How did the Victorians think about disasters such as famines and epidemic diseases? What was the relationship between such cataclysmic events and literary forms, styles and genres? In what way was thinking about disasters also crucial to practices of governance? Does the legacy of such Victorian thinking still shape our contemporary responses to 'natural' disasters? This book seeks to answer such questions by looking at a wide range of administrative, medical, historical, journalistic and literary texts written about Britain's key imperial possession in the 19th-century – south Asia. In doing so, it expands our ideas about Victorian literature, just as it reshapes our definitions of 'natural' disasters themselves.