Crisis, charisma and triage: Extirpating the pox

Abstract

This article is a history of the last stage of the global smallpox eradication programme, christened in India as the National Smallpox Eradication Programme (NSEP). Here I have attempted to show how the Intensive Campaign of the NSEP was forced to abandon its erstwhile language of targets and returns, whose acme was the mass vaccination strategy of the 1960s, and switch instead to a language of crisis and cases. It instituted a new practice where vaccination once again became a moment in a larger armamentarium, though not in quite the same way that variolation was a moment in a larger therapeutic structure in the eighteenth century. Unlike variolation, where it was self-imposed, the eradication campaign's rediscovery of individual segregation as a necessary tool, and village and community as hallowed space, were coupled with an imagery of the kill. In this imagery, smallpox had been radically transformed from a goddess to a demon that was no longer to be solicited and purged but fought against and vanquished. This leads us to two models of consecration and healing in the movement from the eighteenth to the twentieth century: from Sitala and the self to body populations and the state.