Abstract Summary
In making an attempt to explore the “medical incentives” and the “interests of the capitalist agencies” involved in the project in locating the vectors of diseases prevailed in the Assam tea plantations of British India, the paper argues that ideas of medical welfare was instrumental both in “building a network of tropical medicine with its professional researchers and contributed to the oppressive ‘plantation paternalism’ in the frontier colony”. To elaborate the histories of such entanglements, my paper will firstly look at the way through which the rise of metropolitan scientific institutions came to be prioritized. This will be followed by looking at how the question of transmitting and circulating of the “scientific knowledge” provided the impetus to the formation of the “cadre” of medical researchers. The third section of the paper will be engaged in providing examples of the interplay of global and local in the rise of supposedly objective scientific practices which transformed the locally lived lives of the plantation system in the global network of tropical medicine. In tracing all these trajectories, I take the reader into the question of how the growing concern about epidemics in the tea plantations of Assam eliminated the boundary of once considered the cultural and racial basis of explaining the epidemiological character of diseases for the interest of the capital.
