Drawing the Bombay Plague
The Bombay Plague of 1896 marked a turning point in disease control in India. Strict, authoritarian measures were imposed by a colonial administration that was worried about the plague spreading to Europe through trade routes.
In Drawing the Bombay Plague, Ranjit Kandalgaonkar combined imagery from two collections: photographs from the Wellcome Collection and satirical cartoons from HindiPunch, a monthly magazine archived at the Asiatic Library, Mumbai. He produced archival driven artwork in the form of an interactive online sketch. In doing so, he encapsulates the different imaginations of the plague to recover under-represented facts, figures, and people's voices. Kandalgaonkar imagines the drawing as a record to view the plague through a new lens that could inform future research through validation of some of the lesser known aspects of the plague years.
About the Artist
Ranjit Kandalgaonkar lives and works in Mumbai, and his art practice primarily comprises urbanity and cities. Projects such as cityinflux, Gentricity, build/browse and Stories of Philanthropic Trusts map the vulnerability within redevelopment strategies of urbanisation, record anomalous histories, or document timelines and “blindspots”—alternate markers of a city that is unraveling. A study of the combative histories of reclamation and speculation has led to projects such as Isles amidst reclamation and Seven Isles Unclaimed, which map ever-diminishing geographies.
