ABSTRACT
For some fourteen years the districts of Hooghly and Burdwan in the vicinity of Calcutta were subject to constant outbreaks of cholera, malaria and enteric fever. The outbreak of the early 1870s renewed speculation on the most appropriate ameliorative measures, and provided Digambar Mitter with the opportunity of relaunching a devastating critique of colonial policy based on his extensive experience as a manager of large estates. Mitter, who had attended the Hindu College and was President of the British Indian Association, had served as a member of the 1864 Epidemic Commission, and published a minute to the majority report in which he blamed the epidemic on the destruction of previously healthy land caused by the obstruction of surface drainage by the construction of roads, railways and embankments. What was at stake here, therefore, was the status of ‘modern’ colonial preventive medicine over indigenous knowledge of the area’s topography and natural drainage, particularly with regard to the appropriateness of examples culled from experience of the reclamation of the English fens. It was not until the belated and reluctant acceptance in the 1890s by British medical opinion of the water-borne theory of cholera and enteric fever and the parasite theory of malaria that such arguments were taken seriously.
