The story of Upendranath Brahmachari is the story of a forgotten man, remembered only when a street in Kolkata that bears his name shows up on Google Maps. Even here, Brahmachari was handed down a recognition that for more than a century belonged to John Claudius Loudon, the Scottish botanist. A nation that knows not how to honour its living, knows not how to honour its dead.

“Brahmachari was a genius but a maverick; a rebel,” remarked once the late Asima Chatterjee, an alumni, like Brahmachari, of Calcutta University, and a genius in her own right, having made pioneering contributions to Alkaloid and Natural Products research. “This was the thirties we are talking about. The nation was in the grip of Nehru and Jinnah and Patel and Mahatma Gandhi. But for me, there was one other Mahatma, who no one really knew, leave alone worship. No one except us, the students of Calcutta University. Thakurda we called him. He was a legend, someone who had beaten Ronald Ross, no less. But an eccentric legend. His quirkiness was the stuff of folklore. One day something snapped in him. He protested against, of all things, the hand-drawn rickshaw. “We want independence but are fine with a man pulling another man?” he cried. The very next day we saw him come in a rickshaw. Except that it was empty of passengers and he was pulling it. Imagine. There ensued mayhem. The English professors were aghast. Unconcerned, Thakurda, as always in his pristine kurta and dhoti, brought the rickshaw to a halt, dropped the handlebar coop and hopped out of it, then strolled calmly into his lab. I can’t forget the scandal it caused. Yes, he was the Mahatma India forgot.”

Mahatma or not, Brahmachari was nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize. Like Gandhi, he never got it. But unlike Gandhi, he didn’t make it to our currency notes. There is no holiday or a dry day to celebrate his birth or death anniversary. There is no stamp minted in his name. There are no political parties that sing his paeans, no government schemes that are burdened with his legacy. He exists only in sunset memories of the few who knew him, and of the even fewer who come across his name accidentally while consulting Google Maps on their smartphones or spending lazy afternoons on the internet. His story is, in a strange, sad way, the story of our nation. It is the story of tea, triumph and tragedy. And because every great story has a prologue, written for it by fate, one that tethers its soul to history, this one is no exception.

The year is 1815. Great Britain has emerged victorious in the Napoleonic wars, and with the simultaneous crumbling of the Spanish empire, the excitement of the cash-strapped Britons, eager to hunt for opportunities to invest in the new world, has reached fever pitch. The new world is Latin America, with its freshly minted independent countries, all erstwhile colonies of Spain. Flourishing on conceit, arrogance and an active debt-bond market, London has become the financial hub of Europe, delirious with untold riches and wholly unaware of meeting its own Waterloo just 10 years hence.

The year is now 1825. Many of the new-world enterprises and governments have defaulted on their borrowings. Panic has taken hold in both the new and old worlds, heralding the first emerging markets’ financial crisis. The Bank of England has jumped in to bail out banks and independent investors, but the damage is beyond repair. The stock market has crashed, with catastrophic implications for the blue-chip stock – that of the East India Company. The company has come under the scanner for its monopoly over the tea trade, which has cost the rich people of Great Britain in excess of two million pounds sterling. The horror and hurt to the pride of this tea-loving nation is further compounded by the fact that they are left behind by the poor people of Australia, who are procuring tea directly from China. To rub salt into the wounds, the Aussies are savouring tea at much lower prices. Just not cricket.

Meanwhile, the eastern-most part of the British Empire is at war. Her subjects, the Indians, are fighting simultaneously on two fronts: against deadly diseases, and, for the British army, to annex the principalities of Assam and Manipur from Burma. Bengal has turned into the delta of death – 150,000 men of the Bengal regiment engaged in the first Anglo-Burmese war, fighting incessant rain and dangerous terrain, are dead. The port city of Jessore (now in present-day Bangladesh), the jewel in the crown of Pratapaditya, the king who fought against the Mughals the famed tactical battle of Salka, has come under the dark throes of an incurable epidemic called “kala-azar” or black fever. It has claimed no less than 75,000 lives. Jessore has turned into a graveyard once more.

Meanwhile, the British Indian army has tasted victory in the Anglo-Burmese war, a taste soured by a whopping war bill of thirteen million pounds sterling, worsening further the economic crisis plaguing the Old Blighty. It doesn’t take long for this crisis to engulf India in its snarl. The chattering English classes have begun to chatter. Eyebrows are raised over the special privileges granted to the East India Company. Why should British military and naval services continue to protect a trading company? How could these tea dealers act as sovereigns? Who is paying for all this?

The lords convene, acting on behalf of the crown. With the idea to grant itself time and focus to keep India on the leash, the British Parliament dismisses the Company’s monopolistic tea trading rights with China. The Company is devastated. No one likes a blow to their ledger, not in the least the lordly grocers of Leadenhall Street. Thus begins the quest to discover a new diamond, a quest that would alter the world forever.

To fill up its depleted coffers, the Company decides to turn the newly annexed region of Assam into a vast tea estate. The chaas-drinking natives would have to be proselytised into chai-drinking ones, and at the click of one’s fingers, as though by magic, would materialise a giant captive market.

Charles Alexander Bruce, the man who led bravely in the Anglo-Burmese war, is charged with altering the topography, demography and drinking habits of Assam. His sole mission is to ensure that the Company’s accounts rise and shine once again. This marks for India the beginning of a new era – that of a plantation economy. The Company’s search for a new diamond has ended. It is tea.

Bruce gets to work. As an essential trade requirement, access to the region is opened. Connections via road and steamer services to Bengal enable rapid movement of people and supplies. The gates to El Dorado have been unlocked. In consort, and unknown, quietly slithers in an unwanted devil, kala-azar.

In quick time, the wild wastelands of Assam are transformed into sprawling estates of manicured greens. Matching this progress, proceeding from village to village, from Jessore via Nadia through Hooghly, kala-azar casts its deathly shadow over Bengal, garbed as Old Burdwan fever. Next, and it was only a matter of time, it hurls into the Brahmaputra valley to reach up to the Garo Hills. The year is 1870.

District after district in the Brahmaputra valley is decimated by this unexplained fever, a “fever of malarial poisoning that darkens the skin in its chronic form”, as explained in his Sanitary Reports on Assam by Captain Clarke McNaught, Civil Surgeon of Tura, the district HQ of Garo Hills. Kala-azar has dug its fangs in the local population, lacerated already by the socio-cultural, political and economic chaos brought about by the repeated Burmese incursions by the British. They hold them responsible for its emergence and spread, calling it the sarkari bimari. It doesn’t take long for the Garos to figure out that the only way to escape the scourge is to leave the infected and diseased villages and be on the move constantly. As a result, vast swathes of inhabited lands have become severely depopulated. The few who are fortunate enough to survive the black fever onslaught have turned bitterly recalcitrant towards the British, refusing to serve in the tea estates. Mutiny beckons. The much-vaunted plantation economy is about to collapse.

Hit by an acute shortage of plantation workers, the British induct “Arkutti agents” or “coolie catchers” to source cheap labour from areas such as the Chhota Nagpur. Brought over false promises, paid too little, fed too less and thronging in unhygienic conditions, large numbers of hired coolies fall victim to disease and death. The medico-social problem of kala-azar, a creation of the plantation economy itself, is now threatening to engulf all who dare to come in its way. No one, from agents to migrant labour to locals to even the masters, no one is spared.

The sarkari bimari, of no importance or worry to the Sarkar until now, has become a matter of grave concern, enough for the British to call for urgent measures to tackle it. The mutiny must be quelled, the revenue registers must be kept ringing, the tea business must be salvaged. The black diamond cannot be allowed to turn into Black Death, or the many names it has come to be known by: sarkari bimari (Garos), kala-dukh (Purnea), kala-jwar (Darjeeling), pushkara (Jalpaiguri), dum dum fever (Calcutta), sahib’s disease (Assam). The mortality rate is an incredible 90 per cent. It appears that nothing can save the east from being ravaged by this curse.

But the luck turns. And so does tense.

1873. Those were troubled times, days of devastation for Assam and Bengal, when Upendranath was born. Villages resounded with wails and lamentations of those whose spirits had been broken, and fields were strewn with skulls and bones of those whose spirits had escaped.

Born in Jamalpore, in the Monghyr district of Bihar, Upendra’s father, Dr Nilmony Brahmachari, was a highly respected medical practitioner, and a household name in both European and Indian communities. Upendra loved mathematics from childhood. With an illustrious academic record at school, decorated with double Honours at graduate level in Mathematics and Chemistry from the Presidency College, one would have thought he would continue in the field. But how could an educated, conscientious man stay unaffected by the misery all around him?

Upendra set out to be a polymath. He chose to learn medicine and surgery next, following in his father’s footsteps. Once again, he stood first in the course, joining the Provincial Medical Service in 1899. By 1902, he had earned his MD from Calcutta University, alongside a PhD in physiology – a rare distinction. That he was to achieve something even more remarkable in the coming years had not yet dawned on him.

His diligence in research and teaching, and dutiful commitment to medicine earned him appointments at the medical schools in Dacca and Calcutta. His fame was beginning to spread. Soon, he was appointed as Additional Physician at the Calcutta Medical College – one of only two Indian doctors outside of the Indian Medical Service (IMS) cadre to have ever been inducted. All positions at medical schools were, until then, exclusively held by doctors of European origin, selected and trained in England to serve in the IMS.

Meanwhile, another polymath and a man of medicine, Major Ronald Ross, an officer with the IMS in the Madras presidency, had successfully uncovered the culprit behind a seemingly insurmountable health challenge: Malaria. A spectacular discovery, that of the malarial parasite and its life cycle, earned him the 1902 Nobel Prize in Medicine. In keeping with the prevailing view that kala-azar could be a form of cachexic malaria, and disregarding Sir Ronald's unwillingness to extend his stay in India, the panic-ridden British government appointed him in charge of the newly instated Kala-azar Commission. His posting orders for Darjeeling followed. Reluctant to accept the assignment, he remarked: “Columbus having sighted America was ordered off to discover the North Pole.” Unsurprisingly, his disinterest in the appointment, coupled with his longing for horrible weather and baked beans, meant he couldn't make the scientific breakthrough the crown had hoped for, except that his eye for detail and meticulous record-keeping resulted in capturing patient case histories from the districts of Nowgong and Naxalbari, which had witnessed a third of their population wiped out because of kala-azar.