Settler Sensibilities and Environmental Change

Abstract

Malaria eradication arrived in Nepal in the 1950s as part of a global initiative to make malarial landscapes available for land reclamation and universal settlement. This article situates period reports from World Health Organization personnel involved in the Nepal Malaria Eradication Organization alongside testimonies from two malaria eradication workers from the country's Farwestern Tarai region to disentangle the socioecological and political effects of Nepal's malaria eradication project in its formative years. By concentrating on the labor of malaria eradication—focused on geographic reconnaissance and indoor residual spraying and the employment of laborers of diverse caste and ethnic backgrounds—the author argues that the project helped generate a settler sensibility toward the Nepal Tarai, transforming the forests and grasslands into a domesticated, development-ready village landscape. Applying insights from settler studies to a formally non-colonized nation-state, Nepal, the article highlights settlerism as a practice extending beyond the geography of European-American imperialism and embeds Nepal's malaria eradication program within the colonial landscape of Northern South Asia.