Dr. Kotnis - a rare Indian revered in China!

The Qingming festival, also called Ching ming festival, or the Tomb Sweeping day, is a 2500 year old annual tradition that the Chinese people follow, in the first week of April each year, commemorating their ancestors, by visiting their tombs, cleaning them, praying and providing ritual offerings like flowers and food.

Every year, on this festive day, the tombs of two foreigners are decked up with flowers and heart-felt prayers offered to them. One is a Canadian named Dr. Norman Bethune. The other is an Indian named Dr. D. S. Kotnis. Therein lies a tale.

In 1938, Japan invaded China in what is today referred to as the 2nd Sino-Japanese war.

It was the time when there was a great deal of mutual sympathy between India and China. The Chinese Commander-in-chief, General Zhu De requested Jawaharlal Nehru to send some physicians to China to assist the war time efforts. At that time, the president of the Indian National Congress was Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. He immediately mobilized a sum of INR 22000 for a team of 5 volunteer doctors and an ambulance. One of these 5 volunteers was a young, idealistic Maharashtrian from Sholapur, recently graduated, by the name of Dwarakanath Shantaram Kotnis.

The four others were - Dr. Cholkar from Nagpur, Dr. Atal from Allahabad and Dr. Basu and Dr. Mukherjee from Calcutta. Together, these five doctors were called the Indian Medical Mission Team, and in September 1938, they left by ship for the Chinese port of - hold your breath - Wuhan. All of them returned safely, except Dr. Kotnis.

They were warmly welcomed by Mao Zedong, Zhu De and other top leaders of the Communist Party, as they were the first medical team to come to China from another Asian country.

The 28 year old idealistic doctor stayed in China for 5 years, working in hospitals, on the war front, in mobile clinics, most of the time with acute shortage of medicines, nurses and support staff, working 72-hour sessions at a stretch, treating more than 800 wounded people and collapsed to death in 1942, of an epilepsy seizure.

In 1939, while he was the Director of the Dr. Bethune International Peace Hospital, named after the famous Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune, he met a Chinese nurse, Guo Qinglan, and fell in love with her. They subsequently married and had a child. They named him Yinhua – meaning India (Yin) and China (Hua). Yinhua was a months-old baby when Dr. Kotnis died.

I think it is safe to say that no other Indian is respected and revered more in China than Dr. Kotnis. Mao Zedong mourned his death by observing that:

"The army has lost a helping hand, the nation has lost a friend. Let us always bear in mind his internationalist spirit."

Madame Sun Yat-sen, another prominent leader of that time, said:

"His memory belongs not only to your people and ours, but to the noble roll-call of fighters for the freedom and progress of all mankind. The future will honor him even more than the present, because it was for the future that he struggled."

Dr. Kotnis has been memorialised at the Martyr’s Memorial Park in Shijiazhuang City (Hebei). A large statue of the doctor was erected in 1982 and each year in April on Qingming festival, locals lay flowers at the statue as a sign of remembrance and gratitude.

On 1st January, 2012, a memorial was built in Sholapur, his hometown, and was inaugurated by then Union Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, in the presence of Maharashtra's Chief Minister Prithviraj Chauhan.

Both the Indian and Chinese governments commemorated him with postal stamps.

Whenever Chinese officials visit India, they meet Dr. Kotnis' family. Here is a nice little picture saying volumes.

And of course, V Shantaram's movie Dr Kotnis ki amar kahani immortalized him through Bollywood.

These are really terrible times. I just do not trust China any more. Its foreign policy, economic policy, military policy, scientific policy and just about any damn policy is colonialististic. And India is not its friend. I just donot trust China at all.