Caste in Sickness and Health

That the forced separation between the “white” town and “black” town was more colonial ambition than reality is particularly true when diseases like the bubonic plague arrived in the Indian subcontinent and spread indiscriminately across variously governed territories. The plague arrived in Bangalore’s ‘European’ Civil and Military Station in 1898 and quickly arrived at the Princely controlled ‘Native’, Bangalore City. The experience of plague in Bangalore differed from those places where it had already taken hold like Bombay. The colonial government had already been triggered by both domestic and international pressures to launch a series of measures to prevent the plague's arrival and the disease transmission, measures (or so the GOI said) that assumed person-to-person contagion had moved to the neighborhood to criminalize the poor as the cause of contagion.

Focused on the period between 1897 and 1899, the year before the plague was identified in Bangalore and the year after, this paper captures a variety of short-lived and extraordinary interventions that allow us to complicate who “the poor” were. Unlike scholarship that has primarily focused on the assaults on the urban fabric through demolition or urban renewal via subsequent improvement projects, these short-lived interventions allow me to reframe assaults on the poor through caste. I argue that plague measures became how caste identities were perpetuated and maintained as only some neighborhoods were framed as carriers of contagion. I also expose the disproportionate sanitary violence against Dalits and their coercion to perform the ‘polluted’ work of sanitation and handling diseased bodies, across both halves of Bangalore city. In showing how the technologies of the Princely government combined the disciplinary, biopolitical and necropolitical to target Dalits while preserving the health and well-being of elites, I reveal that the caste-splintered city is more accurate than a “white” town and “black” divide.