Desowitz, R. S.
The British make no apology for their imperial period. They speak with pride of their high purpose as colonial custodians in freeing the peasantry from the excesses of despotic native rulers; in endowing their colonies with a judiciary, a sense of fair play, cricket, and a democratic government. The French, on the other hand, endowed their colonies with the ability to bake wonderful loaves of bread. Making a current comparison between the former colonies of those two powers it would often seem that good bread has proved to be more sustaining and enduring than hand-me-down parliaments. Less often mentioned, and of equal importance to the ultimate character of these colonies-become-nations, was the fervour with which the British built the avenues of communication-roads, railways, and waterways. This was particularly true in India where, in the first half of the nineteenth century, they built the Bombay-Agra Road, the Bombay--Calcutta Road, and the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Peshawar. Three thousand miles of new roads--all paved. They also built a canal-irrigation system for the Ganges and its tributaries that when finished was the most extensive in the world. ... Unfortunately, what was good for the business of colonial rule was also good for the pathogens. The new corridors that brought cloth and cooking pots, were also passageways for the dissemination of infectious disease.
Kala azar was a stowaway traveller to Assam, carried there in 1895 by the British steamers that began to ply the upper Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. When the infection broke out in Assam, the inhabitants recognized it as something new to their experience and somehow associated the disease with the activities of their new masters, the British. With remarkable epidemiological insight, they called their new affliction sakari bemari, the ‘government disease’. Now Assam was ignited, and during the next twenty-five years kala azar in some districts killed 25 percent of the population. Some villages lost two thirds, or more, of their people. From Assam to Tamil Nadu, kala azar had established a permanent residency in India.
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