ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Rare Spleens and Black Skin: Rarity in the making of Kala-Azar in Assam, 1890s.

• In Event: Rarity in Medicine 2: Geographies and Politics

English Abstract

In the late nineteenth medical registers of Assam, a persistent febrile disease came to acquire an identity shifting between the etiologies of malaria cachexia, ancylostomiasis, and beri-beri, before being identified as what we now know to be leishmaniasis. Leishmaniasis is one of the few diseases to retain a South Asian name; ‘kala-azar’ translates to “black fever”, a term that sparked medical disputes over the purported blackening of the skin.
This paper examines rarity as a historically contingent diagnostic and epistemic category in the late nineteenth century medical registers of kala-azar in Assam, South Asia’s eastern periphery. The mysterious febrile disease left hundreds dead in its wake, striking at the heart of the Empire's political economy, leaving the British state anxious to find an identity to the fever that exposed the limits of colonial control. The paper describes how, in the unstable nosologies of the 1890s, the concept of the “rare” functioned as an interpretative tool that reinforced colonial physicians’ differentiation of the normal from the pathological in the native bodies of Assam. Exploring how these observations were made through the practices of post-mortem examinations, photography, and note-taking within colonial modes of objectification, I argue that rarity was a category produced by the meandering nosology that buttressed racial pathologies. Kala-azar becomes a study in how the rare and the common co-produce each other, and how this disjuncture created meanings across the clinic, the laboratory, the tea plantation, and the colonial apparatus of rule.

Author

• Saikia Anidrita, Delhi University