A PANDEMIC BUILT BOMBAY

The Story of the first Pandemic Bombay saw, this was more than a century ago. This sat in my draft for almost 2 years now.

Bombay’s story is at least 450 years old discounting its pre-colonial existence. This one here is a mere hundred-odd years old.

It all started with a riot. A series of riots, actually.

The year was 1893

Unsure of how to handle such chaos and still recovering from the mutiny that almost cost them the colony about four decades earlier, the British government came up with a haphazard solution — they banned all public gatherings of more than 20 natives.

With one exemption.

A limited headcount would make it easier to put down violence should any erupt in a gathering. Keeping in mind the natives’ sentiments, religious events were exempt. Understandable given the whole 1857 thing was triggered by a violation of religious sentiments.

Only one problem.

The exemption benefitted only one community as it was the only one with such a gathering mandated by religion — Muslims.

They could gather in any number every Friday for that special prayer. Hindus and others had no such mandate in their religions.
Of course, this didn’t go down well with Hindu nationalists, some even militant. More than oppression, they read the ruling as Muslim appeasement.

Unacceptable.

Spearheading this sentiment was the celebrated leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak. But he knew better than to fight.

Instead of taking this head-on, Tilak elected to go the diplomatic way. Rather than protesting the “appeasement,” he decided to make use of the exemption instead. For that, he needed grounds, a religious festival that could make Hindus eligible for such exemptions.

And the answer was Ganesh Chaturthi.

The event was no novelty to the Hindus, especially those of Bombay, as it had been celebrated routinely during the Peshwa rule. But it was never a public shindig before.

Tilak decided to change that.

The idea worked and Sarvajanik Ganesh Chaturthis quickly emerged as an idiom of Hindu nationalism and became a Bombay mainstay. This was nothing short of a minor victory against the colonial injustice.

All seemed to be going great.

And then it struck.
But before we get to what struck Bombay in 1896, let’s rewind three years, to the beginning of our story.

Just as the city rioted and Bombay decayed, a middle-aged Jewish-Russian man came to work in the city.

This was no ordinary visitor.

The highlight of the period was the fifth cholera pandemic that had gripped the world since 1881 and killed over a quarter million in Europe alone.

The Jew in question was a bacteriologist with the Pasteur Institute in Paris (had started off as a librarian).
Only months before his Bombay trip, the man had developed something the world needed desperately at the time — a vaccine against cholera.

So invested was he in his research that he became his own lab rat and administered the first dose to himself. Risky stunt.
Although the test proved successful, luckily for him, it was far from enough. A sample size of one was not big enough to convince the movers and shakers of the vertical.

And vaccines were largely uncharted territory so not many came forward to volunteer.
He needed a place where the pandemic was already killing thousands every day — India. The place had it all in abundance — population, hopelessness, and resources.

And just like that, our man was in Calcutta, the epicenter of the killer outbreak.
The cholera vaccine was administered to hundreds of volunteers and it passed all parameters with a great deal of success. Within three years, the man administered hundreds of thousands of doses in the slums of Calcutta and singlehandedly helped kill the pandemic.

But India couldn’t celebrate, for just as cholera ended something else struck. Something far lethal, and with no cure.

The curse had once wiped off over half of Europe and inaugurated the Renaissance.

Patients usually died within 2 days of infection!

Having already terrorised the world since the Romans, the scourge was now back, this time in one of the most deprived corners of the world.

Taking roots in Bombay, the epidemic reached as far as Pune in no time. Things were quickly getting out of hand.
Something had to be done, and very quickly. People were dying like flies. So the government haphazardly put together a Special Plague Committee to monitor the situation and figure out a solution. In charge, they placed a civil servant named Walter Charles Rand.

Now Rand had a rather difficult brief. Given its population and squalor, Bombay wasn’t an easy place to manage, much less in the middle of a killer outbreak.

Among the first few things Rand did upon assuming office was summon the cholera hero.
Rand wanted him to develop a vaccine for the plague just as he had for cholera and promised him all the resources he needed. But this was just the first in a series of initiatives, not all being as prudent as this one.

Strict lockdowns were imposed.
The cap of 20 became practically 0. Homes were hose-sprayed with lime water and badly ransacked in the process, even looted at times.

Every Hindu home has a prayer nook, a shrine for routine religious chores. All desecrated and vandalized.

Every death had to be reported and the home of the deceased was marked with a ring. Most homes had over half a dozen such rings on their walls. Besides painting a gloomy picture, this also led to the ostracisation of such families within their own communities.

Anyone sickly was herded into camps for forced quarantines. The process caused many families to break apart.

To add to it, there were indiscriminate mass cremations, often without rituals, in order to prevent the corpses from turning into plague bombs.

In short, Rand pulled all stops in plugging the plague.

Causing irreversible resentment among the natives, especially those still stung by past episodes of tyranny. By early 1897, the pandemic had entered Pune and started overwhelming its hospitals.

Now Pune was a sensitive place; as one of the hubs of high-octane saffron nationalism, it mounted a far stronger resistance than Bombay. Rand’s attitude became a symbol of British injustice and far too many people now wanted him dead, but more on that later.

Meanwhile, our vaccine man had now moved to Bombay and set up a small laboratory in Parel. With the administration’s help, of course. Here, he worked tirelessly with bacteria cultures and three assistants for over three months trying to pull off a miracle.

And the miracle happened.

Using the same approach that worked with cholera, he added plague bacteria extracted from rats to an organic mix of meat broth and coconut oil and allowed them to multiply. About two weeks later, he’d end up with a good enough culture.

Once a decent enough bacterial count was achieved, he used heat to weaken or kill them. The theory was that these weakened or dead bacteria, once inside a human, would trigger the latter’s immune system to tailor antibodies for that specific bacterium.

But the theory had to be tested, a risky but necessary step.

Once the concoction of weakened or “attenuated” plague bacteria was ready, tests began to be planned. Of course, it couldn’t be on humans right off the bat. Too dangerous and too unethical.
The first trial was conducted on rabbits in December 1896.

All rabbits survived.

Now the Jew needed humans. As he did with cholera, he volunteered to become his own guinea pig. On January 10, 1897, he administered to himself the world’s first bubonic plague shot.

To ensure the proof of concept was definitive, he did something significantly dangerous. Injected himself with more than thrice the dose he’d deemed safe for trials at large.

Fortunately, all it gave him was a severe fever.

And immunity to the dreaded Black Death.

Finally, wider human trials could be opened. Had to be opened. The biggest bottleneck at this stage was finding volunteers as test subjects. But this was not Europe. This was a place known for overpopulation. Also, Providence intervened.

A call from a jail in Byculla.
Toward the end of January 1897, a fresh outbreak was reported at the Byculla House of Corrections. Hundreds of inmates were lodged there and bubonic plague in such living conditions meant certain death.

The Jew saw the opportunity and volunteered to help.
And with zero resistance, the inmates volunteered to cooperate. They knew these shots were their only security, however uncharted.

A total of 147 were inoculated, of which only two caught the plague eventually. And both survived.

The vaccine worked!

This was a turning point for obvious reasons. The vaccine was now finally ready for rollout. Which meant, production had to be ramped up. A one-room lab in Parel was not nearly good enough for such volumes. So a bigger facility was planned.
Grant Medical College was the only facility big enough to handle such a workload. Founded by Governor Sir Robert Grant (after whom is named Grant Road) and funded handsomely by the Parsi philanthropist Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy, it’s among the oldest in India.

Here, the Jew had a team of experts to work with, two of them being professors of medicine at the college itself. A well-appointed room was given to him and his team to work in.

Strictly off-limits to anyone not on the team.

Unassumingly named, Room 000.
And now came the biggest hurdle.

Public mistrust.

Indians saw everything British with an unhealthy amount of suspicion and Rand’s ways didn’t help matters much either. Few came forward to get inoculated even with prospects of certain death staring at them.

Thousands upon thousands of doses were concocted but there were no takers. The Jew had hoped that his being the first volunteer would help instill trust, but it didn’t.

Nationalism over science.

All while the plague continued to kill everyone it touched.
Room 000 soon proved too small for mass production and the team had to look for an alternative address. Help came from the wildly influential leader, the Aga Khan III who offered his bungalow for the job. This was a giant leap from the modest one-room setup before.

Something had to be done about public trust though. Rand being Rand, saw answer in brute force. He even considered forced inoculation. Of course, it backfired.

Once the plague — and along with it, Rand’s measures — reached Pune, things quickly went out of hand.

On June 22, 1897, Damodar Chapekar assassinated Rand. This was bad as it had repercussions. A crackdown that followed, saw many of Chapekar’s associates including his own siblings, apprehended and sentenced to death. It was expected.
Chapekar and his brothers were executed in April 1898.

Among the ones apprehended was also Tilak.

Now Tilak’s arrest was special, not only because he was so big, but also because the charges pressed against him were under a section never invoked before.
IPC Section 124(A), defines sedition as any act that excites contempt or “disaffection” toward the government. Encoded in 1870 as a counter to Islamic extremism, the section had only been invoked once before Tilak.

Hear this more often now a days? Anyways lets get moving.

In Calcutta.

Against a Jogendra Chunder Bose, in 1891.
But Bose was never convicted.

Six years down the line now, Tilak stood trial on charges under the same law. He was charged with sedition. For publishing calls for violence in his Marathi daily Kesari, leading to Rand’s assassination.

The case ended in conviction.

Tilak was sentenced to a year and a half in prison. This was India’s first conviction for sedition. The controversial law continues to land men and women in prison on flimsy grounds to this day.

This conviction made Tilak an overnight sensation and Bombay erupted.

People started seeing vaccines as an imperial conspiracy to wipe off Indians. Rumors started doing the rounds, especially after knowledge became public of how the bacteria cultures were grown on meat broth.

This was dangerously similar to the cartridge situation of 1857.

The British certainly did not want a redux of 1857, so it was decided to go easy on the lockdowns and inoculations for the time being.

Meanwhile, wiser Indians lamented this dangerous mass rejection of science in the name of nationalism.
One such Indian was none other than the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad. He invited the vaccine maker to his state to inoculate his subjects. Outside of British jurisdiction, people were more open to the initiative in Baroda and mass inoculation went smooth.

The Aga Khan III also stepped in and had his entire family inoculated. This one gesture helped win over the Khoja community right away.

Meanwhile, some colonial officers still insisted on Rand’s heavy handed ways, either by the inertia of habit or out of contempt.

As inoculation rates improved, homes still continued to be hosed with disinfectants, people still continued to be quarantined, and the sick still continued to be treated as untouchables.

The good news, however, was that the number of sick had begun falling rapidly.

Within months, hundreds of thousands of doses had been administered throughout the country. The mortality rate was now down by over 97%. Almost everybody that mattered, stood impressed. Even Tilak turned vaccine evangelist when out of jail.

Life began to return to normal and by the turn of the century, the epidemic was officially declared over.

But it could return any moment. Something had to change fundamentally if Bombay was to breathe easy. For starters, it had to breathe. Right now it couldn’t.

The plague had changed Bombay in more ways than one. Sure it killed many, but it also made many more leave. The population boom brought by cotton was almost killed by the plague.

The trains ran packed like proverbial sardines every day throughout the pandemic.
Many emigrated to nearby Baroda; many others, to Bengal and other presidencies. This trend had to be reversed once the pandemic was over for Bombay to become alive again.

This is when enterprising social thinkers like Jamsetjee Tata stepped in.

The Tata patriarch, for instance, began with exploring the wilderness up north. Bombay those days was just the southern cone and most of the upscale coastal neighborhoods were off-limits to non-Europeans. The only parts natives could inhabit was the shanty inner city.

And the inner city was unliveable. Overcrowded slums, bad streets, poor lighting, and few civic amenities made the district a sitting duck for ambitious bacteria.

Jamsetjee saw opportunity in gentrifying the north — the Salsette Island. Ambitious project.

Tata started with Madh, Juhu, and Bandra. He purchased vast parcels on the cheap and began developing them rapidly as settlements for the natives looking to escape the suffocating environs of Bombay’s slums. All this despite heavy levies by the colonial administration.

He had also drawn plans for thousands of acres in Santa Cruz and Mahim but died before they could take off.

Meanwhile, the British government had its own plans for the notorious “inner city” of Bombay. They were determined to make it less disease-prone.

By the end of 1898, they had already set up the Bombay City Improvement Trust to oversee these initiatives. All vacant plots in the city were handed over to this body for further development.

The brief was to make the city more breathable and improve sanitation.

One of the first things the CIT constructed was an east-west conduit named Princess Street right through the otherwise airtight slumland. The express purpose of this street, besides improved transportation, was to channel fresh sea breeze through the grimy neighbourhood.

Many other streets were also constructed later with the same objective in mind, the famous Muhammad Ali Road being one. Many slums were also redeveloped into slightly upgraded tenement systems called “chawls.”

Bombay was beginning to breathe once again.

While Tata opened up suburbs like Juhu and Bandra, the CIT opened up Matunga, Wadala, Sion, and Dadar. All with one objective — to ease up Bombay.

In 1907, the government even tried to develop Trombay, but gave up as nobody seemed interested. Only to revisit it in 1913.

By the end of 1910, the city was already looking remarkably like it does today. Chawls were now a metropolitan mainstay. The city was starting to attract immigrants once again and within just a few quick years, it exploded both in population as well as area.

Oh and that Jew? They knighted him in recognition of his efforts. The Parel facility he mass-produced his vaccines in, still stands. Fittingly named in the honor of its most notable occupant.

The Haffkine Institute. Remember the name ? Am sure you heard while the city was once again ravaged after more than a century. The only institue allowed to produce Covaxin apart from Bhart Biotech and that’s what took me on this crazy ride of finding the story of Mr.Haffkine.

Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine never married and spent his later years alone as an orthodox Jewish evangelist in Lausanne, Switzerland. When died at the age of 70 in 1930, Lord Lister called him the “savior of mankind.”

Had the plague not struck Bombay and had a Ukrainian victim of antisemitic pogrom not taken up medicine, it’s hard to imagine what the city would have looked like today or if it would even be the economic powerhouse we know it as.

Sources:

Room 000 by Kalpish Ratna