Fairs, Cholera, and Colonial Epidemiology in Bengal, 1860s–1884

Dr. Sharmin Jahan Chowdhury

Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Dhaka

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59815/bhs.vol2805

Abstract: This article examines how colonial medical thought, administrative practice, and cultural politics shaped the identification and management of fairs as sites of cholera transmission in nineteenth-century Bengal. While modern epidemiology clearly links fairs to waterborne contagion, colonial officials operated within a hybrid epistemological landscape shaped by miasmatic assumptions, fragmented district-level knowledge, and the political sensitivities of the post-1857 state. Drawing on sanitary reports, government correspondence, and historiography, the article analyses how the Bengal sanitary establishment first sought to render fairs legible as epidemiological problems in the late 1860s. These early assessments arose less from medical certainty than from administrative anxieties and racialised assumptions about Indian society. Using the concept of “epidemic infrastructure,” the article shows how fairs, as commercial hubs, devotional sites, and social institutions, embodied the contradictions of colonial governance: culturally indispensable yet framed as inherently unsanitary. Sanitary interventions, therefore, remained limited, based on the state’s commitment to non-interference, limited resources, and reliance on selective Indian expertise. Ultimately, during the late nineteenth century, the relation between cholera and fairs was determined by the colonial state as a combination of scientific ambiguity, imperial ideology, and vernacular social worlds, creating a distinctly colonial epidemiological notion.

Keywords: Colonial epidemiology, Cholera, Bengal, Fairs, Epidemic infrastructure, Sanitary administration, Miasmatic theory, Public Health Policy.