In October 1943, the colonial government of India asked him to lead a “broad survey” of health conditions in British India, the first of its kind. With nowhere else to go, he went back to India. ![]() When German forces occupied Guernsey and the other Channel Islands in 1940, he was forced out of his quiet retirement. The people who shaped India in those years included outsiders and misfits, the orphaned and the underestimated, foreigners and Indians from many different religions and castes - those whom history rarely remembers.Ī distinguished Indian bureaucrat who had served the Crown loyally, even as Gandhi’s independence movement gathered force, Bhore retired with a knighthood in 1935 to the island of Guernsey. But this hospital and the women who started it is also a story of a nation in the process of becoming itself. My mother studied nursing there in the early 1960s, and those skills helped her travel, with my father, to the United States. The story of Nazareth Hospital began, for me, as a family story. That was the period during which a handful of Catholic nuns from Kentucky chose to come to Mokama, a small town at a railroad junction in northern India on the southern banks of the Ganges River, to start a hospital. More than 20 million Indians lived under direct rationing, entitled to 10 ounces of grain a day. By the end of 1948, two of India’s cities, Delhi and Mumbai, had each absorbed more than 500,000 refugees, and the country had endured violence, dislocation and food shortages on a mass scale. India had been devastated by World War II and then partition, which split the country in two. ![]() That would require new institutions, new ideas, and men and women who were willing to take a chance on building them. India would soon be free from British colonial rule, but it could not fulfill the basic needs - let alone the hopes and ambitions - of most of its people. In the spring of 1947, nothing about the future of India, its identity as a nation or the kind of country it would be, was certain. Thottam, a member of the editorial board, is the author of “Sisters of Mokama: The Pioneering Women Who Brought Hope and Healing to India.” By Jyoti Thottam of the New York Times | Ms.
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