David Arnold has described the plague epidemic of the 1890s as an occasion for an unprecedented ‘attack on the body’. Plague, clarified Arnold, ‘was specifically identified with the human body and thus occasioned an unprecedented assault upon the body of the colonized’. Informed by the arrogance of what it believed to be ‘scientific’ practice, the British Indian state sought to intrude upon the colonized body as it had never done before. The forcible search and quarantine measures instituted by the government eventually led to widespread protests and violence and even the assassination of W. C. Rand, the Sanitary Commissioner of Pune. This account, however, has been largely based upon the experiences of the Bombay Presidency. Though mention is made of other regions across the subcontinent, the scope of Arnold's pioneering work did not include the interrogation of regional specificities. Ira Klein's demographic study of plague mortality and antiplague measures also focussed primarily on the western and northern regions of the subcontinent, while Ian Catanach's studies highlighted the ‘tensions of empire’ that the politics around the plague brought to the fore. Apart from the conflict between the Pune politicians, Catanach highlighted the differences within the European medical community. Rajnarayan Chandravarkar's study, based once again on Bombay, highlights the ways in which the ‘epidemic’ came to be constituted and the diverse and varied responses it evoked. He highlighted the absence of a generalized ‘Indian reaction’ even within the context of Bombay.