The existing rich historiography on cholera in India can be divided into three distinct, albeit occasionally overlapping, strands. David Arnold has looked at how cholera was seen as a disease connected to disorderly crowds. His work has analysed the role of cholera in the imperial British–Indian state's efforts to ‘control’ spaces where large numbers of Indians gathered. Harrison's account of cholera, though also interested in issues of ‘control’, gives greater weight to the numerous internal tensions within the Anglo-Indian medical ureaucracy in speaking and writing about cholera. He gives particularly detailed descriptions of the varied positions maintained by different authorities on the question of the transmission of cholera. Harrison also points out how, being closely implicated in imperial politics, the eventual triumph of any one of these many views depended largely upon political considerations. Dhrub Kumar Singh uses a very similar approach to accent the difference in the medical response to cholera in Britain and India. Apart from these two major strands accenting, respectively, the politics of control and the politics of translating heterogeneous medical opinion to medical policy, a third strand investigates the demographic impact of cholera. Ira Klein's work is particularly significant in this regard. The scope of each of these studies reflects the massive administrative importance that a deadly endemic such as cholera had. Each of these studies draws upon administrative archives of the colonial government and therefore critically reflects the major concerns of those who compiled that archive.