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In this paper I will seek to provide a new understanding of endemicity of disease in India. Through a study of cholera research in the twentieth century I will argue that disease and its endemicity has to be understood in biological factors as well as within a wider social and economic context. I will discuss the medical efforts at locating the causality of cholera from the nineteenth century in Indian climate, water bodies and human anatomy to show that cholera is no more a biological phenomena than water is an ecological or environmental problem. Both are essentially political and economic questions.

AbstractThis article traces the consilience of science and mythology in the history of fossil research in India: this is a narrative in which Indian fossil research met the Orientalist discovery of the Indian past. It demonstrates that in exploring the geological evolution of Indian fossils, British researchers such as Hugh Falconer invoked animals from thePuranas, picking up on a tradition of mythological hermeneutics first developed in India by the likes of William Jones. In exploring the nuances of this intellectual approach, the article thus identifies a hitherto obscured historical trajectory regarding the making of geology in colonial India.