Ecology, epidemics and the colonial state: Environmental change and health in Eastern Bengal Delta, 1858-1947

The dynamic nature of the ecological regime of eastern Bengal stems from the fact that it is home to the largest delta in the world, the Bengal Delta. Despite its importance, its history has been underrepresented in regional historiography. Iftekhar Iqbal tried to address thisunder-representation by incorporating the category of the ecological in his assessment of the region. An important aspect of Iqbal's scholarship includes the study of how human-induced ecological changes in the Bengal Delta spread water-borne diseases and caused famine. The present study argues that colonial efforts to combat the epidemic disease at Dhaka in eastern Bengal failed due to two reasons. First, the colonial medical institutions and health infrastructure in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Dhaka was disproportionately distributed and remained inadequate and out of the reach of those who needed it most. Second, colonial developmental projects and attitudes leading to the loss of ecological balance in the Bengal Delta contributed to famine-like conditions and hyperendemicity of epidemic disease in the region, which together contributed to higher mortality in the region. This study employs an ecological framework based on dynamic deltaic nature to examineepidemics in assessing the colonial history of the Bengal Delta region. It also uses the notion of the Delta as a broader 'zone of anomaly' in the history of colonial administration of the region. Employing this framework to assess the history of the region, the study concludes that colonial policies that neglected ecological concerns in the delta were directly responsible for failure in eradicating epidemics in eastern Bengal during the colonial period.