From survey to silence: The Rockefellerf hookworm campaign in the colonial princely state of Mysore

This paper examines the Rockefeller Foundation’s hookworm campaign in the princely state of Mysore (1927–1931) to explore how global health philanthropy operated as an instrument of governance. Drawing on Mysore Sanitary Department reports, Rockefeller Foundation records, and vernacular press sources, the study reconstructs how the campaign’s surveillance-based approach rooted in mass stool examinations and treatment camps extended state authority into rural life. Rather than establishing enduring public health reform, the intervention produced what may be described as a sanitary governmentality: a system of mapping, disciplining, and demonstrating health designed to align labouring populations with the logics of productivity and order. Methodologically, the paper combines archival analysis with critical readings of administrative silences and vernacular counter-narratives to reveal how caste, ecology, and semi-autonomous governance shaped both participation and resistance. It argues that the Mysore campaign’s limited outcome was not merely technical but structural exposing the limits of a global philanthropic model that privileged demonstration over reform and measurement over care. In doing so, the study contributes to a broader understanding of colonial public health as a biopolitical project where surveillance endured, reform withered, and the ethics of welfare were subsumed by the imperatives of rule.