Bengal was one of the most productive regions in the Ganges delta that came under British control in the eighteenth century. The British East India Company consolidated its hold on the region following the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and the Battle of Buxar in 1764 and, by 1793, took complete control of the region. Thus, colonial rule started its journey from Bengal (that is, Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa) in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent, and its resources were exploited by the British to extend and consolidate their empire. Apart from colonial exploitative pressure, the region experienced several natural calamities, including the inroads of famines and epidemic diseases, that caused unprecedented ravages and torment for the people. This chapter aims to look into the epidemiology of kala-azar in Bengal, the colonial medical intervention to combat it, and the effectiveness of the methods implemented to contain the disease. It also brings into focus how the indigenous people, including medical professionals in particular, responded to the illness and the state's medical measures to manage it. It may not be out of place here to provide a brief note on the area, its people, and the disease environment to have a better understanding of the occurrence of black fever and its containment.

A Peep into the History of Bengal: People and Public Health

Bengal was one of the prosperous and healthiest regions in eastern India, and its prosperity, whether agricultural, commercial, or industrial, even in the early nineteenth century, was widely acclaimed. However, it lost its affluence because of colonial exploitation. The colonial rule brought about certain significant changes in Bengal's economy that severely affected agriculture and manufacturing works, leading to subordination and economic decline.

The term nostalgia dates from the end of the seventeenth century when Johann Hofer, a nineteen-year-old Swiss physician, devised it for his doctoral thesis on the causes for the melancholic state of Swiss serving as hired soldiers in the armies of other European powers or working or studying away from their native area. Nostos in Greek means home, the homeland, while agie means longing, yearning for. As its usage became more popular from the second half of the nineteenth century in west-European languages, it gradually entered Russian, Persian, and Arabic, among other languages, even when they already had words expressing homesickness, in other words spatial nostalgia, and temporal nostalgia, a nostalgia for the past.

This chapter deals with the question of how the story of Noah begins to leave the world of history to enter the world of myth and legend. It begins with a discussion of Noah and his family within the developing field in the eighteenth century of comparative mythography. Particular attention is paid to the idea of Noah and his family as the origin of all religions in the works of Jacob Bryant. The chapter also continues the discussion started in Chapter 5 on the populating of the earth after the flood with an account of the role of Noah and his sons in the development of ‘race science’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is followed by a discussion of ‘the curse of Ham’ and its connection to the slave trade.

This chapter begins with an account of the flood story in Hellenistic Judaism with particular attention to Josephus and Philo. It continues with a discussion of the account of Noah within the group of interpreters in the second to fourth centuries CE, whom we generally gather under the broad title of ‘Gnostics’. Like the Gnostics, the early Christian interpreters gave the story of Noah a radically new meaning as they sought the ‘spiritual’ meaning of the Noah story behind the literal or historical meaning. This section of the chapter explores the many allegorical and prototypical readings that dominated Christian readings during the first millennium. The chapter ends with a discussion of Hugh of St. Victor’s (1096–1141) De Arca Noe Morali – an early sign of the increasing emphasis for the next five hundred years within the Christian tradition on the literal and historical meaning of the story of Noah.

The accession of six British Empire member states to the League of Nations questioned the Empire’s constitutional structure, and whether it was one entity or many. The resulting debate would form the doctrine of ‘inter se’ that attempted to rationalise the Empire’s new situation. Chapter Three delves into the frictions caused by separating the Empire’s international personality, as imperial federalists attempted to control and harmonise the foreign relations of the Empire, whilst Dominion leaders sought to use their newfound seat in Geneva to pursue their distinct foreign policies. As the Dominions began to gain full statehood, the chapter examines how the gulf between their membership at the League and that of India’s began to widen.

Before the summer of 1914, there were seemingly few indicators that British colonies would be represented on the international stage as nominally separate entities, as they would be five years later. Chapter One charts the changing patterns of British rule that constituted the ‘Third British Empire’, and how new patterns of imperial governance were beginning to emerge in the newly formed Dominion of South Africa, that would put the Empire on a trajectory towards separating its international personality. This chapter will also examine how India, a colony with comparatively fewer of the self-governing institutions of the Dominions, would also accede to the Imperial Conference alongside the Dominions, a significant step towards membership of the embryonic League. Finally, this chapter will assess to what extent the participation of colonies at international organisations and conferences was normalised, and what precedents were employed to justify the presence of colonies after the War ended.

The demise of the League of Nations did not lead to the end of colonial membership at international organisations. Chapter Six examines how the League’s legacy of colonial membership continued under the United Nations. Despite not being fully independent, the Indian National Congress would appoint India’s delegation at the first General Assembly in 1946, resulting in a very different international personality. No longer constrained and gagged by British appointees and the imperial conference, India would aggressively pursue its longstanding grievances against South Africa, destroying the ideal of inter se, and effectively ending the British ideal of colonial membership at international organisations. Instead, this chapter reveals how the end of the legacy of colonial membership went beyond the British Empire, and was replicated by the Soviet Union in the accession of Soviet Belorussia and Ukraine. Neither of these member states would become independent until 1991.

Public opinion in Iran was not naïve about criminality. Robbery, mugging, the occasional random murder, and murder resulting from conflicts between people who knew each other were considered a danger and unfortunate fact of everyday life resulting from socio-economic conditions or weaknesses and faults in human character. However, from the early 1960s, the mass media in the West and Iran brought to readers and viewers reports about rapidly rising rates of murder and current crime horrors in the West, such as the Moors Murders carried out by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady who in and around Manchester sexually assaulted and killed five boys and girls, aged between ten and seventeen; Dean Corll, who raped, tortured, and murdered at least twenty-eight teenaged boys; and Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper who randomly shot forty-two people, killing eleven, from the twenty-eight-storey observation deck of Austin University’s Main Building. In the West, social commentators, journalists, politicians, and public opinion increasingly spoke of ‘crime waves’.

Black fever, also known as visceral leishmaniasis, or kala-azar in India, had been a serious health issue in British India for a century, threatening a large part of the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There were several names for it, including Dumdum fever, kala-hazar, Assam fever, black sickness, and others. The Garos described it as sarkari bemari, or ‘saheb's disease’, referring to it as a British government illness not because any Europeans had it but rather because the Garos claimed to have been unaware of it until after the sahebs (referring to the British) took over their domain. This would seem to show that following the establishment of British control, outsiders brought the disease vector to the area. In Bengal, it was referred to as kala-jwar, which means ‘black fever’ or ‘fatal fever’, while it was known in Bihar as kala-dukh, which means ‘black suffering’ or ‘fatal misery’. With a high fatality rate of more than 95 per cent, kala-azar seemed to be an uncommon but deadly disease. It began spreading so quickly in the 1870s that the British government felt compelled to attempt to control it through medical intervention, but the results of such intervention were not seen until the 1920s. From 1921 onward, kala-azar mortality significantly decreased, and modern clinical medicine significantly contributed to this reduction.

Given that the disease was one of the leading causes of death in eastern India under British control, there is no dispute about its terrible impact. Despite being a neglected illness, it has recently been mentioned extensively in the press due to its comeback to epidemic proportions in north Bihar in 1976–1977.

Hassan Moghaddam in his play Jafar Khan Has Returned from the West (1921) satirically described two social phenomena: arrogant Occidentosis and nostalgic resistance to change. While it can be considered the first popularly acclaimed work describing the condition of Occidentosis-ridden individuals, it simultaneously describes an equally new phenomenon, a generation gap that began to emerge in the late Qajar period given growing contact with the West.