The Buddha is said to have affirmed that he would not die until he had disciples who were monks and nuns, laymen and laywomen (upāsaka and upāsikā) who could teach Dhamma and ‘establish it, expound it, analyse it, make it clear’ (D.ii.104–5). These groups are known as the four ‘assemblies’ (Pali parisā, Skt pariṣat; Jat.i.148). The term Saṅgha (Skt Saṃgha) or ‘Community’ refers in its highest sense to the ‘Noble’ Saṅgha of those, monastic or lay, who are fully or partially enlightened. Most typically, though, it refers to the community of monks and/or nuns, and this chapter deals with this as well as certain types of married clerics. ‘Saṅgha’ in its widest sense was also occasionally used of all the four ‘assemblies’ (A.ii.8) – a sense which became not uncommon in Mahāyāna circles (Prebish, 1999: 203–5).

The terms for monks and nuns are respectively bhikkhu (Skt bhikṣu) and bhikkhunī (Skt bhikṣuṇī), which literally mean ‘almsman’ and ‘almswoman’. The original mendicancy of these, still current to varying extents, symbolized renunciation of normal worldly activities and involvements. While this was an aid to humility, it actually also ensured against becoming isolated from the laity. The often close lay–monastic relationship makes bhikkhus unlike most Christian ‘monks’. They also differ from these in that their undertakings are not always for life, and in that they take no vow of obedience. The Buddha valued self-reliance, and left the monastic Saṅgha as a community of individuals sharing a life under the guidance of Dhamma and Vinaya. The job of its members is to strive for their own spiritual development, and use their knowledge and experience of Dhamma to guide others, when asked: not to act as an intermediary between God and humankind, or officiate at life-cycle rites. Nevertheless, in practice they have come to serve the laity in several priest-like ways.

This chapter traces the expansion of tea plantations in the three ‘tea districts’ of northern Bengal: the Darjeeling hills, its foothills, the Terai, and contiguously in the plains of Duars. While the enclave of Darjeeling was constructed as a European escape from tropical diseases, the plantation enclave was created through modes of heroism and adventure associated with the colonization of ‘diseased’ lands. The plantation system of Darjeeling and Duars marked a break from the existing agrarian policies and practices of the colonial government in India. Agrarian revenue represented the mainstay of income for the colonial government. From the mid-nineteenth century, with commercialization of agriculture and the integration of colonial India with the global economy, new models of agrarian practice were consolidated. These included the leasing of previously uncultivated (although not unoccupied) land, designated as ‘wastelands’ to mostly British private entrepreneurs, and the introduction of plantation crops and methods. Encouraged by government land grants, entrepreneurs introduced plantation crops such as tea and coffee, cinchona, and commercialized farming of apples and strawberries. Their cultivation benefitted from extensive research on transplantation and acclimatization of foreign species in different parts of the British Empire. Therefore, although the tea plantations were huge isolated tracts with a few resident planters and thousands of labourers, they were also part of important economic and structural changes in other parts of the country. These plantations co-existed with other modes of agrarian production; for instance, agricultural labourers in the adjacent rice fields worked as casual (basti) labourers within the plantations in the peak seasons.

This chapter studies the dynamics between colonial enclaves and Tropical Medicine in the twentieth century. Despite the acceptance of germ theory, British Indian medical discourse and practice never abandoned miasmatic and climatic theories of disease. In colonial India, Tropical Medicine continued to connect diseases with specific ‘zones’ and ‘localities’. Research in Tropical Medicine reiterated the importance of ‘local factors’ constructed through ecological, climatic or cultural modes. From their contribution to Tropical Medicine, through the ‘experiments’ and verification of disease theories in their localities, to the contribution to the control of archetypical ‘tropical’ disease in Bengal and India generally, the tea plantations were an important site for the exploration of new ideas and experimentation. In the case of research in antimalarial sanitation, a focus on the local ecological conditions of the tea plantations in Darjeeling foothills merged seamlessly with factors such as the cultural behaviour of plantation labourers – all framed in a set of conditions termed the ‘local’. Simultaneously the political economy of the tea plantations inhibited both anti-malarial sanitation as well as systematic and full use of quinine prophylaxis within these ‘local’ sites. Similarly, when the Indian Research Fund Association (IRFA) proposed a hookworm project to assess the feasibility of its eradication, the medical experts chose the Darjeeling hill plantations as their first, experimental site. The results of the hookworm survey showed a very high incidence among the plantation labourers.

As we have seen in Chapter 2, Darjeeling was incorporated into the wider colonial polity and economy of north Bengal over the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, it also sustained its role as a resort for exclusive European medicalized leisure in the late Victorian period. As its popularity became wider, the town stretched to accommodate various demands on its multiple identities – as a European social enclave and seasonal administrative centre, as the social and medical hub for the planters of the Darjeeling, Duars and Terai. As they did over many other institutions of British privilege, the Indian elite, especially the Bengalis, staked a claim on Darjeeling. With these multiple claims over its privileges and facilities, there was also a sense of loss of Darjeeling's essential character. After the turn of the century, both British and Indian complaints echoed official discourse in an attempt to keep Darjeeling socially exclusive. Most of the other principal hill-stations felt the pressures of over-crowding and the consequent spread of diseases within the town. Kennedy argues that the incursions of Indians, ‘the Intrusion of the Other’, at various levels strained the resources of the hill-stations and changed their essential character. I will contend here that this sense of ‘intrusion’ was a matter of perception both by the British and the Indian elites. Despite a real growth in its population at the turn of the century, Darjeeling remained an exclusive social and cultural space. In official reports and elite perception, it was the poorer sections within the town which acquired visibility as the undesirable ‘crowd’ in the late colonial period.

There were many ideological, political, military and medical reasons for hill-stations in tropical colonies. The urgency of the question of the Europeans' long-term survival in the tropics engaged medical discourses in Britain as well as in the tropical colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The eighteenth century represented a period of optimism about acclimatization and it had been generally a period when racial categorizations had not assumed absolute rigidity. By the third decade of the nineteenth century acclimatization theories were eclipsed and there were serious doubts about the survival of the Englishman in India over a few generations. The contrast between the disease-ridden, crowded, unsanitary plains and the pure and healthy air of the ‘hills’ therefore came to be a familiar trope of official as well as medical discourses in colonial India. The hill-stations provided one means of establishing comfortable, familiar surroundings for the British in the tropics: their climate was supposedly not tropical. The logic of the development of hill-stations was their climatic opposition to the plains. The hill-station was a uniquely colonial phenomenon, and although best known in India, was institutionalized in many tropical colonies. The British built hill-stations in Asia in the Ceylon and the Malay Straits – in fact the earliest ‘hill-station’ was at Penang in Malaya, which was occupied by the English East India Company (EEIC) in 1786 and by the early 1800s served as a site for recuperation for civil and military officials.

This book is about the interaction between Tropical Medicine, the colonial state and colonial enclaves. The epistemologies and therapeutics of Western science and medicine informed the practices of colonialism in the tropical world from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The European conquest and colonization of the non-European world was imbued with the dread of ‘tropical diseases’ and simultaneously sustained by the practices of settlement in these tropical colonies. In analysing these two processes together, this book investigates the links between Tropical Medicine and colonial enclaves.

The perception of the ‘tropics’ itself changed from the abundant and the paradisiacal in the sixteenth century to dark, dank territories that generated ‘putrefaction’, disease and death by the mid-eighteenth century. In eighteenth-century European writing, the status of the Indian subcontinent as a distinctively tropical zone was ambivalent due to its vastness and diversity and the prevalence of different ‘climatic zones’ within. This gradual transformation in the idea of the tropics was the consequence of prolonged European interaction with, and experience of, the tropics. Along with these ideas and experiences of the tropics, from the eighteenth century, European traders, sailors and armies built their own commercial, military and social spaces in the tropics. In the Indian subcontinent, initially these were factories (in their eighteenth-century sense factories were European warehouses), fortresses, churches, barracks and white towns that were located near ports and harbours.

So far we have discussed the impact of colonization and consequently medical policies in two different, contiguous enclaves: the hill-station of Darjeeling and the tea estates in its adjoining regions of northern Bengal. The town of Darjeeling, originally conceived of as a European sanitary enclave, invited from the very beginning traders, immigrant labourers and Indian civil officials and servants; and with its development came the greater colonization of the entire Terai and Duars areas. As we have seen, the town of Darjeeling was neither an indisputably healthy hill-station, nor was it a white enclave. Certain areas within Darjeeling were marked out for the exclusive use of the European population and the Eden Sanitarium was one of them. The hill-station signified an enclave because the British perceived it as a secluded site, more salubrious and scenic than the dreaded hot and dusty Indian plains. The town itself, controlled directly by the colonial administration, provided a space for medicalized leisure to the European population; and the Eden Sanitarium provided an exclusive space unavailable in the plains for the rejuvenation of white bodies. Through these various institutions the British population in India sustained a socially exclusive site for themselves in some parts of Darjeeling. As a consequence, the medical facilities within the urban space of Darjeeling were of a much higher standard in the colonial period than in the surrounding areas. These places were kept relatively free from encroachment from local Indian influences. In that sense, the town of Darjeeling was an enclave of particular, privileged medical infrastructure.

In this chapter, I will examine public health and medical infrastructure in the tea plantations in the context of their physical location and economic position as enclaves of specialized medical attention. An analysis of disease, medicine and health in a plantation economy can be made from an understanding of public health in a privileged area of colonial economy. Were the public health measures, which were not undertaken in rural India due to lack of financial resources, carried out in the tea plantations? Official discourse and planters' perspectives emphasize the view that the plantations were a privileged, segregated sector so far as the availability of medical care was concerned. This was attributed to the economist logic, articulated in various government reports as well as by planters associations, that planters invested in medical care to ensure high productivity. I intend to argue here that although the tea plantations were often constituted as areas of focus for government policies in public health, as well as sites for the study of diseases prevalent in the plantations, the provisions for health care did not follow the pattern of ‘privilege’ for the purpose of better health care for the labourers. The management of disease in the tea plantations was dictated by a range of imperatives: some economic, others political, and each such contingency was related to the nature of the plantation system as it developed in northern Bengal in the colonial period.

In nineteenth-century medical, management and official discourse, the foothills of the Darjeeling (and the plains beyond), Terai and Duars were represented as sites of disease, fevers and fatalities. Malaria and blackwater fever, a particularly vicious form of fever, were widely prevalent among the planters as well as the labourers, although the indigenous Meches were supposed to have been immune from them. This chapter studies a particular historical moment in the formation of the plantation enclave, when its modes of functioning were challenged by a team of malariologists who were commissioned by the government of India to find out why malaria and blackwater fever were endemic to the plantations and to advise how to control the diseases. The medical experts’ recommendations challenged the recruitment system, wage structure, and finally, the planters’ autonomy within the plantations. In the time of interventionist external medical surveys and malaria research in the twentieth century, the modes of functioning of the plantation enclave were challenged. These surveys identified that diseases in the plantation system were due to the systems of recruitment, wage structure, and the autonomous paternalism of the planter class. In response, the planters provided an alternative vision of the ‘moral economy’ of the plantation system within which disease medical infrastructure and the livelihood of labourers could be managed by the paternalistic planter. The government's response was to compromise and impose a legislation that broadly confirmed the planters’ vision of their enclaves.