ABSTRACT
One can see that the four major epidemic diseases that the study interrogates could be situated at different locations with differing perspectives and varied meanings. The politics of location, as one could notice, enmeshed in an interlocking relationship, sometimes between the disease and the victim, between the patient and the doctor, between the society and the individual, and more often than not between the state and the people in a colonial territory. I have sought to see how health and illness were shaped, experienced and understood at different locations at different times in the light of historical and political forces. Understandably, our focus very often reverts to think of epidemics geographically instead of just historically. This geographical imagination of an epidemic helps us track its migratory and trans-cultural formations and make it more viewable within a temporal and spatial framework.
