A walk to show how plague reshaped the city

MUMBAI: It was a time when a sneeze drew stares and prompted people to move away from you. It was 1896. Nearly 2,000 people were dying every week from the highly

MUMBAI: It was a time when a sneeze drew stares and prompted people to move away from you. It was 1896. Nearly 2,000 people were dying every week from the highly contagious bubonic plague, which had surfaced in the city the year before.

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In the slums where the working classes that manned the mills, docks and other industries were packed together in tiny rooms, the Black Death spread swiftly and silently.

Outside, a city had begun to change in ways that are still visible nearly 120 years later. You can track the changes yourself, on a Plague Walk being organised by art organisation Art X and travel company Beyond Bombay this weekend.The BIT chawls? They’re a result of the plague. So is the Haffkine Institute, and the development of the suburbs.

Horrified by the spread of the plague — outbreaks of which would continue for another 18 years — the British government set up the Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) to decongest the city and plan hygienic living spaces for the working classes. This initiative expanded the city’s limits with BIT chawls in Dadar and Sion.

“In Bandra’s churches, nuns and priests treated the ailing. It was one of the few times the Mount Mary church suspended mass, for fear that the disease would spread if a large group came together in one enclosed space,” says Shriti Tyagi, founder of Beyond Bombay.

Bandra’s Ranwar Village was an isolation zone, where the diseased were housed in a kind of loose quarantine. Some of the 160 crosses now found here were constructed to ward off plague.

“The plague made a generation accept modern medicine. A population that considered hospitals places for the dead and were reluctant to be admitted, began to trust the system.”

(To sign up for the walks on Saturday and Sunday, call 9833675287)