What is commendable about Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India: 1820–1909 is the arc of history (both temporally and spatially) that Rohan Deb Roy has so skilfully mapped. This monograph is an admirable example of transnational histories of medicine, which provide a finely crafted narrative of medical knowledge, practices and other objects as they developed in and through movements across several national boundaries. Deb Roy tracks the coconstituted histories of malaria, quinine, cinchona and mosquitoes in British India by drawing on a treasure trove of archival material. While it is common for historians to study timelines of historical events or processes, what is striking about Malarial Subjects is the wide geographical expanse, which the author scans in order to tell a nuanced history of malaria, quinine, cinchona and mosquitoes.
Malarial Subjects studies history as process. The disease, medium and cure are not taken as self-evident categories from the pages of colonial records, medical monographs and/or travel accounts. Rather Deb Roy argues that disease categories like ‘malaria’ took shape in a symbiotic relationship with discourses on plants, events, places, drugs and insects. Similarly, with drugs like ‘quinine’ or plants like ‘cinchona’. Malarial Subjects is a fine example of what historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam has called ‘connected histories’ of medicine.Footnote 1
The book also brings into dialogue a number of scholarly areas, which are seldom in conversation with each other – postcolonial studies, studies of empire, science studies and histories of medicine. To me, the most stimulating aspect of this book is the author’s exploration of the materiality of nonhuman objects (plant, insect, drug) in this work. This is a refreshing and welcome break from the exclusive focus on history of ideas that still dominates most scholarship in history of medicine.
By blurring the distinction between medical knowledge/theory and practice, between ideas and object, or between ‘thin things’ and ‘thick objects’, this book carries forward recent debates in history of science that take in the history of objects/things that constitute crucial building blocks of knowledge itself. Taking the route worked out beautifully by Timothy Mitchell in his book Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, Deb Roy gives fleshiness to dark green cinchona leaves and bark, to bitter quinine, and to the mighty mosquito.Footnote 2 He argues that a narrative that merely treats these three as raw material (to be subsequently transformed into medical facts or objects or vectors by experts in public health, botany and medicine) would be rather simplistic. He studies the many lives of these (cinchona, quinine and mosquito) as they merged into the very idea of the British Empire and its medicine and markets. In showing how the meanings of malarial fevers and uses of cinchona or quinine changed forms, Malarial Subjects is to me a postcolonial study in two significant ways. One, circulation and shifts are central to the author’s analytical framework. Despite focusing on British India, the author destabilizes the latter by mapping ‘intersecting narratives of the past, some of them local and comparative, others cross-cultural, transnational and global’ with regard to cinchona, quinine and malaria.Footnote 3
This book also unsettles some of the nagging Euro-American focus of science studies by mapping a much more transnational analysis of medicine.
Malarial Subjects can be included as a text for in variety of courses – postcolonial science studies, transnational histories of biomedicine, and animal-insect studies. Some of the chapters in this book I found intellectually fascinating are chapters one, three, four and five.
Chapter One, called, ‘Fairest of Peruvian Maids’, in which the ‘distant’ and ‘delicate’ cinchona becomes desirable as an object of botanical fascination, commerce and medical relief as it circulated between French, Dutch and British colonies.
Chapter Three, A Cinchona Disease: Making Burdwan Fever’ questions the facticity of scientific categories. Deb Roy shows ‘how a series of dispersed and dissimilar debilities could be put together as a single, continuous epidemic of malaria over a considerable period of time’.Footnote 4 The ‘Burdwan Fever’, for example, was the outcome of an active mapping of a place and disease at the intersections of a number of colonial practices, including knowledge gathering about particular geographical locations, medical disorders, flora and fauna. Before being categorized as a mosquito-borne parasitic fever – the term malaria was used to explain a number of physical ailments – from nausea, headache, diarrhoea, secretion of pus or a general bodily malaise.
Chapter Four, ‘Beating about the Bush: Manufacturing Quinine in a Colonial Factory’, traces the unstable history of how quinine became a scientifically stable cure for malaria. The quest for a ‘pure’ drug (quinine) brought in the fore questions about who could produce a ‘pure’ drug, what purity signified, and how such purity was at the end of the day true mark of an empire.
The last chapter, ‘Of Losses Gladly Borne: Feeding Quinine, Warring Mosquitoes’ is a study of the entangled histories of mosquitoes and quinine. As quinine gained more legitimacy in the 1890s and 1900s, mosquitoes became both the subject and object of fields of knowledge as disparate as entomology, public health, commerce and vernacular writings.
Malarial Subjects is a significant and highly impressive book. How does the history of British India look like when seen through the lens of a plant, insect and a drug? What kinds of historical personhood can be given to a plant or insect or drug, which thrive in diverse locations and have the capacity to push some of the crucial agendas in the British Empire? Through a study of malaria as a disease and public health problem that was conceptualized through a movement across ‘factories, laboratories, plantations and government files’ and geopolitical landscapes, Deb Roy disrupts the myths of a stable and autonomous modern science.
