From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, railways became increasingly important in the lives of a growing number of Indians. While allowing millions to collectively experience the endemic discomforts of third-class travel, the public opportunities for proximity and contact created by railways simultaneously compelled colonial society to confront questions about exclusion, difference, and community. It was not only passengers, however, who were affected by the transformations that railways wrought. Even without boarding a train, one could see railway tracks and embankments reshaping familiar landscapes, realise that train schedules represented new temporal structures, fear that spreading railway links increased the reach of contagion, and participate in new forms of popular politics focused around railway spaces. Tracks of Change explores how railway technology, travel, and infrastructure became increasingly woven into everyday life in colonial India, how people negotiated with the growing presence of railways, and how this process has shaped India's history.

The epicentre of the Muslim universe, Mecca attracts hundreds of thousands of believers every year. Pilgrimage, Politics, and Pestilence studies the organization and meanings of the Haj from India during colonial times and analyses it from political, commercial, and medical perspectives between 1860, the year of the first outbreak of cholera epidemic in Mecca, and 1920, when the subject of holy places of Islam became a very powerful political symbol in the Indian subcontinent. Contrary to the general belief about colonial policy of non-intervention into religious subjects, the book argues that the state, in fact, kept a close watch on the pilgrimage. Saurabh Mishra examines the 'medicalization' of Mecca through cholera outbreaks and the intrusion of European medical regulations. He underscores how the Haj played an important role in shaping medical policies and practices, debates and disease definitions. The book explores how the Indian Hajis perceived, negotiated, and resisted colonial pilgrimage and medical policies in their quest of an intense spiritual experience. The author recovers the hitherto unexplored perspective of pilgrims' voices—in travelogues, memoirs, newspaper reports, and journals—to present a nuanced analysis of the interaction between religious faith and colonial public health policies during the age of steamships and empire.

Using case studies of cholera, plague, malaria, and yellow fever, this book analyzes how factors such as public health diplomacy, trade, imperial governance, medical technologies, and cultural norms operated within global and colonial conceptions of political and epidemiological risk to shape infectious disease policies in colonial India.