Indian doctor hopes to have acupuncture link

Indian advocate inspired by role of compatriot as wartime volunteer

Amid the flurry of changes anticipated in 2018 in the wake of this week's 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, a doctor in India is hoping that a decades-old collaboration between the countries will not be forgotten.

The link goes back to September 1938, when the CPC was leading the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45).

The Party asked neighboring countries for medical assistance to treat the wounded and in response, a team of five volunteer doctors from India arrived in central China.

From there they were taken to Yan'an, the city in northwest China's Shaanxi province, where the Chinese Red Army's historic military retreat, the Long March, ended in 1935 and the CPC strengthened its revolutionary base. The doctors treated victims of the war until 1943, when all but one of them returned to India.

The volunteer who stayed was Doctor Dwarkanath Kotnis, who had joined the Eighth Route Army under the CPC, treating the wounded on the battlefront. Kotnis married a Chinese nurse, Guo Qinglan, and the couple called their son Yinhua, an amalgamation of India (Yin) and China (Hua).

Kotnis died in China in 1942 at the age of 32 but his legacy lives on, with a statue in The Martyrs' Memorial Park in Shijiazhuang City in north China's Hebei province.

The CPC leadership continued to respect the tie. During their official trips to India, many Chinese dignitaries met the surviving members of the doctor's family.

Friendship award
In 2014, when President Xi Jinping visited India, he conferred a friendship award to the medical mission members. Kotnis' 93-year-old wheelchair-bound sister, Manorama, came from Mumbai to New Delhi to accept the tribute on her brother's behalf.

The friendship forged by the Indian medical mission has continued in different forms. Doctor Mrigendranath Gantait is one of them.

"One of the members of the Indian medical mission was Doctor Bejoy Kumar Basu," Gantait said from his residence in Kolkata, India.

"During the war, Basu saw Chinese doctors practicing acupuncture and was struck by the efficacy of the traditional Chinese medicine as well as how relatively easy and inexpensive it was to provide acupuncture treatment." So in 1958, Basu returned to China to learn the system before returning to India to introduce it to his students at the medical college where he worked.

"I was one of those students," Gantait said, who traveled to China 20 years later to learn TCM.

Gantait said he was influenced by the "humanist, internationalist and anti-imperialist" work of Basu and Kotnis and became associated with the "India-China friendship movement".

"It changed my mindset," he said. "Instead of becoming a doctor to earn money, I dreamed of becoming a humanist doctor."

Now retired from government service, Gantait still remains an acupuncture activist. As the president of the Doctor Kotnis Memorial Committee, a nonprofit organization founded in 1973, he oversees free medical services, mostly acupuncture, for the needy in villages and suburbs.

Last year, following in the footsteps of his mentor, Gantait led a team of Indian acupuncturists to China to update their skills and renew contact between practitioners.

He wishes the two neighbors would continue to collaborate on something as universally beneficial as acupuncture.

"Acupuncture therapy has become interwoven with my life," he said. "It's not just a therapy but a friendship bridge between the peoples of India and China."