In the early 1940s, the British colony of Mauritius found itself in a precarious position. The 1942 Japanese occupation of Burma and a powerful cyclone in Bengal the same year shattered the rice economy of the Indian Ocean. Not three years later, three cyclones in 1945 pushed the Mauritian sugar economy to the brink of collapse and unleashed a colony-wide outbreak of poliomyelitis. Anxious about the potential political crises sparked by a hungry population and growing concerns over disaster recovery, chronic malnutrition, and disease, the colonial state attempted to reshape the domestic nutrition systems of its agricultural poor. This was done by identifying women as the vectors through which to change social patterns of food production and consumption. In addition to building an ethnographic infrastructure to understand the social worlds of Mauritian women, colonial researchers also collected biometric data -- blood samples and splenic studies -- data that became an archive around which the development of the colony was to be rationalized. These efforts to produce new nutritionally-minded households also folded into contemporaneous efforts by the colonial state to “improve” the natural spaces of Mauritius by eradicating malaria: forests were cleared, rivers canalized, and pesticides spread. Mauritius was, one study declared, “a [s]anatorium."
This paper examines the social aftershocks of these efforts to intervene in the biological and natural worlds that Mauritians inhabited. Debates over food and disease proved to be fertile territory for emerging discourses of political community, constitutional change, and diasporic belonging. Drawing on the colonial archive, the papers of Indo-Mauritian cultural organizations, newspapers, and the writings of Hindu intellectuals, this paper suggests that the emergence of political community and civilizational thought drew from, in part, gendered debates over how Mauritians encountered the natural world as well as their nutritional habits. It centers the historical significance of Indian Ocean networks of knowledge and culture in Mauritius while also attending to the locally specific ways in which those networks became meaningful for Mauritians.
