Contagion and Colonialism: Race, Disease and Power in the Cholera Pandemics in Nineteenth Century India

• ALI FAISAL

  Author

This research paper explores the racial, political, and epistemological dimensions of cholera in nineteenth-century colonial India, arguing that the pandemic became both a biological crisis and a moral theatre of empire. Through the lens of colonial medical archives, missionary accounts, and vernacular responses, it examines how disease was deployed as a discursive tool for legitimizing imperial authority and reinforcing racial hierarchies. The British medical establishment, driven by epidemiological anxiety and racial fear, constructed Indian bodies and environments as inherently diseased—an ideology that justified spatial segregation, urban sanitation programs, and the moral policing of native populations. Yet, these same policies exposed the contradictions of imperial governance: while claiming humanitarian purpose, they deepened inequalities and alienated indigenous communities from the structures of modern medicine. The study situates cholera not simply as a health crisis but as a site of colonial meaning-making, where science, religion, and race intersected. Simultaneously, it uncovers how Indian intellectuals, reformers, and local practitioners resisted and reinterpreted cholera through indigenous cosmologies of purity, divine wrath, and environmental balance. This dual movement—imperial pathologization and indigenous rearticulation—reveals the politics of knowledge that underpinned the colonial experience of disease. Ultimately, the paper argues that cholera functioned as a mirror of empire: a pandemic that laid bare the moral fault lines of colonial rule, exposing how racialized science and administrative power transformed human suffering into a spectacle of governance.

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