7 days ago
The doctor from Sindh, once honoured by Pakistan, now forgotten
On August 14, 1947, the day Pakistan came into being, Karachi was swept up in jubilant celebration. A 4.8-km state procession wound its way through the city led by Viceroy Louis Mountbatten and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam – Great Leader – of the new nation.
Military units lined the route of the procession, while overhead, fighter planes dipped in salute. Crowds gathered at every corner, cheering, waving, witnessing the birth of a country.
To mark the occasion, the Citizens' Celebrations Committee had erected 16 ceremonial gates along the route. Each one bore the name of a distinguished citizen: political leaders, religious figures, intellectuals and national heroes. Among them were three future prime ministers of Pakistan, pioneering voices of the Pakistan Movement, spiritual heads of major communities, and iconic city-builders.
One of the 16 was a Hindu: Dr Hemandas Wadhwani.
Eminent but forgotten
I came across his name quite by chance while working on the family history of a Wadhwani family and was intrigued. A few older relatives with memories of Sindh had mentioned Hemandas Wadhwarni, a doctor with a practice in Jacobabad. Some thought back with faraway expressions and vaguely recalled that he had once been a minister in Sindh.
Curious, I began piecing together his story through online searches and scattered mentions. I found more than I expected. Most striking of all was a Dawn report dated August 15, 1947, quoted by Khurram Ali Shafique on The Republic of Rumi website, which mentioned the 16 ceremonial gates.
Who was this prominent Wadhwani, honoured on the day Pakistan was born – and now almost entirely forgotten? From news reports, gazetteer entries, and administrative records of the time, a shadowy picture emerged: that of a widely respected physician and high-ranking public servant. These findings were later enhanced by family memories.
What Kanu remembered
Kanu Wadhwani (1934-2022) was 84 when I first met him. He had lived in Jacobabad as a child where his father Hiranand (Hemandas's paternal uncle) was headmaster of the municipal high school. He had very fond memories of his well-settled older cousin and the three-storey family home with its arches, red pillars, wide verandas and spacious rooms overlooking the Begaree Wah.
Hemandas's clinic was in the house and several of the rooms doubled as a nursing home. When Kanu's elder brother Moti contracted typhoid, the family moved from their government quarters to live in the family home, where a safe and comfortable convalescence was assured.
Kanu's memories of his loving, always cheerful uncle are balanced by Hemandas's formidable reputation as a skilled and dedicated doctor across the Upper Sindh Frontier region and Balochistan, where he was responsible for many social activities.
Doctor saab
When devastating floods struck Jacobabad in 1929, Hemandas led the relief efforts. He was again at the forefront during the Quetta earthquake of 1935, in which more than 40,000 lives were lost from a population of 60,000.
He served as honorary secretary of the Indian Red Cross Society in Sindh, implementing global practices he had encountered while volunteering with the Red Cross Society Leagues in London and Paris. His MBBS degree was from Grant Medical College in Bombay. He had enhanced his skills in Vienna with specialised courses in diseases of the ear, nose and throat.
A long-serving member of the Jacobabad Municipality and Chairman of both the Sanitary and Primary School Boards, he also established a Child Welfare Centre in the town. One of its most beloved initiatives was the annual baby show – a joyful community event with a public health purpose.
Hemandas's greatest motivation was to promote hygiene and nutrition across the region. Grateful families credited him with significantly reducing maternal mortality in Jacobabad and with training midwives who later served across Sindh.
Perhaps it was his dedication that earned him the title Kaiser-e-Hind from the British colonial government.
One of his most enduring efforts was the establishment of Dow Medical College in Karachi. When Sir Hugh Dow, governor of Sindh, laid the foundation stone of the college, he reportedly said of Hemandas:
'His efforts were untiring; he would accept no discouragement, and it is certain that this scheme would not have been brought to the stage which we see today had it not been for his enthusiastic and dedicated work. I have done my best to second his efforts, but in my opinion the college might have been more appropriately named after him than after me.'
As Hemandas rose to prominence across the province, he remained a kind and good-natured man, loved by his family and widely respected by the people of Upper Sindh Frontier and Balochistan.
The rise to eminence
When Sindh was separated from the Bombay Presidency in 1936 and established its own government, Hemandas was put up as the candidate of the Indian National Congress from Jacobabad and won a resounding victory. He was appointed minister of health for Sindh and his time was divided between Jacobabad and Karachi.
In Karachi, he set up a nursing home next to his residence and the road was named in his honour: Hemandas Wadhwani Road.
Although the British government had postponed independence until the Second World War had ended, negotiations were already underway. Among the senior officials involved in these high-level discussions was Hemandas Wadhwani.
Were these the reasons he was honoured as one of 16 eminent citizens of Pakistan with a ceremonial gate bearing his name on the day the country was born?
He stayed on as long as he could
Gradually, things began to change. Sindh had not been partitioned. Hindus had lived there as a peaceful and prosperous minority for centuries and at first, there was no reason for them to leave.
But Partition had created a tide of desperate new arrivals – refugees who had been promised a homeland and who looked to Sindh to begin again.
Kanu Wadhwani's family left in September 1947, after a traumatic incident in which their home was raided. He remembered his father walking calmly to the front door and opening it, as the police inspector in charge of the search entered. His terror turned to astonishment when the inspector bowed before Kaka and assured him that the house would not be searched.
Hiranand had once been his headmaster at the Municipal High School in Jacobabad – how could he violate the home of a man he still respected? But the officer pleaded with Hiranand to leave Pakistan, warning that it was becoming increasingly dangerous for Hindus.
It was Hemandas who arranged passage for the family on one of the ships evacuating non-Muslims from Karachi to Bombay. Kanu remembered his father weeping at the port and others around him trying to console him, saying there was nothing anyone could do.
Hemandas and his family remained in Sindh until 1950. Who can imagine the shifts that finally forced them to leave: the disillusionment, the helplessness, the loss of all the goodwill and prestige he had built over decades of hard work?
Their first home away from Sindh was in Udaipur, where Hemandas was welcomed as personal doctor to the Maharaja, whose treatment he continued for nearly a year. It's unclear how this association had formed, but the family already had links to Udaipur – it had been the first port of call for several relatives after Partition.
This included Kanu's family, who were allotted two rooms in a large house known as Iron Bungalow, shared with seven other displaced Sindhi families. It was their first home as refugees.
From Udaipur, Hemandas moved to Indore, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to set up a business selling steel vessels for his son Moti. Eventually, he, Totibai, and their differently-abled son Gopal moved to Bombay.
Moti, his wife Kamala, and their sons Vijay and Ashok – both born in Sindh – and baby Ravi, born in Jhansi, settled in Pimpri. In time, the family came together again in Colaba, Bombay.
Our family physician
Building up a professional practice takes years. Hemandas was one of the hundreds of thousands of illustrious Sindhi professionals who had lost everything and did not have the resources to start all over. In time, patients came, largely from families who had known him in Sindh. Many travelled from the refugee camps in Kalyan, a journey of nearly three hours, having complete faith in his treatment.
Colaba had a large Sindhi population too. Hemandas established the Colaba Sindhi Panchayat and Bombay Sindhi Panchayat where medical treatment was provided for free.
Among the many Sindhi families who made Colaba their home was that of my grandfather, Presidency Magistrate KJ Bijlani. That home in Colaba remained a centre for gatherings and happy times for our family, all the way till 2003.
When I asked two of my uncles if they remembered Hemandas, it turned out that his home had been right nearby. To my amazement, they recalled him vividly – because he had been the family physician.
However, they had not the faintest idea that he had once been an important public figure in Sindh. What they did remember, the kind of detail children are so likely to retain, was the lisp with which he spoke.
My uncle Hiru, who was born in February 1948 at the peak of post-Partition trauma (the family had migrated just months earlier in November 1947), had been sickly as a child. He remembered Dr Hemandas as kind and reassuring.
On phone consultations he would say, 'Haa, haa, samjhi vyus' – yes, yes, I understand. Someone would then be sent over to collect the medicine he dispensed.
The Ramayana mix-up
For some years I believed that in the completely altered life after Partition, Hemandas revived a tradition initiated by his grandmother Chetibai when he was a little boy in Sindh, encouraging him, 'Ramayana ji katha budhaye', tell us a story from the Ramayana.
People would gather round to sit and listen when he did. This became a daily routine and it gave the comfort of home to many who had carried on with stoic bravery after their lives had been upturned.
However, in November 2024 I finally got the opportunity to meet Ashok Wadhwani, Hemandas's grandson, who had grown up in the Colaba home, and he was adamant that no such routine ever took place in their home.
Kanu Wadhwani had passed on. There was no one else I could check with. Confused, somewhat sheepish that I seemed to have made a mistake, I went back to Kanu's recordings. Eventually it became clear that I had misheard. It was Rupchand, Hemandas's father, whose Ramayana katha was so popular.
Seventy-four when Partition took place, Hiranand's brother Rupchand resolutely stayed on in Sindh. His wife Jasoda and their brother Thakurdas were both no more. While most of the family left Sindh, Rupchand chose to stay. He moved to his darbar – a traditional Sindhi place of worship usually maintained by generations of a family – in Kambar.
There, he swept the floors himself and referred to himself humbly as 'Darbar jo naukar Rupo', Rupo, a servant of the darbar.
After the pogrom of January 6, 1948, when mobs began attacking gurmandars, tikanos, darbars, and other Hindu places of worship across interior Sindh, the Kambar Darbar's devotees fled as well. With help from its followers, the community reconvened in the Bombay suburb of Kandivali.
Rupchand went to live with his son – once the health minister of Sindh – now leading an unassuming life in Colaba.
The memory of the daily katha was not Hemandas's. But it remains part of the family's atmosphere of comfort, continuity, and quiet reconstruction in a world turned upside down.
A lasting legacy
While in Bombay it is the memory of Hemandas's gentle lisp that lives on, in Sindh his legacy endures – not only through infrastructure and institutions, but through a model of civic service, compassion, and professional excellence.
His contributions to Dow Medical College, the Indian Red Cross Society's work in Sindh and the Jacobabad Child Welfare Centre, along with the public health practices he pioneered, continued to shape the region's medical and social fabric long after his departure – and long after his name was erased from plaques and street signs.
Hemandas was one of many illustrious Hindus of Sindh whose work lived on even as their names vanished from public memory. I felt a little better about this when my uncle Moti told me about Hemandas's funeral procession: that it had been enormous, with hundreds of mourners.
The local population probably wondered what all the fuss was about.
