Dengue, urban life and Rabindranath

Dengue may appear to be a modern urban crisis, but its roots in Bengal stretch back nearly two centuries-touching colonial Kolkata, the childhood of Rabindranath Tagore and, eventually, the chaotic expansion of Dhaka.

We saw in the newspaper that the number of dengue cases in the country had crossed 5,000 at the beginning of the season.

The administrator of the Dhaka City Corporation has fined a large sum of money after entering a famous restaurant in Banani and seeing a breeding ground for Aedes mosquitoes, the carrier of dengue fever.

It goes without saying that the city regulators will conduct a rooftop raid in the coming days. Moreover, mosquito exterminators will descend on the streets, emitting white smoke with fogging machines and making loud noises, reminding us of the history of a fruitless, endless war between mosquitoes and humans.

Dengue fever returns every year during the monsoon season – a little surprised to think that such a terrible outbreak of this very unromantic disease occurs in the most romantic month for poets and writers in the country.

Yes, dengue is a very unromantic disease. At least more so than the mosquito-borne disease called malaria. Although this disease regularly attacks the two Bengali metropolises of Dhaka and Kolkata every year, there is no mention of it anywhere in Bengali literature.

At least we have not come across any writer who has written a story or novel about dengue. Dengue has not been mentioned in any memoir. However, references to plague, tuberculosis, influenza, cholera or malaria can be found in Bengali literature.

Many say that the main reason for this is that initially doctors could not identify dengue as a separate disease. They confused it with influenza and malaria. When they were able to distinguish it, the local name for the disease became breakbone fever.

Dengue is a civic disease. It is associated with the rapid growth of the city with its skyscrapers. Dengue first met Bengalis in a city, almost 200 years ago in 1824, in colonial Kolkata. It used to occur more or less every year. Later, dengue appeared in Kolkata in three epidemics in 1836, 1872 and 1906.

Rabindranath Tagore was 11 years old during the dengue epidemic of 1872. As the number of infected people continued to increase, the elite families of Kolkata began to leave the city in panic.

Among them was the famous Tagore family of Jorasanko. The whole family, including the boy Rabindranath, moved to a garden house on the banks of the Hooghly River in an area called Panihati near Barrackpore, 16 kilometres north of Kolkata.

In his autobiography ‘Jibon Smriti’, Rabindranath wrote: “Once, in Kolkata, due to dengue fever, a small part of our large family took shelter in the garden of Chatubabu in Peneti (Panihati).

I was among them.”
It was Rabindranath’s first escape from Kolkata’s narrow streets. In Jibon Smriti, he recalled how the Ganges, guava groves and open skies awakened in him a deep sense of wonder and made each morning feel like “a new letter with golden borders.”

Every day, the ebb and flow of the Ganges, the movements of the various boats, the shifting of the shadows of the guava trees from west to east, the countless golden floods of the sun setting on the classified darkness of the forest on the edge of the city.

One day, clouds come in from the morning; the trees on the other side are black; a black shadow on the river; the horizon is blurred by the torrent of loud rain, the shoreline on the other side seems to be bid farewell with tears; the river swells and the wet wind wanders as it pleases among the branches on the other side. From the depths of the walls of the barricade, I was reborn in the outside world.

I went to know everything anew, and the veil of triviality of habit was completely removed from the world.”

However, in the rich Bengali literature of the next 150 years, we do not find any mention of this disease. It is as if everyone has conspired together to keep a particular disease hidden.

In Tarashankar Banerjee’s famous novel ‘Arogya Niketan’, about the conflict between the ancient medical system of Bengal and the modern Western medical system, we do not find any mention of diseases ranging from malaria, smallpox, measles, cholera, tuberculosis – but dengue?

If we look at history, we see that dengue fever came to Bengal from faraway Africa by ship. European merchants used to travel all the way around the Uttamsha Peninsula to do business in this country. On the way, they had to stop at various African ports for supplies.

And thus, the Aedes mosquito, which carries the dengue fever germ, reached the subcontinent through the ship’s hull. The arrival of dengue in Dhaka is a very recent event compared to other cities in the subcontinent. One reason for this is that Dhaka experienced rapid urbanisation much later.

Dhaka’s rapid urbanisation began after it became the provincial capital of East Pakistan, followed by a major dengue outbreak in the 1960s known as “Dhaka Fever.”

Unplanned housing expansion in Mirpur and Mohammadpur from the late 1990s contributed to another severe outbreak in 2000, when about 5,500 people were infected and 93 died.

Later, large-scale construction and infrastructure development were followed by two major dengue outbreaks in 2019 and 2023.

No matter how much we want to forget about dengue, this disease, which came to this country through traders and colonial rulers, is not leaving us. Many say that dengue is not actually a disease.