Every time Vatsala Kotnis sets foot in Shijiazhuang, a nondescript town in northern Hebei province, she is overcome with emotion.
It was here that seven decades ago, her brother Dwarkanath spent the last moments of his life, fighting to save the lives of injured Chinese soldiers even as illness consumed his own.
For his heroics during the 1938 Sino-Japanese War, Dwarkanath Kotnis, a young doctor from Solapur, Maharashtra, would become a household name in China.
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A year before his 100th birth anniversary, his memory here remains as strong as ever.
This week, Dr. Kotnis is being honoured in Beijing by the government as one of the ten most influential foreigners who have positively shaped the history of modern China. They were chosen through an online poll, with more than 50 million Chinese casting their vote.
“It is a point of honour that China is remembering my brother after so many years,” said Vatsala Kotnis (82), who made the journey to Beijing from Mumbai along with her sister Manorama (88) for a celebration of their brother’s memory.
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They are also, possibly for the last time, poignantly retracing Dr. Kotnis’s journey.
Dr. Kotnis arrived in China in 1938, one of five doctors who had volunteered to help Chinese troops after Jawaharlal Nehru made a public appeal asking Indians to come forward and help their neighbours during the Japanese invasion.
He quickly made a name for himself, known among Chinese villagers as the “Black Mother” for his compassionate treatment. He travelled across China, to Chongqing, Shijiazhuang and Yanan, the Communists base, where he would become a close acquaintance of Mao Zedong.
He made China his home in 1941 he would marry Guo Qinglan, with whom he had a son. Dr. Kotnis would, however, tragically die a year later with illnesses he contracted on the battlefield.
For sacrificing his life during the war, the young Indian doctor became a mythic figure in China. In some sense, he still is one. This year, more than 2.3 million Chinese cast their vote for him as one of the ten most influential foreigners who have shaped China’s history.
He is in illustrious company. The others include John Rabe, the German doctor who saved tens of thousands of Chinese during the Japanese massacre of Nanjing, and Norman Bethune, the Canadian physician whose hospital Dr. Kotnis worked at.
Retracing the doctors footsteps, his two sisters and niece are travelling to Shijiazhuang, where a military hospital now stands in his memory. “He was the first ever president of this hospital, and is still fondly remembered in Shijiazhuang,” said Junmei Ji, director of the Bethune International Peace Hospital and Kotnis Memorial Hall.
His family is even meeting with his old patients. “They still recall how much care he took of them,” an emotional Ms. Vatsala Kotnis said, here on her sixth trip to China.
This may be her last trip, she says. She is here for a “special reason”: a final meeting with Guo Qinglan, now 96, in hospital in Dalian and not in the best of health. They have stayed in touch over seven long decades, united by an unlikely common bond, one they happen to share with a million other Chinese.