Dwarkanath Kotnis

Dwarkanath Shantaram Kotnis (b. October 10, 1910 in Solapur District, Southern Maharashtra, India – d. December 9, 1942, in China), Chinese name: 柯棣华, Pinyin: Kē Dì Huá, Devanagari द्वारकानाथ शांताराम कोटणीस) was one of five Indian physicians dispatched to China to provide medical assistance during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1938.  Besides being known for his dedication and perseverance, he has also been regarded as an example for Sino-Indian friendship and collaboration.

Along with the Canadian Dr. Norman Bethune, he continues to be revered by the Chinese people. In April 2005 both their graves were covered completely in flowers donated by the Chinese people during the Qingming Festival, a day used by the Chinese to commemorate their ancestors.

Origins
Dwarkanath Kotnis was born to a lower middle class family in Solapur, Maharashtra, he had two brothers and five sisters. He studied medicine at the G.S. Medical College of the University of Mumbai.

Indian medical mission
In 1937, after the Japanese invasion of China, the communist General Zhu De requested Jawaharlal Nehru to send Indian physicians to China. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, the President of the Indian National Congress, made arrangements to send a team of volunteer doctors and an ambulance by collecting a fund of Rs 22,000 on the All-Indian China Day and China Fund days on July 7-9. He had made an appeal to the people through a press statement on June 30, 1938. In Modern Review S.C.Bose wrote an article on Japan's role in the Far East and denounced the assault on China. The key element of this mission was it was from a nation itself struggling for freedom, to another nation also struggling for its freedom. The mission was reinforced with Nehru's visit to China in 1939.

A medical team of five doctors (Drs. M. Atal, M. Cholkar, D. Kotnis, B.K. Basu and D. Mukerji) was dispatched as the Indian Medical Mission Team in September 1938. All, except Dr. Kotnis, returned to India safely.

Dr. Kotnis, who was 28 at arrival, stayed in China for almost 5 years working in mobile clinics to treat wounded soldiers. Dr. Kotnis first arrived in China at the port of Hankou, Wuhan. He was sent to Yan'an, and was eventually to be posted as director of the Dr. Bethune International Peace Hospital there.

In 1939, Kotnis finally joined the Eight Route Army (led by Mao Zedong) at the Jin-Cha-Ji border near the Wutai Mountain Area, after his efforts all across the northern China region. The hardships of suppressed military life, stresses that were especially relevant to the front-line doctors who often had to work over 72 hours at a stretch, finally began to tell on him. He died of epilepsy on December 9, 1942 at age 32, and was buried in the Heroes Courtyard, Nanquan Village. It is rumoured that he joined the Communist Party of China just before his death.

During his mission he was also a lecturer at the Dr. Bethune Hygiene School of the Jin-Cha-Ji Military Area, and the first president of the Dr. Bethune International Peace Hospital, Yanan.

Tributes
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.." Madam Sun Yatsen was to say to the Indian nation, concerning his role in the revolution, that "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."

Family
During this time, he married a Chinese woman (Dr. Qinglan Guo-Kotnis) with whom he had a son named Yinhua ("Yin" for India; "Hua" for China). Yinhua died in 1967, while Guo remarried (to a Chinese gentleman) and lives near Dalian, in Northeastern China.

She was an honoured guest at the banquet Dalian Mayor Bo Xilai hosted for then Indian President K.R. Narayanan in June 2000, and during the visit of then Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee to Beijing during June 2003.

Movies on subject
The story of his life was the subject of a Bollywood movie with the title Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani (1946, English : The Immortal Story of Dr. Kotnis, script by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, directed by V. Shantaram, who also played Kotnis) as well as a Chinese movie Kē Dì Huá Dài Fū (1982, Dr. D.S. Kotnis, screenplay by Huang Zongjiang).

Honours


Both China (1982 and 1992) and India (1993) have honored him with stamps.

The Chinese government continues to honour his relatives in India during every high-level official trip. His relatives (primarily sisters) were visited in Mumbai by:


 * the then Premier Zhou En-lai in 1950
 * the then President Jiang Zemin visited India in 1996, he sent flowers to the Kotnis family.
 * the then Premier Li Peng in 2001
 * the then Premier Zhu Rongji in 2002
 * Present President Hu Jintao in 2006, Hu Keeps Tradition, Meets Kotnis Family

Dwarkanath Kotnis is commemorated together with Dr. Bethune, and Scottish missionary and athlete, Eric Liddell in the Martyrs' Memorial Park (Lieshi Lingyuan) in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, China. The entire south side of the memorial is dedicated to Dr. Kotnis, where there is a great statue in his honour. A small museum there contains a handbook of vocabulary that Kotnis wrote on his passage from India to China, some of the instruments that the surgeons were forced to use in their medical fight for life, and various photos of the doctors, some with the Communist Party of China's most influential figures, including Mao.

Additional reading

 * Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad. And One Did not Come Back! The Story of the Congress Medical Mission to China. Bombay: Sound Magazine, 1944.


 * Basu, Dr. B. K., Light on China: Call of Yanan - Story of the Indian Medical Mission to China 1938-1943, Edited by Manjeet H. Singh. Sketches by David Olivant. Foreign Languages Press Beijing, 2003, Hardback 420pp 235 x 155mm, ISBN 7-119-03476-6

柯棣华