In nineteenth-century medical, management and official discourse, the foothills of the Darjeeling (and the plains beyond), Terai and Duars were represented as sites of disease, fevers and fatalities. Malaria and blackwater fever, a particularly vicious form of fever, were widely prevalent among the planters as well as the labourers, although the indigenous Meches were supposed to have been immune from them. This chapter studies a particular historical moment in the formation of the plantation enclave, when its modes of functioning were challenged by a team of malariologists who were commissioned by the government of India to find out why malaria and blackwater fever were endemic to the plantations and to advise how to control the diseases. The medical experts’ recommendations challenged the recruitment system, wage structure, and finally, the planters’ autonomy within the plantations. In the time of interventionist external medical surveys and malaria research in the twentieth century, the modes of functioning of the plantation enclave were challenged. These surveys identified that diseases in the plantation system were due to the systems of recruitment, wage structure, and the autonomous paternalism of the planter class. In response, the planters provided an alternative vision of the ‘moral economy’ of the plantation system within which disease medical infrastructure and the livelihood of labourers could be managed by the paternalistic planter. The government's response was to compromise and impose a legislation that broadly confirmed the planters’ vision of their enclaves.

In 1906, the government of India appointed a survey by expert medical authorities to look into the causes of and suggest methods for controlling fevers, particularly blackwater fever, which had recently caused several fatalities among the planters in the region, the consequence of a petition by the Dooars Planters Association (DPA) to the government of east Bengal and Assam. The resulting Christophers–Bentley report challenged the very foundations of the political economy of the plantations in the Duars and, by extension, all of northern Bengal. It dismissed the miasmatic theories of local disease and instead recommended that the plantations initiate a system of recruiting indentured labour that would enable the government to inspect their labourers for disease and intervene in the case of epidemics. It claimed that the remuneration to the workers was inadequate and the system of disbursing it through the recruiter-foremen (sardars) was responsible for keeping the workers vulnerable, malnourished and indebted.