Carrack and caravel, galleon and grab, Indiaman, clipper, steamship and schooner.
For five centuries ships have been auguries of uncertain life and sure death, their arrivals and departures a chronicle of plagues in the islands we now call Mumbai.
Sailors and passengers, cargo and crew, were captives in a complex milieu that fostered these plagues. They were in thrall to the ship, and the ship moved in thrall to the elements.
Plagues come about when we disturb the balance of nature. The ocean, the highway of exploration and conveyor-belt for plunder, is the element that controls the land. What were these plagues? Who were the victims, and who the physicians treating them?
Kalpish Ratna explores the city like a palimpsest, revealing the troubled story of medicine and mahamaari in maritime Mumbai.
"We make trifles of terrors, wrote Shakespeare four hundred years ago, 'ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown terror. A few centuries ago, that terror related to the threat of annihilation by diseases, the causes of which were yet unknown and uncertain. And that terror came by sea, on ships!
This book by two distinguished medical doctors Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan is a thoroughly well-researched and well- documented tale of the sea as the highway along which the great and devastating plagues that afflicted mankind travelled across the continents since the Age of Exploration.
Before the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the English and sundry other maritime powers of Europe set out by sea to acquire land and lucre for their respective monarchs, the great pestilences had remained territorial. The ships which conveyed these explorers- turned-conquerors and colonizers of ancient lands and civilizations they eagerly pronounced as Terra Nullius, the easier to stamp the authority of their kings and queens upon, carried in them the vectors of diseases. The hitherto immune populations were quick to fall prey to the diseases of Europe and of the Europeans. In India, for example, syphilis became known as Firangi Reg (the white man's disease).
The civilization of medieval Western Europe, with its overweening accent on science and scientific enquiry, no doubt benefited the colonized, but not before vast amounts of misery had been visited upon them by European freebooters, seekers after spices to doll up their bland cuisine, and purloiners of fortune from the unsuspecting and often welcoming populations.
This narrative reads like a detective novel, and holds the reader in thrall from its beginning in medieval Mumbai to its end in the same city in our century. From Mumbai's Phansi Talao to the Halls of Montezuma it is a thrilling, if morbid tale, revealing the methods of rampaging explorers from Europe who brought with them enlightenment, yes, but also disease and death on a massive scale to the countries they colonized.
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