'Asiatic cholera': Disease names revealed colonial India's racism

There were many different choleras, each suiting disparate political interests and corresponding to particular communities affected by the disease at that time.

In the autumn of 1817, a mysterious intestinal disease that had been endemic to the rural Ganges delta arrived in Calcutta, then the East India Company’s capital and a major centre for inter-Asian trade. The malady was associated with a variety of interconnected symptoms, among them lethargy, diarrhoea, vomiting, chills and abdominal pain. It came to be known as a ‘cholera’, one of several present on the Indian subcontinent, because it resembled a host of other diseases that caused those affected to forcefully expel fluids from their bodies.

As the contagion spread further afield—to British outposts in Burma, Sri Lanka and