by Xinhua writer Sudeshna Sarkar
BEIJING, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- Amid the flurry of changes anticipated in 2018 in the wake of the momentous National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) this month, Mrigendranath Gantait, a doctor in India, is hoping that the Chinese authorities will not forget a historical collaboration between China and India that will mark its 80th anniversary next year.
It's an old and cherished link that goes back to September 1938 when the CPC was leading the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. The party asked the neighboring countries for medical assistance to treat the war-wounded and in response, a team of five volunteering Indian doctors arrived in central China.
From there they were taken to Yan'an, the city in northwestern 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 Indian doctors treated victims of the war till 1943, when all but one of them returned to India.
The one who did not come back was Dr. Dwarkanath Kotnis, who had joined the Eighth Route Army under the CPC, treating the wounded at battlefronts. 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 memory lives on. The Martyrs' Memorial Park in Shijiazhuang City in northern Hebei Province has a statue of him and other Kotnis memorabilia.
The CPC leadership continued to respect the tie. During their official trips to India, many Chinese dignitaries met the surviving members of the Kotnis family.
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 tie of friendship forged by the Indian medical mission has continued in different forms. Mrigendranath Gantait is one of them.
"One of the members of the Indian medical mission was Dr. Bejoy Kumar Basu," Gantait told Xinhua from his residence in Kolkata, India. "During the war, Dr. 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, Dr. Basu returned to China to learn the system, and going back to India, he began introducing it to his students at the medical college where he worked.
"I was one of those students," Gantait said.
He remembered how acupuncture became a new system in India, and at that time, there were no textbooks thereon. So they used the handwritten notes made by Dr. Basu when he was in China, containing many Chinese terms. In 1978, to enable his students to have higher training in the Chinese healing science, Dr. Basu took four of them to China. Again, Gantait was one of the quartet.
"In China, I learned the basics of the TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) at Nanjing University (in east China's Jiangsu Province)," he said, describing the stint. "Traveling in 14 provinces, I was deeply impressed to see a society with a social system different from India's. The sincerity and hospitality of the Chinese was amazing."
The visits they made to different provincial hospitals illustrated to the visitors how the health system of a socialist society worked. "Particularly in rural areas, the system of running medical services in the morning and afternoon to suit the working peasants' (free time) was new to us," he said. "It made me wonder why we could not have such a system in India."
Gantait said he was also influenced by the "humanist, internationalist and anti-imperialist" work of Dr. Basu and Dr. 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 dreamt of becoming a humanist doctor."
Recognizing the potential of acupuncture to help patients in a developing economy like India by providing low-cost yet effective cure, especially for chronic diseases, Gantait has made acupuncture therapy, research and training his main professional activities for the last four decades.
His campaigns resulted in the local government of India's West Bengal State legally recognizing acupuncture in 1996.
"It was the first Indian state to recognize acupuncture," he said.
Subsequently, Gantait helped set up the first local government acupuncture clinic in Kolkata City, where he served as the founder director from 1996 to 2010. At that time, he also established acupuncture clinics in all 18 district hospitals and 10 lower-level hospitals in the state.
While he has now retired from government service, Gantait still remains an acupuncture activist. As the president of Dr. Kotnis Memorial Committee, a non-profit organization founded in 1973 for philanthropy, he oversees free medical services, mostly acupuncture, for the needy in villages and suburbs. The committee is also campaigning to have the central government of India recognize acupuncture.
Last year, following in the footsteps of his mentor, Dr. Basu, Gantait led a team of Indian acupuncturists to China to update their skills and renew contact between practitioners of the same healing system on both sides of the Himalayas.
"I was amazed to see the tremendous material development of China," he said. "I saw a new China from that in 1978 and 1988, as if a great giant has waken up from sleep."
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."
