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ABSTRACT
The military cantonment of Mian Mir was planned and built in the 1850s about six miles outside the urban area of Lahore as an ordered and sanitary environment for officers and troops – away from the presumed miasmas and unhealthiness of the old city. Yet not long after, a complex interplay of existing and emergent socio-material ecologies, particularly linked to canal irrigation, ensured that malaria became a defining feature of life at Mian Mir. This paper examines the evolving relationships of colonial planning and development, ecological change, and medical knowledge, showing how malaria and mosquitoes unsettled the dominant aesthetics of urban space and landscape, linked to frameworks of sanitation and improvement. It shows how aspirations for spatial order, environmental healthiness, and racial segregation, central to the regimes of colonial sanitary planning and hygienic modernity, were contoured and reconfigured in materially situated ways.
Acknowledgements
The research for this paper benefited from the guidance of staff at a number of libraries and archives, particularly the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and Juliet Davis for their feedback on the paper as well as to Matthew Gandy, Stephen Legg, Emma Mawdsley, Ateya Khorakiwala, Joel Tarr and my students in the ‘Urban Nature, architecture and the modern South Asian city’ seminar at Carnegie Mellon University for their careful reading and critique at various stages. With warm thanks to the organizers and attendees at ‘Circulation(s): On the Logistical Condition’, organized by Andrea Bagnato, Dele Adeyemo and Francesco Sebregondi at Goldsmiths, University of London in May 2019 and ‘Techniques, Technologies and Materialities of Epidemic Control’, organized by Christos Lynteris and Branwyn Poleykett at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge, where I first presented material that would become this paper. All errors are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Whitcombe, “The Environmental Costs of Irrigation in British India: Waterlogging, Salinity, Malaria”; Whitcombe, “Indo-Gangetic River Systems, Monsoon and Malaria.”
2 Roy, “Mal-Areas of Health.”
3 Arnold, Colonizing the Body. See also Harrison, “Hot Beds of Disease.”
4 Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes.
5 See for instance Peckham and Pomfret, Imperial Contagions; Nash, Inescapable Ecologies; Arnold, Colonizing the Body. Mark Harrison argues that despite the new scientific developments, Indian officials continued to hold on to perceptions about the environment and that there was “no substantial change in the framework in which malaria was understood in British India”, Harrison, “Hot Beds of Disease,” 15.
6 See Bynum, “An Experiment That Failed.”
7 Zurbrigg, Epidemic Malaria and Hunger in Colonial Punjab.
8 Bhattacharya, Contagion and Enclaves.
9 Ross, “The Practice of Malaria Prevention.”
10 Nathan, Rogers, and Thornhill, Report on the Measures Taken against Malaria in the Lahore (Mian Mir) Cantonment, 1909; Proceedings – Imperial Malaria Conference.
11 See for example Legg, “Planning Social Hygiene: From Contamination to Contagion in Interwar India”; McFarlane, “Governing the Contaminated City”; King, Colonial Urban Development; Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities; Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity; Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore; Prashad, “Native Dirt/Imperial Ordure”; Curtin, “Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa.”
12 The Punjab Medical and Public Health Departments. At the same time, the emphasis on hygiene and sanitation also entered vernacular discourse through the publication of manuals and pamphlets outlining the roles and responsibilities for people maintain the clean spaces in their homes and residential areas. See Sheikh, “Public Health and Sanitation in Colonial Lahore, 1849–1910”; Glover, Making Lahore Modern; Ram, Notes and Suggestions on Sanitation in the Punjab.
13 Heath, “The Tortured Body: The Irrevocable Tension between Sovereign and Biopower in Colonial Indian Technologies of Rule”; Legg, “Planning Social Hygiene: From Contamination to Contagion in Interwar India”; Arnold, Colonizing the Body.
14 On the partiality and “blurriness” of lines of racial separation in colonial architecture and planning see for example Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta. On the planning of cantonments see Cowell, “The Kacchā-Pakkā Divide”; Chang, “‘Tropicalizing’ Planning: Sanitation, Housing, and Technologies of Improvement in Colonial Singapore 1907–1942”; Chang and King, “Towards a Genealogy of Tropical Architecture”; Scriver, “Empire-Building and Thinking in the Public Works Department of British India”; King, Colonial Urban Development.
15 See Sheikh, “Public Health and Sanitation in Colonial Lahore, 1849–1910,” 51. On colonial officers’ perceptions about Lahore’s old city and its Indian inhabitants see Glover, Making Lahore Modern.
16 Glover, Making Lahore Modern, 34.
17 Glover, Making Lahore Modern.
18 Sheikh, “Public Health and Sanitation in Colonial Lahore, 1849–1910,” 66.
19 Government policies, most notably after the passing of the canal act in 1873, oversaw the building of a vast network of irrigation canals, barrages, and weirs; the expansion of agriculture; and the transformation of social structures through the resettlement of people in newly built canal colonies. See Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest; Gilmartin, Blood and Water; Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism, 1885–1947.
20 ‘Improvement’ – a metropolitan transplant realised with difference in various colonial contexts – linked agricultural productivity, botanical and horticultural efforts, and urban reform, taking colonized landscapes as well as people as subjects of reform. See for example Arnold, “Agriculture and ‘Improvement’ in Early Colonial India”. See also Ranganathan, “Rule by Difference”; Gidwani and Reddy, “The Afterlives of ‘Waste.’”
21 See Rehman, “Primary Materials: Reading Lahore’s Disobedient Landscape”; Rehman, “Description, Display and Distribution.”
22 James, A Report of the Anti Malarial Operations at Mian Mir, 1901–1903. Scientific Memoirs by the Office of the Medical and Sanitary Departments of the Government of India.
23 Walker, Gazetteer Of The Lahore District, 1893–94.
24 Bengal Military 21 August 1850. Reports on the sites selected for permanent Cantonments of the Troops located at Lahore and Wuzeerabad, the former being fixed at Mean Meer, 3 miles S.E. of the City of Lahore, and the latter at Sealkote, 33 miles in a N.E. direction from the present temporary Cantonment. India Office Records and Private Papers, Ref: IOR/Z/E/4/21/M662, British Library.
25 Colonial officers’ perceptions about Lahore’s old city and its Indian inhabitants are documented by Glover, Making Lahore Modern. For other examples of colonial and elite perceptions of local populations and the urban poor see also McFarlane, “Governing the Contaminated City”; Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta; Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities.
26 Chrimes, “Architectural Dilettantes”. By the early 1860s there were 114 cantonments across the country accommodating European and Indian members of the military establishment. King, Colonial Urban Development.
27 Royal Commission, Report into the Sanitary State of the Army.
28 Rowan, “Malaria in Mian Mir: A Criticism,” 231.
29 Royal Commission, Report into the Sanitary State of the Army, 165, 170.
30 See Glover, Making Lahore Modern; Rowan, “Malaria in Mian Mir: A Criticism.”
31 Nathan, Rogers, and Thornhill, Report on the Measures Taken against Malaria in the Lahore (Mian Mir) Cantonment, 1909.
32 “Report of the Cantonment Reforms Committee 1921”; as quoted in Mazumder, The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab.
33 Nathan, Rogers, and Thornhill, Report on the Measures Taken against Malaria in the Lahore (Mian Mir) Cantonment, 1909.
34 Royal Commission, Report into the Sanitary State of the Army.
35 Legg, “Governing Prostitution in Colonial Delhi”; Wald, “Defining Prostitution and Redefining Women’s Roles.”
36 Nathan, Rogers, and Thornhill, Report on the Measures Taken against Malaria in the Lahore (Mian Mir) Cantonment, 1909, 2.
37 See Rehman, “Primary Materials: Reading Lahore’s Disobedient Landscape”; Cope, May 19, 1851.
38 Sewell, “The Results of the Campaign against Malaria in Mian Mir,” 635.
39 Bengal Military 3 September (No 94) 1851/ IOR/Z/E/4/22/A543. IOR/E/4/812, 999–1001, Bengal Military 22 October (No 119) 1851 / IOR/Z/E/4/22/M617 IOR/E/4/812, 49–50.
40 “Report on the Committee – Meean Meer Cantonments.”
41 James, A Report of the Anti Malarial Operations at Mian Mir, 1901–1903. Scientific Memoirs by the Office of the Medical and Sanitary Departments of the Government of India.
42 Rowan, “Mian Mir (Lahore Cantonment): A Retrospect and Prospect.”
43 The second report of the Royal Society Malaria commission’s Mian Mir experiments discussed the difficulties of conducting statistical analysis from admission rates because of the mobility of the troops. Christophers, “Second Report of the Anti-Malarial Operations at Mian Mir, 1901–1903.”
44 James, A Report of the Anti Malarial Operations at Mian Mir, 1901–1903. Scientific Memoirs by the Office of the Medical and Sanitary Departments of the Government of India.
45 Tandon, “Epidemics in Colonial Punjab”; Bhattacharya, Contagion and Enclaves; Klein, “Development and Death”; Whitcombe, “The Environmental Costs of Irrigation in British India: Waterlogging, Salinity, Malaria.”
46 Minutes of the Malaria Committee Ref: CMB/14, The Royal Society Library and Archives. James, A Report of the Anti Malarial Operations at Mian Mir, 1901–1903. Scientific Memoirs by the Office of the Medical and Sanitary Departments of the Government of India., 1.
47 Stephens and Christophers, “Malaria in an Indian Cantonment (Mian Mir): An Experimental Application of Anti-Malarial Measures.— Preliminary Report,” 14–15.
48 Proceedings – Imperial Malaria Conference.
49 Ross, “Report on the Measures Taken against Malaria in the Lahore (Mian Mir) Cantonment [Correspondence]”; See also Bynum, “An Experiment That Failed.”
50 Sewell, “The Results of the Campaign against Malaria in Mian Mir,” 636.
51 Rowan, “Mian Mir (Lahore Cantonment): A Retrospect and Prospect,” 236.
52 Rowan, 236.
53 From a letter to Lieut Col A. Becher from James Tennant, 03 March 1853. India Office Records and Private Papers, IOR/F/4/2557/150102. British Library.
54 James, “Malaria in Mian Mir.”
55 Hamilton, “Report on Mian Mir.”
56 Barrow, “Malaria in Lahore Cantonment, Letter to the Editor of the Pioneer.”
57 Sewell, “The Results of the Campaign against Malaria in Mian Mir.”
58 Reid, “Letter to Ronald Ross,” March 22, 1905; Reid, “Letter to Ronald Ross,” April 11, 1906.
59 James, “Malaria in Mian Mir.”
60 Shearer, “Letter to Ronald Ross,” March 9, 1909.
61 Chakrabarty, “Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze,” 542; Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity; Douglas, Purity and Danger.
62 For example, David Arnold traces how scientific knowledge about malaria in India, such as in the writings of Ronald Ross, reinforced longstanding colonial perceptions about the inherent fragility of Bengali people. See Arnold, “An Ancient Race Outworn,” 84. Arnold, “An Ancient Race Outworn.”
63 See for example Roy, Malarial Subjects; Bhattacharya, “The Logic of Location”; Humphreys, Malaria; Anderson, “Immunities of Empire.” As Warwick Anderson suggests, the emphasis on racial immunity, extolled by scientists like Robert Koch, the pioneering German microbiologist, was particularly influential in the Indian context ‘because it resonated with long-standing racial assumptions, clinical interest, and enclavist practice.’ Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 213.
64 Stephens and Christophers, “The Native as the Prime Agent in the Malarial Infection of Europeans,” 8.
65 Stephens and Christophers, 6.
66 Ibid., 12. See also Frenkel and Western, “Pretext or Prophylaxis?”
67 Stephens and Christophers, “The Native as the Prime Agent in the Malarial Infection of Europeans,” 16–17.
68 Stephens and Christophers, “Malaria in an Indian Cantonment (Mian Mir): An Experimental Application of Anti-Malarial Measures.— Preliminary Report,” 16.
69 James, A Report of the Anti Malarial Operations at Mian Mir, 1901–1903. Scientific Memoirs by the Office of the Medical and Sanitary Departments of the Government of India, 13.
70 James, 14.
71 Christophers, “Second Report of the Anti-Malarial Operations at Mian Mir, 1901–1903.”
72 Stephens and Christophers, “Brief Summary of Conclusions Arrived at in the Previous Papers,” 22–23.
73 The juxtaposition of colonial subjects and mosquito vectors exemplifies processes of racialisation, resting on what Sylvia Wynter has called the “overrepresentation of Man as if it were the human”, where Man specifically refers to the secular, modern subject of post-Enlightenment Europe – and which entails “the barring of non-white subjects from the category of the human as it is performed in the modern west” enabling colonial subjugation, genocide, or enslavement. See Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus.
74 Stephens and Christophers, “The Native as the Prime Agent in the Malarial Infection of Europeans,” 19.
75 Stephens and Christophers, “The Segregation of Europeans,” 23.
76 Stephens, “Discussion on the Prophylaxis of Malaria.”
77 Stephens, 631.
78 On sanitary education and deferred citizenship see Anderson, Colonial Pathologies. See also Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?
79 See Curtin, “Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa.”
80 Christophers, “Second Report of the Anti-Malarial Operations at Mian Mir, 1901–1903.”
81 Nathan, Rogers, and Thornhill, Report on the Measures Taken against Malaria in the Lahore (Mian Mir) Cantonment, 1909.
82 From a letter to the Secretary to the Director General, Indian Medical Service, from Dr J.W.W. Stephens, 25 December 1901. India Office Records and Private Papers, Ref: IOR/P/6347 Feb 1902 nos 90–97. British Library.
83 Hackett, “Far Eastern Trip Diary – India.”
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Nida Rehman
Nida Rehman is an urban geographer, and Lucian and Rita Caste Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on urban environmental politics, landscape, and infectious disease, particularly in South Asia.