Reviving Colonial Memory: A Study of Maladies and Massacre in Colonial Bengal

Crisis is an indispensable part of our everyday existence. Diseases are a common threat to all living entities. The theme of my paper is to portray the terrible health crisis that ensued by various epidemics in colonized Bengal. The long-lasting medical emergency shook colonial Bengal and evoked a blame game between the colonial rulers and the indigenous people. Superstition, misconception and politics behind medical treatment remained the major reasons causing spreading of the diseases. Meanwhile, care from philanthropists was also documented. Newspapers and journals covered the everyday events of these maladies and the massacres caused by the epidemics. The paper will explore the responsive literature which was generated while documenting about the maladies such as cholera, plague, kala azar, smallpox, etc., in colonial Bengal. The demon epidemic arrived alone, hunted the mass and left a permanent imprint on the socio-cultural and human psyche in the contemporary times. How the Bengali thinkers responded to different diseases that wrecked havoc in the colonial period; how the massacre caused by these maladies were reported in the contemporary newspapers and periodicals and how literature responds to this condition of crisis—this research will respond to these various issues coming up in analysing socio-cultural, political and economic effects of the epidemics in colonial Bengal.