaks between 1900 and 1947. Starting in 1897 in the Madras Presidency, the colonial government strictly implemented anti-plague measures and introduced various health schemes and medical policies for plague prevention. However, despite partly vigorous government efforts, plague outbreaks could not be fully controlled. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the plague remains among South Asia’s most feared epidemics, with an outbreak in Surat in 1994 causing major havoc. Neither indigenous knowledge nor Western medical systems provided fully effective remedies regarding causation, cure and prevention of plague epidemics. Since the article gained new relevance in light of current struggles faced by India’s public health system in handling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, some lessons from history emerge in the concluding discussion.

Highlights

The research for this article was originally conducted as an archive-based study of how plague epidemics were ravaging colonial South India to examine what measures were undertaken to control these outbreaks
Various later reports of the Director of Public Health in Madras show that while the plague mortality rate declined over time, and only 51 cases of plague were registered in 1945, plague outbreaks continued to cause concern throughout the 1940s
Reports from Madras Presidency about how the colonial state handled plague outbreaks, found in immensely rich regional archives, provide important illustrations of the vacillations and policy failures involved in control policies, before more effective processes and remedies were developed and applied

Summary

Introduction

The research for this article was originally conducted as an archive-based study of how plague epidemics were ravaging colonial South India to examine what measures were undertaken to control these outbreaks. Various later reports of the Director of Public Health in Madras show that while the plague mortality rate declined over time, and only 51 cases of plague were registered in 1945, plague outbreaks continued to cause concern throughout the 1940s.

Results

Conclusion