‘Done the Elephants, Done the Mosquitoes’: International Cricket Tours and the Making of India as a Disease Zone, c.1890s-1990s

This article examines how international cricketers touring India between the 1890s and the 1990s represented the country as an alien, unhealthy and bodily threatening environment. Memoirs, autobiographies, and press reports repeatedly foregrounded heat, contaminated food and water, illness and physical discomfort, often allowing these experiences to overshadow the cricket itself. Rather than reading such accounts simply as incidental descriptions of difficult touring conditions, the article situates them within a longer imperial history of climate, disease, and racialised difference. It argues that cricket writings helped sustain a colonial and postcolonial ‘disease zone’ imaginary in which India continued to be framed through older assumptions about hygiene civilisation, bodily vulnerability, and environmental danger. Drawing on published cricketing memoirs and press reports, the article adopts a material-discursive approach to illness on tour. It acknowledges the real agency of pathogens, climate, and bodily distress, while also analysing how these experiences were narrated and given meaning for public consumption. In doing so, it treats cricket tours as a public archive of imperial and postcolonial perception. The article shows that sport was a significant arena through which the cultural afterlives of empire endured, circulated, and acquired renewed legitimacy in the postcolonial era.