Hill Stations, Tea Gardens and Tropical Disease

his book presents a medical history of Darjeeling, the hill station and the tea plantations in the periphery of Darjeeling, nearby foothill regions of Tterai and the plains of Duars in northern Bengal. Both the hill station and the plantations located on hill slopes and the plains are treated as “colonial enclaves”, where there were “similarities in coloni-sation processes and colonial investments; geographical proximity, patterns and experiences of settlement (both among the white planters and entrepreneurs and the immigrant labourers); the political economy of colonisation and the trade in timber, tea and emergent leisure economy that linked both the plantations and the hill station, ﬁ nally their simultaneous absorption within the colonial and im-perial economy” (p 9). In the author’s own words “…this book investigates links between Tropical Medicine and co-lonial enclaves” (p 1). The author argues that these colonial enclaves were special sites of development, inclusive of appli-cation of tropical medicine. Colonial EnclavesThe book tells us that there were three ways in which the discourse of tropical medicine informed and shaped the establishment of colonial enclaves. First, hill stations were established for the beneﬁ t of Europeans so that they could escape dirt, dust and disease in the plains and move to suitable locations in higher elevations for recuperation and revitalisation whenever the need arose. Second, there were special efforts to control tropical diseases in the regulated environments of these enclaves perhaps giving some degree of protection for the European settlers, planters and tourists against these diseases for which they were especially vulnerable due to their absence of acquired immunity of any kind. Third, the Europeans in these cool-er climates were in a better position to protect themselves against infections of tropical diseases from the natives seen as carriers of these diseases as their move-ment into the enclaves was regulated and those who entered these enclaves primarily as workers were subjected to disease control measures of various kinds. There are some unresolved questions regarding each of these arguments, but the overall thesis that the so-called colonial enclaves were designed as a means to es-cape contagion and as an effective venue and a congenial atmosphere for recu pera-tion once Europeans in colonial India were infected with disease is a novel idea that contributes to knowledge not only in history of medicine in India, but also in the historiography of colonial so-ciety in the tropics in general.The total of eight chapters in the book follows a logical sequence, and as a result, the arguments put forward are easy to follow. The ﬁ rst chapter provides an intro-duction to the book by examining why colonial enclaves were necessary in the light of the emerging colonial economy and the colonial state, the disease proﬁ les of Indians and Europeans, patterns of set-tlement of Europeans and Indians and the accumulated knowledge of tropical medi-cine in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book does not claim that health and sanitation reasons were the only or even the most important reasons that led to the emergence of colonial enclaves. Rather the argument is that a whole range of economic, political, security, class and race considerations contributed to the estab-lishment and development of colonial enclaves in various parts of British India. Plantation EconomyThe second chapter describes the origin and development of Darjeeling as a hill station primarily catering to Europeans from 1828 onwards. Planning for the hill station, territorial expansion, land acqui-sition and infrastructural development