ABSTRACT
When a bubonic plague outbreak occurred in Bombay in 1896, disease maps were understood to be important tools through which doctors could attain certainty about the aetiology of disease. In the epidemic that followed, however, certainty continually eluded colonial science. The maps discussed in this paper should not be seen as reasoned arguments, but instead as imitations of cartographic claims to knowledge. They were spaces of desire in which colonial science chased after its own mythologised ability to know and control its subjects. These imitative maps can tell us about the history of uncertainty in colonial Indian science.
