Introduction

2In order to understand the challenges of accessing Indian health archives after 1947, we need to contextualise the way health governance and repositories evolved in the late colonial period. If the colonial archive used bureaucratic issues to assert the power of colonial statecraft, the postcolonial archive exacerbated this link with its emphasis on the axiomatic truth of official correspondence within its ministries. To understand the postcolonial state’s assertion, we need to understand how it borrows from colonial modes of enumeration. Governmental archives, at every level and scale, illustrate this lineage of hierarchy.

3The primary question guiding this essay is how the archives of public health interact with India’s trajectory from a colony to a postcolonial entity. Despite drastic transformations in governing health, there are many colonial lineages in the way health is documented. Through a thick description of the national and transnational archives, the essay shows how knowledge around public health in India emerges within and beyond its national contours. These descriptions emerge from decades of engaging with health in different institutional archives. This auto-ethnography works in the larger scheme of questioning the very idea of an “official” archive. Methodologically, this essay de-centers the statist attempt to filter news, correspondence and files. It does so by introducing competing claims to authenticity as posed by archives such as the Rockfellers and other transnational aid organizations. Each such collection provides a singular version of archival truth.

4The first section of the article shows the evolution of archiving health in colonial and postcolonial India. The section foregrounds the colonial continuities that guide the national archives. The second section introduces transnational aid donors and how they works together to stitch varying versions of how Indian national programs operated and worked in an evolving political context. The final section showcases the significance of municipal and local archives. By juxtaposing the local scale of everyday governance with transnational imprints, the essay urges historians of postcolonial India to circumvent the nation.

1. Archiving Public Health in India

5This section traces the way public health has been documented and collated in the Indian bureaucratic paper archive. The underlying beliefs guiding the colonial state’s health archive, its origins, and its heavy reliance on paper documentation guide the postcolonial notion of archive too. Moreover, the objectives of surveillance and benevolent coercion that is foundational to colonial heath and sanitary reforms, continue to work within postcolonial health governance. Which makes the task of accessing documents of health programmes and population planning doubly complex, adding to the challenges researchers face in uncovering the stories of marginalized individuals within health narratives.

6Following the mutiny of 1857, one of the first activities initiated by the British monarchy was to set up a Royal Commission that was to enquire into “the regulations affecting the sanitary conditions of the army, the reorganization of military hospitals and the treatment of the sick and the wounded”(Ramasubban, 1982: 13). This was followed by the establishment of the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley, which conceived a course on military hygiene, medicine and surgery. In 1859, another Royal Commission was appointed to enquire into the sanitary state of the army in India. In 1863, the Royal Army Sanitary Commission, of which Nightingale and William Farr were also part of, presented a report which described the existing unsatisfactory sanitary conditions in the country. Consequently, three sanitary boards were appointed in 1864 for Bengal, Bombay and Madras for improving sanitary conditions of towns and villages in these presidencies. In 1866, the Sanitary Board of Bengal was replaced by the Imperial Sanitary Commissioner. The person filling this post advised the government on civil medical matters too.

7In 1867, we see the first mention of the administrative gaze shifting to provinces other than the three royal presidencies (Calcutta, Bombay, Madras) and setting up of the sanitary commissions there. Until now, all these developments were occurring within the “Public” branch of the Home Department. Only in 1868 do we see the creation of a separate Sanitary Branch. From 1868 to 1910, the Sanitary Branch was with the Home Department. Between the years 1881 to 1883, health as an issue was shifted to the branch with Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce department. This was the arrangement until 1910, when the branch was coupled with the Education department. This timeline is important for scholars tracing the Sanitary Branch, as the records of these years are in the Medical Board, of the Ministry of Home Affairs, and not in the archives of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

8In the year 1880, civil and military medical administrations were separated. Military medical matter was entrusted to Military Surgeons General, appointed for the three presidencies. Civil medical matters were placed under Surgeons General for the three presidencies. The Surgeon General also took up the Imperial Commissioner’s role. On 1 April 1896, the civil medical services of the three presidencies were centralized. This conglomerate was the Indian Medical Services, under the Surgeon General who was called the Director General thereon. Simultaneous to this, the Army medical administration was also centralized under a principal Medical Officer for Armed Forces. The post of a separate Sanitary Commissioner, however, continued and was amalgamated into the Director General of IMS only in 1914.

9Official discourse on public health in British India could be summed up with three words: coercion, charity, development. Postcolonial governance has not shifted away from these foundational thematics. One can think of development as a constantly deferred state of being; a never-ending process of modernization (Chatterjee, 1997; Arnold, 2013; Zachariah, 2012; Menon, 2022). The main factors which shaped colonial health policy in India were the troops, the European civil official population, and their locations (Ramasubban, 1982: 9). The nature of responses to health concerns kept varying, depending on the kind of theoretical framing of disease in the metropolitan. Thus, the shift in focus in England and Western Europe from sanitation to epidemiology and bacteriology, which began in the 1880s and gained momentum in the following decades, made sure that laboratory investigations were instituted in the four army commands.

10Dominant disease causation theories influenced strategies of governance in colonial India. Even as Robert Koch discovered the cholera “Comma” bacillus in Egypt and visited Calcutta in the same year (1876) to confirm the discovery, it was not as if the germ theory was allowed to triumph over miasmatic theories in total. Governing health in India began using a consortium of all the available knowledge networks, and no other mode of theorizing the diseases appeared to overpower other explanations. The containment policies which sprung from miasmatic theories were never removed and were acting in tandem with the newer policies which were springing from the theory of contagion: places of pilgrimage and pilgrim routes were seen as the locus of disease transmission. The implementation strategies borne out of all the disease-causation theories were working to the same effect of containing the “native” population who were assumed to be the carriers of communicable disease.

11In tandem with the diseases-causation theories were the climatic theories. The climate of India seemed far less deadly than that of the Caribbean or tropical Africa, and until the early 1800s, many European visitors thought it no less salubrious than Europe itself (Harrison, 1964). It was not until the nineteenth century that India’s climate was generally considered incompatible with European constitutions. The second half of the eighteenth century was a time of considerable optimism about the prospects of acclimatization and settlements in the tropics. These shifts in perception, according to Mark Harrison, mirrored the successive phases of European expansion in India, particularly the transition in the eighteenth century from what had been a largely commercial relationship with Indian states, to one of territorial dominance (Harrison, 1999).

12The year 1923 saw the regrouping of the Secretariat due to reductions in the expenditure of the government of India (Ramasubban, 1982). The metropole abolished the post of public health commissioner within the Indian government. The Committee also cut down research funds, by half, as public health was viewed as “non-remunerative.” The administration of Education, Health, Revenue, and Agriculture was transferred under the monolith of the Department of Education, Health, and Lands. The Health Branch within this umbrella department of disparate field of governance was operative from 16 April 1923. It consisted of the Central Medical Services, Public Health, sanitation, and medical records. The medical and sanitation governance were merged to form the Health Branch in 1914. Only in 1945, was this arrangement found unwieldy and trifurcated back into the Health, Education, and Lands departments.

14So, the history of public health has an overt reliance on state documents. This question takes us to the very notion of archive. How does the archive function without the state-produced documents, is a question that needs creative answers. What is also necessary is a creative use of the archive. In the context of the years after Independence, the archive becomes a crucial site for recording the opaqueness of state documents. In every report are thin descriptions of the issue at hand, and gaps and silences that say a lot more. The use of the archive in the context of the postcolonial nation is different from the years before 1947. The postcolonial years require an arduously worked creative approach, where the very meaning of “documentation” gets interrogated. Tracing the word “health” along different governmental shifts produced several possibilities for creative takes on its archive. Even a preliminary foray into the files and correspondences of different years produced a chronology of influences that structures governance. Any postcolonial project of interrogating health relies heavily on the hermeneutics of these state documents. Hermeneutics brings with it a sense reading into and through the text at hand, understanding the world scape of the document, and see the event that is described through the lens that has been offered in the document. This kind of a reading was crucial to understand why the document would be silent on some aspects of the event, while spending a thousand words describing another. Also important is the task of eliciting truths counter to the claims made in official discourse.

15These discussions become particularly important when describing registers of segregative violence in society. Caste is one such form of violence which serves as an organizational principle in the subcontinent. One way state archives disempower subaltern and oppressed caste communities is by showcasing them as sites of either violent contestations or benevolent reform. Sanitary discourses are the most striking examples of how oppressed caste bodies become causative agents in diseases. Through files on health programmes, we see how tuberculosis, cholera or malnutrition were policed as results of poverty and moral failure of people, and not things that the state caused due to economic degradation and extractive colonialism (Amrith, 2004). Health reforms showcase how archives are complicit in rendering oppressor caste acts of violence as neutral acts of reform. Several of these efforts, which began in the late nineteenth century (with some having earlier roots), anticipate actions later adopted by postcolonial India. They significantly influence the welfare policies and structures of the postcolonial Indian state.

16Thus, one cannot rely on the bureaucratic production of paper regimes to be the sole documentation of a period or event. The challenge for a historian is to juxtapose differing sources and find multiple voices. There are several ways of circumventing the methodological conflation of state-making with the geopolitical contours of a nation. One way is to access media other than the paper document: oral history (where available), literary sources, newspapers, audiovisual media (where available) disrupt the tendency to see paper documents as the “natural” archive. Princely state archives also figure as important countering points to national repositories, particularly in the collections of writings they hold of subaltern communities (Banerjee, 2018; Cherian, 2022; Ernst et al., 2018). The other way to disrupt the reliance on any single health department is to seek the same subject or programme in a municipal, state, or transnational archive.

17Here again, politics of access becomes relevant as scholars working in Delhi not only use the National Archives but also the library at the Central Secretariat, and the Prime Ministers Museum and Library (formerly known as the Teen Murti Library). These libraries house private collections of prominent political leaders and other prominent personalities. While these libraries purportedly hold many correspondences and documents of postcolonial India, they also constitute a chimera. Many of these personal records are redacted, and scholars are allowed to access them via special requests and recommendation by the chairperson. Many scholars are routinely denied access to these personal records as these are considered too sensitive for public dissemination and against “national interest” – a term so nebulous that the staff in the Personal Records can use it to deny access to files pertaining to topics as wildly unconnected as Kashmir to leprosy. The period of the 1950s-70s is particularly regulated. While the state continues to document and value these collections of personal papers and artefacts, it is not possible to ascertain what these materials are, if not allowed to researchers. The personal papers of independent India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru were opened as late as 2016. The collection of the first Health Minister Rajkumari Amrit Kaur is redacted to such an extent that it officially holds more dinner invitations than actual dialogue. Similarly, the letters and correspondences of the first Minister of External Affairs Krishna Menon are redacted for most of his tenure. We cannot even ascertain the value of these papers as most of them are possibly, not even indexed beyond stating the period and topic. This denial off access has shaped the discipline of modern South Asian history in ways we are yet to comprehend.

18The other aspect of this lack of access is how some institutional records and, thereby, historical actors are more written about than others. For instance, the Health Minister Sripati Chandrasekhar left his personal papers with the Ohio State University, in Toledo. By virtue of this decision, his papers attracted several first documentation of India’s population policy (Connelly, 2008; Bashford, 2014a, 2014b; Ghosh, 2017). We see a similar cluster of historiographies on PC Mahalonobis, a statistician who was a central figure in India’s demographic and planning histories (Zachariah, 2012; Ghosh, 2020; Menon, 2022). Relying on the records of the institutions that make their papers available can sometimes run the danger of overstating their prominence or involvement in postcolonial Indian governance. The repercussions of this overt stress on Mahalonobis and Chandrasekhar has meant that the first wave of historiography on postcolonial planning in India has been through upper caste male men, who were expert figures with no apparent interest in political society, and yet had immense power in dictating the decisions of the Planning Commission (Chatterjee, 1997; Arnold, 2013).

19This uneven landscape of archival spread shows that we need an ethnographic history of the archival spaces, and their categories of collation is needed. Historians often, without a recognition of the width of the gap between state documents and people’s voices in these files, recreate this gap in their analyses. This is often true for works on colonial governmentality. However, creative interpretations of historical works can potentially undercut the state-centric narratives emerging out of studying government documents. Ethnographic histories of the actors, disciplines, and institutions that hold archival truths will show how these truths, and the categories they build, were never stable. The link between paper documentation and impermanent truths is particularly cogent for the Indian postcolonial state of the 1980s – which is characterized by a Kaghazi Raj (the License Raj). As the last decade of a closed economic order of import substitution policies, the 1980s represented the peak of Indian bureaucracy overreach in the form of arbitrary licensing regimes. However, the era that has the government going to extreme lengths to fine, enumerate and tax almost every aspect of life (including televisions) has also been the most under-preserved decade so far. It is hard to even begin historicizing this decade even as bureaucratic paper regimes were essential to it. The blindfolds of censorship work in setting the very agenda of historical research, by dictating access to official correspondence and other departmental records.

20However, in the climate of political censorship, local non-state institutional archives can disrupt the distance between the state and its citizens. Historians have recently started using repositories of commercial enterprises to understand the role of these non-state actors in building postcolonial frameworks (Raianu, 2021; Alladi, 2018; Tumbe & Ralli, 2018). The use of audio-visual media created outside statist sources is also a way out. They help chart the way people carry government lexicon in everyday cultures of media consumption. Such sources are usually more precarious than bureaucratic documents. Historians using film are particularly significant in this recovery. As Debashree Majumdar notes in her cinematic rendition of late colonial Bombay, “to think of the talkie industry as a cine-ecology is to accommodate multisensory histories marked by medial overlaps, divergences, and intensifications within a period defined by the cultural dominance of sound cinema. The emphasis here is not on continuity/discontinuity but on simultaneity…” (Mukherjee, 2020). Thus, in creating a postcolonial archive, we too undertake a process of unearthing simultaneous conversations taking place in supposedly disparate realms.

22The postcolonial archive is thus a site of conversation that is necessarily broken and scattered. It will not work in ways that the traditional archives work, and nor should it. The national borders will need to be circumvented to understand the impact of governance structures and funding patterns. Some of the assumed orderliness of colonial archives disappear and what replaces it is a curious mix of governmental truths and paper regimes. In the context of health governance, these issues become more relevant in the distance they create between state programmes and the people they are intended for. However, a close reading of documents produced on similar topics in different constellations of archives composes several layers of confusion and mess. Precarity of these documents and chance findings in boxes form a major portion of this enquiry. In these minute ways, we move away from seeing the postcolonial grab at sovereignty as less stable and take it less for granted than when we start our research projects.

2. Transnational Repositories and their Politics

23This section introduces how health archives have emerged outside national borders. It showcases how the hierarchies of access determine the nature of postcolonial readership and analysis. The first explication of this discursive distance between national programmes and their documentation within the United States rests in New York.

24Hidden in the collections of the New York Academy of Medicine are all the volumes of the Journal of Family Welfare, from 1959 to 1975. It might be hard to believe, that in the age of digitized archives, how impossible it was to find all the volumes of this journal started by the Family Planning Association of India. One would assume that the collection would be accessible through the organization. However, neither of its offices in Delhi or Mumbai responded. In this way, the archive of the first official population control programme in the world, started in India in 1951, is scattered across the North-Atlantic world. This dispersion tells us two important things about the programme: the scale of global interest in the domestic policy of a particular nation, and the fact that the Indian government was aware of this attention.

25Like the journal volumes kept in the library in New York (see fig. 2), one often encounters volumes of journals that have stopped being published and reports from institutes that do not exist. Take the Central Family Planning Institute for example, which ceased to exist, and a commercial enterprise which replaced its Delhi office. The archivist at the New York Academy of Medicine was a meticulous person, who was frustrated that the series of monographs from the Central Family Planning Institute in India was incomplete in her library. Not only that, but the monographs were also confused with the report series, which amounted to blasphemy in the cataloguing world. More significant is the fact that there might not be a complete set of its publications in India. Couple this with how the private collection of the Health Minister and demographer Dr. S Chandrasekhar rests in the Ohio State University, in Toledo. These instances show that the correspondences vital in understanding the importance of international funding in domestic population governance lie ironically, with the funders. There is no way to trace the scope and depth of how many links are missing from archives in India, and how no history of postcolonial planning can be written without recourse to international aid circulation. In yet another case of hierarchies of knowledge production, several transnational donors and university libraries house documents and personal papers of postcolonial India.

26The archives of transnational aid house two forms of documentation: those published by the Indian government for research or for donor organizations, and internal reports, discussions, and memorandums about the Indian government. They are integral to any postcolonial history of the subcontinent. All these aspects place the archives in the North-Atlantic world in a strange quandary: how does a historian of postcolonial governance write a history of domestic policies without accessing the documents that say, lie with the Ford Foundation? More importantly, is it ethical to write about a domestic policy through the version of history that appears within these paper documents, microfilms, photographs, and films? (see fig. 3) What kind of blind spots do these histories carry within them? More importantly, is it possible to glean subaltern voices from reports that were written expressly for circulation within nationalist communities and international funders?

Credit: A. Sarcar, 2024

27However, one cannot assume that the archives in the Global North, even the private collections, are not falling prey to some of the troubles of archives in India. Due to their overwhelming attention to paper documents, many archivists miss material in other media. Often, digitization of records does not mean that the archivist is completely aware of the order of files in the box. Chance plays a role in global institutional archives too. While there might not be intentional negligence or miscommunication on topics, there will be papers that would be cordoned off or unavailable to researchers.

28This is perhaps an unintentional outcome of the Cold War. Repositories like the Rockefeller Archives, Office of Demographic Research in Princeton University have papers of demographers like Frank Notestein and Ansley Coale. These experts were significant players in negotiating India’s soft boundaries of non-alignment. Especially pertinent to scientific research and pilot projects, these archives have helped produce the first few renditions of postcolonial history, albeit through population control and technological aid through funders in the United States (Williams, 2014; Bassett, 2009; Engerman, 2018). The reports concerning donor organizations share contradicting stances about India’s non-alignment policy. Repositories about health programmes and memos/reports regarding the Indian government, therefore, are crumbs with which one can follow a larger story of India’s place in and during the Cold War.

29However, there is need for an important caveat to using transnational archives. It is important to point out the immediate lack of access for a scholar based in the Global South. Even as there are small pots of money for visiting these archives, these serve as more token amounts when thinking about the overall cost of travel involved in a visit to these sites. Not surprisingly, many of the postcolonial histories are emerging from scholars from the Global North. With relative ease of funding and travel, they are better positioned to think through transnational histories of this aid. This question of access recreates the hierarchies of knowledge production between North/South clusters. Many scholars of the Global North, even if South Asian, are upper caste and limited in their understanding of everyday lives and local geographies. Such unfamiliarity is not just the outcome of Orientalized white scholarship on a specific region. It can also be recreated by an upper caste historian who has no embodied experience of subaltern subjectivities and historical oppression. Their only access to these is through the archives. It is impossible for them to read and look for oppression in these transnational papers in a way that would be possible for a historian bearing a historically persecuted or oppressed identity. Such a gaze is an urgent requirement for interrogating the archives based in the Global North.

30Another impact of the Cold War still relevant in postcolonial histories, is how, while the pertinent archives are in splinters around the US, we are yet to access the Soviet libraries. Historiography on health governance in India has detailed the imprints of US-based transnational funders, namely the Rockefeller Foundation and later, the Ford foundation on funding, research, and knowledge production around national programmes and personnel in India. From the 1950s onwards, the Ford consultants were active along with USAID, followed by the Population Council in the later decades of the 1950s-70s. These experts would often work with the Indian government’s Planning Commission, notwithstanding its socialist orientation – something that the public opinion back in the US would not have approved. However, postcolonial paper documents in India, as they exist today, are significantly thin on descriptions of Soviet influences on subjects like demography, reproductive policies, and birth control technologies. Scholars have to necessarily rely on the exhaustive surveys, correspondences of the field officers and their nodal engagements to examine aspects of postcolonial health policy (Ghosh, 2020). There is also a growing need to access archives based in the Global South to decenter the prominence of those based in the United States.

31Which brings one back to the question of censorship and denial of access to archival records of certain political leaders, and thereby, overreliance on others. We have already discussed this inequity within the Indian context. But we now need to wonder what scales of information, and contestations we are currently not aware of, because of our dependence on transnational philanthropic archives. Undoubtedly, the impact of any lacunae directly impacts what we know about Indian governance of today. As historians, we need to examine the Indian government’s steadfast denial of access and ask how it might upset political scenarios today. Otherwise, decades-old files and correspondences of – apparently defunct – health programmes should have been available for public dissemination. Taking the instance of the institutional records of the Department of Family Planning. After the Emergency years (1975-77), this department was dissolved, and the Ministry of Health and Family Planning was rechristened Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. This transfer of power seemingly took away all traces of the department from national correspondences. We find residual traces of the same municipal files in state archives or alternately, in the Rockefeller Archives.

32This erasure is hardly a product of negligence. It is an outcome of India’s reliance on targeted sterilizations and any documentation of the same would reveal that many of the mass vasectomy camps recruited people without their consent. Enough has been written about this period of population control without official papers anyway (Connelly, 2006, 2008; Tarlo, 2003; Rajagopal, 2019; Gwatkin, 1979; Prakash, 2019). Thus, we see answers to why bureaucratic papers from 1970s would go missing in Indian repositories or that scholars be denied access to them. In fact, the Emergency years (1975-77) in which the government banned any public gathering and suspended fundamental rights, has produced an irrefutable schism in Indian politics (Dodd, 2010). The very legitimacy of the Indian democracy ethos has been questioned ever since the two years of curfews, arbitrary arrests, police torture, and unethical mass sterilizations. Postcolonial governments resist acknowledging transnational health documents as worthy of archiving due to the risk of these documents exposing malpractices in administration – not just in the period that has passed, but also as they may exist today. Additionally, this erasure of transnational aid in the domestic circuit of repositories also helps build a facade of self-sufficiency. In the process, we miss out on an in-depth understanding of India’s policy of non-alignment with either of the power blocs during the Cold War.

33Apart from the vacuum created by political censorship, another interesting challenge for postcolonial research is forcing a dialogue between the transnational archives and the ones based in India. A significant factor in this discussion is scale: archiving records and their status change according to the institutional actor involved. A file that may not be pertinent to National Archives, can be accessed through the Delhi State Archives mostly because it was deemed safe for public dissemination by the state government. Many a time, this disorganized redaction is a result of what an individual bureaucrat deems appropriate for public knowledge.

3. Scales of Governance

35It was, therefore, very important that the transnational archival collections be broken and disturbed by something beyond its national boundaries. The decades of the 1950s-70s were significant for the global dispersion of developmental modernization which tried to create a uniform vocabulary of socioeconomic progress in the recently decolonized world. Each of the individuated experiences of the nations were collated as projects within a teleology: the end point of these experiences was to become a developed nation in some form or structure. The routes to this end point were multiple. Playing with the scales of archival repositories disrupts the notion of top-down bureaucracies while tracing the everyday governance of national programs. These policies percolate through people’s lives and close the gap between the state and its citizens. Perhaps, it is in the tension between the transnational and the municipal archives that we find the subaltern voice.

Conclusion

36Thus, the story of governance in postcolonial Delhi is incomplete without the parallel trans-local readings of developments in the policy in Seoul, Colombo, or Istanbul. The story of developmental economic planning in India is a global story. It is a story of how particular experiences of decolonized nations illustrated the global reach of classical liberal conceptions of sovereign statehood. Some of these ideas were grounded in eugenics but also, a politics of good intentions, in which philanthropy sutured the idea of quality of populations to good, governable nations. These questions come alive in little clusters, in papers stored away by some bureaucrat who forgot to burn them or who decided to take the files with them to wherever they travelled after their retired from their official roles.

37The ethical dilemmas of using transnational sources are in no way undercutting the significance of these repositories. Describing the issues around access and knowledge creation helps build a way to break the assumed stability of an archive. This essay posits that one way to disturb the dusty archives is to underline the tension between the transnational and the municipal archives – and circumvent the National Archives. Through charting common actors and topics in both sets of papers, what emerges is a global history of developmental economic planning in India.

38While juxtaposing archives that have hitherto remained in silos might produce a trenchant critique of the state, it would be incorrect to say that this dialogue is helping find a subaltern voice. The agreement between postcolonial states and major powers during the Cold War to collaborate has produced an elaborate and meticulous archive. In the documentation of developmental and healthcare programs, we find glimpses of marginalized communities. They appear as subjects of clinical trials, or victims of sterilization, or a question to be resolved by pencil notes in the marginalia. The question of seeking subaltern voice is not one that is tangential to the process of decolonizing archives, but essential to it: for, what is the point of disrupting the centrality of National(ist) Archives if not to find newer actors who have been steadfastly ignored by academic scholarship thus far.

39While one must ask why the 1940s-70s attracted significant transnational aid in health from donors in the United States, it is also important to underline the value that such philanthropy brought to the country. These health campaigns continue to be significant in the present day by being precursors to later-day health philanthropists like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Stored in institutional repositories and university libraries in the United States (among other donor countries) the transnational health archives exist to document the economic and intellectual investment that the developed world made towards decolonization. In the Indian case, its rise as a prominent player in developmental politics and non-alignment to either ideological bloc meant the archival collections pertaining to the country are complex. While these repositories document the early decades of decolonization, they also lay ground for other government interests. Thus, pairing them with municipal and state-level archives would (and should) produce contradictory narratives around programmes, historical actors, and places. It is this discursive function that archival texts centering health are expected to perform.