Today we all often hear the questions like, when will the Covid-19 pandemic end? And how? How much time it will take to create a vaccine? But honestly, no one knows the exact answer for these questions. The plagues all over the world, typically have two types of endings, the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates decline and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease vanishes. But what if I tell you about a pandemic which destroyed our country and lasted for a total of 20 years.

When the entire century was ending, our mankind gave a destructive finale to it. The brutal plague of 1896 killed 10 million people in India, and the epicentre of this plague was Mumbai. The British wished for Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, to become the first vibrant city of India, and the second-largest city of the British Empire, after London. A neat and elite community of Englishmen and rich Indians were abruptly residing in an area that was imperial and fashionable, but this was a “mask.” The British replenished a tiny part of Bombay with remarkable architecture and stunning monuments when other parts of the city were crowded and damp. They preferred to showcase the city, built on a small piece of land fronting the sea, to influence travellers. The massive bulk of people who were migrating to Bombay from other parts of India, in response to the soaring industrialization, were the poor working class. They shifted to the city to work in the mills and the docks, and their standard of living actually decreased in those years. As the city was not theirs, it was problematic for the migrants to survive in a new and developing area. While the Britishers were busy adorning Bombay for their own privileges, the plague had been scattering across China and confirmed in Hong Kong in 1894. The bacteria, present in the fleas transmitted by rodents, transited from the ports of Hong Kong to Bombay. It was carried on ships from Hong Kong and evolved and scatter handily in the cramped and damp conditions of Bombay. The city was humid, there were hefty monsoons during those years, and an inefficient drainage network indicated that there was plenty of motionless water, a perfect breeding tail for rodents. Bombay also had a limited sewage network, so there was vicious human and animal waste in the sewage. And during those three decades of abrupt industrialization, very limited awareness put into infrastructure. Several chawls and colony housing were constructed next to mills, and untrained labourers set up shacks or slums nearby. With no construction laws in the area, proprietors would construct without thinking of light or ventilation. The way Bombay was structured made it’s residents especially vulnerable to plague, shortly the port city became a centre of a pandemic.

A plague house on Kaladevi Road, Bombay. The plain circles on the wall represent plague deaths. Source: en.wikipedia.org

The British government implicated the pandemic to the working class and the congested regions they populated. They went into these areas, found and isolated people who had symptoms or were in contact with patients disinfected the area and demolished several houses to the ground. Their plan was to decontaminate the areas, and they went at it with full pressure. They were expelling people to plague camps and infirmaries, often forcefully. The British government struggled to resist the disease, using violent strategies such as unwilling displacements and confinement camps. There was a huge social insensibility for this, and migrant workers began escaping Bombay, and even several inhabitants left the city. The plague ultimately dispersed across the country, and the disaster went on with Bombay for almost 20 years. In 1898, the British set up the Bombay City Improvement Trust, a government city planning body. They began barreling through old neighborhoods and developing public areas, particularly streets under which they were able to lay drainage pipes and sewage lines. They were breaking down homes and displacing people, and they never found a way to rehouse those communities.

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In that period, the scientists didn’t actually understand what they were handling. Those in the medical field were puzzled by this disease which saw a mass exodus from the city. The city's commerce was badly hit, and the flourishing textile industry was grounded. But a medical practitioner, Acacio Gabriel Viegas, accurately analyzed the disease as, “Bubonic Plague” and verged to patients at great personal risk. Bubonic plague is one of three types of plague caused by bacterium ‘Yersinia pestis’. One to seven days after exposure to the bacteria, flu-like symptoms develop in the bubonic form of plague, the bacteria enter through the skin through a flea bite and travel via several nerves causing them to swell. Diagnosis is made by finding the bacteria in the blood, sputum, or fluid from nodes. Doctors were struggling to quarantine the patients and demonstrate that the bacteria found in Bombay was identical to the one existing in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, a hope occurred when a Jewish doctor from Odessa, Dr Waldemar Haffkine, arrived in Bombay.

Waldemar Mordecai Wolffe Haffkine. Image Credit: en.wikipedia.org

He was in Calcutta supervising the vaccine he had formulated against cholera. After news of the plague, he was summoned to Bombay where he initiated research in a substitute laboratory in Room 000 of a government medical school. Dr Haffkine was flourishing in developing plague lineages and developed a vaccine out of the weakened bacteria. After tests on rabbits were successful, he injected himself with his own vaccine. It was complicated to assure the government bureaucrats of the science behind it, but when they were convinced, they lent Dr Haffkine the governor's villa in central Bombay, where he renovated the ballroom into a research laboratory and turned on the production of the vaccine. For the next 30 years, this was known as the most beneficial vaccine in the world.

Haffkine on a 1964 stamp of India. Image Credit: en.wikipedia.org

This epidemic happened in the British era in the city of Bombay in 1896 and probably it is barely a piece of history now. Even today, the pieces of this disastrous history settle in Mumbai. Along the twisted lanes of Bandra, with a history of Catholicism, lime-washed crosses can be found near busy crossings of the area. They are markers of the plague that shattered the city more than a century ago. Even the statue of Dr Accacio Viegas stands in a wedge between the grand Cowasji Framjee Hall and Pathak Wadi at the Marine Lines. His statue's vulnerable head is slightly encrusted with bird droppings. On most days the plague that tells his story is repressed by hawkers’flashy display and oblivion of our society. Mumbai was shaped by a tragedy it has largely forgotten. The past similarly seems to be repeating itself during the recent pandemic, when similar images turned out from Mumbai, showing an exodus of migrant workers at the start of a citywide lockdown. In response to COVID-19, the current government has invoked the 123-year-old law, which gave the British colonial government absolute control over Indians during the disastrous plague. Our recent condition perfectly defines the phrase, “History repeats itself.” But the awful thing about the plague history is that “no one really remembers it.”