‘Monstrous Tumours’: Elephantiasis between Disability and Contagion in British India, 1850–1950

Abstract

Abstract One of the more distinctive disabling illnesses common to certain parts of India is lymphatic filariasis. A mosquito-borne viral infection, filariasis often results in severely debilitating swellings and subsequent disability if undiagnosed and untreated, with significant social consequences. Elephantiasis has a unique trajectory in each individual living with it, and can be in equal parts chronic, latent, punctuated and disabling. When Europeans began exploring and eventually colonizing South Asia and the Caribbean, they were fascinated and repelled by this disease. This paper will explore the discourses of contagion and disability around lymphatic filariasis in the colony – and will track how this condition was produced as a racialized contagion. I begin by describing the broader histories of this disease, and how it came to be understood and represented in precolonial texts and art and move on to early modern travellers’ descriptions of the disease. I then describe how biomedicine came to understand the disease, and how the filarial body was put on display as material representation of both contagion and disability.