‘“Sahib, I’m not a doctor like you, and I should not presume to tell you what you already know. In the past month more than fifty have die...
‘“Sahib, I’m not a doctor like you, and I should not presume to tell you what you already know. In the past month more than fifty have died in my neighbourhood. Hale men and women, every one of them. Rich ghee-fed Marwari Jains like myself, not pathetic starvelings of the bazaar. Then, there are rumours.”
‘“Rumours?”
‘“From the docks. The godowns are full of dead rats.”’
The outbreak of plague in Bombay in 1896 throws up a complex narrative of class, caste, community, tradition, ignorance and prejudice. The steps that the British government took to control the epidemic such as forcible examination, isolation and quarantine, caused intense anger among the citizens, many of whom fled to their villages to get away as much from the cure as the disease. This is not the place to enter into that labyrinth of cause and effect. What concerns us here is that Shivaji Park owes its birth, at least partly if not wholly, to the plague epidemic of 1896-97.
The problem created by the plague was not only socially complex, but medically too. There was a great resistance within the medical fraternity to accepting the new idea that bacilli were the cause of the disease. In every culture anywhere in...
