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by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

O, Buffalo, you are black but beautiful. 

You are black, but you give white milk. 

You became our home animal, 

When we were starving for meat and milk. 

You became our tilling animal, 

When we needed your labour power. 

When we built our Harappan civilization, 

You became our source of health and wealth. 

You built our nation on the back of your body. 

Alas, the forces that hate you treat you as a devil, 

Never realized your beauty, love, and labour. 

I do not want you to fight another animal,

Since they worship her as their goddess. 

But you must fight for your rightful place in history. 

Cows and bulls exist in all nations. 

You exist as a household animal only in India, 

Yet you do not exist in their books. 

You are mother of the motherless, 

By feeding them milk every day. 

You adapted to the heat, cold and rains, 

Of this tropical land, like glove to the hand. 

You scorned at their ignorance, 

When they refused to write on your skin scrolls. 

You are not a Western animal, 

But a worthy daughter of the East. 

You are not an emotional animal.

You are a vegetarian being, as they are. 

Yet they crucified your history on their sacred thread. 

You gave them milk and protected their children. 

You are as graceful and compassionate as Jesus was. 

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. His latest book is The Shudra Rebellion.

https://countercurrents.org/2025/07/black-but-beautiful/

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Shepherd-farmer Kattaiah, who survived for more than 45 years with a scientifically made heart valve, is an example of how science is the main source of life, not faith.

Padmashri Dr. Prasada Rao explaining how Kattaiah was operated and an artificial valve placed and how it worked for more than 45 years in memorial meetings in his village.

On June 7, 2025, a shepherd who became a farmer in his early days, and later a long-time heart patient, Kancha Kattaiah (77), died peacefully while sitting on the toilet commode in Hyderabad, Telangana. It appears that the Star Edward Steel Mitral Valve replaced in his heart on December 17, 1979, stopped working after 45 years and six months. This was the first-generation valve made by the Edward Company, the US. Kattaiah got this thoracic surgery done in the Christian Medical College (CMC) Hospital, Vellore, started by a Christian missionary woman doctor Ida.S.Scudder in 1900.

Though the procedure was beyond his means, as a man who believed in science and modern medicine, Kattaiah got it done by making several trips to CMC, which is 600 kilometers away from his village.  

According to Dr. (Padmashri) Dasari Prasada Rao, who began the earliest bypass surgeries in the early 1980s in the Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS), “Perhaps Kattaiah is the longest survivor with that single valve without going for re-surgeries in the history of Edward valves”. Dr Beerappa Nagari, now NIMS Director, a famous gastroenterology surgeon, says “Kattaiah’s survival for so long with the same valve is a medical miracle”. Hence, villagers, in a growing environment of superstition and many people dying with blind faith, call him the ‘Science Man’ of their village.  

THE 1970s MEDICAL SITUATION 

Back in the 1970s, there were no basic heart related diagnostic tools, such as ECG, Echo etc, in Hyderabad. Medical science in India was very backward in spite of the fact that the Nehruvian scientific spirit was around in academic discourses by then.

Even now, India has not evolved into a scientifically discoverer nation, medical or other. We still depend on the West for new discoveries. Hence, there is need for a serious discussion around science and faith in India.       

After 25 years of the establishment of the CMC Vellore Hospital, which used advanced medical science to keep Kattaiah alive for more than 45 years after surgery, the RSS or Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was formed as a Hindu missionary organisation.

While Western missionaries started schools and hospitals in India, the RSS focussed on an anti-Muslim and anti-Christian campaign, shifting the nation’s discourse from scientific temper to secularism versus communalism. Tonnes of material was written on this issue, but much less on science and how to overcome superstition and blind faith.               

THE MAIN FOCUS OF RSS EVEN NOW

Ever since the RSS and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in Delhi in 2014 and also in many states, the conflict between science and faith and superstition is not a major debate issue. Critiques of blind faith, particularly Hindu or Muslim, are getting politicised on a daily basis. Litigations around issues of hurting sentiments have increased several-fold. The media is full of faith-based news. Science gets hardly any attention in the Indian media.  

As the RSS controls the core structures of the nation, faith is being projected as the core value of the nation. But when people are sick or immobilised because of accidents and so on, they need to go to hospital, which is a place of science, and not to institutions of faith. Epidemics get fought with science, not with faith. We have seen and experienced that during the COVID-19 pandemic.        

SCIENCE IS NOT PART OF OUR THINKING

Science as a process of human thinking is not at all taken seriously in India. Agriculture is a science itself. A farmer like Kattaiah, since he was not exposed to faith mobilisation, depended only on science. That is why he survived a major heart disease.     

While the general atmosphere in the nation is such, even Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other ministers keep on speaking about faith. If this mode of thinking does not change in the governing elite, the nation will begin to think that science is foreign, not Indian. The RSS-BJP rule has pushed the nation into science versus faith-based conflict. The idea that faith cures every disease seems to be growing under this regime. 

We do not see RSS-BJP cadres and leaders defending science when there is a conflict between science and faith. They do not allow individual thinking in their ranks. The Chinese and Russian communist parties did exactly the opposite. They did not allow any individualist faith-based thinking. That created its own problems when it was done from a position of power.

The Arab rulers or Pakistan or Afghanistan rulers also do not stand by any science-centred ideological position of individuals or groups. Do they have independent growth of their own science? No. They, too, are fully dependent either on Western science or on Chinese? If the present trend continues, India will fall into the same strap of ‘all faith, no science.’  

There is an increased tendency to project that faith is nationalist and scientific thinking is anti-national. By way of killing scientific thinking or killing the constant questioning abilities of children, adults as part of Indian civilisation. But Indian civilisation developed around agriculture as science. The Right-wing school does not realise this.

What is being forgotten in the process is that human life begins with the process of science and it primarily grows with scientific treatment of children. For example, when a child is born, feeding milk or other forms of food is a scientific process. From the milk feeding stage to food eating stage, faith does not enter a child’s life. The idea of faith begins to be formed in the mind of a child either by observing the parent’s faith-related practices, like pooja or prayer, or with a specific instruction process through schooling.

The Gurukuls and Madrasas historically did this. But the modern school is different. It must turn to teaching science as a life process. Science is culture too. But the RSS propagates only faith as culture.   

The modern school system is mainly meant to teach science and also some amount of faith issues. If faith becomes the central theme of school teaching, the human mind cannot not work in scientific laboratories at all. Because faith does not accept experimentation.

The present political trend, as it is heavily bent on faith, does not accept experimentation. If India is ruled by faith as the central theme of nationalism for long, the nation is bound to remain dependent on the West for science.  

For an average human being, including the voter, this appears the only way of life. We may use science, engineering, medicine, or technology as part of the scientific thinking of Western humans. As long as the supply chain of science continues, we will live like this. If the scientific thinking supply chain becomes unavailable to us, we will start walking, eating our old food, and living in our old type sheds. Our own children are not being allowed to think critically in homes, in the markets. Once young minds are not allowed to question other’s practices and his/her own practice, where will we land?

When our children see critical thinkers being attacked on the roads, on TV channels, in newspapers, they begin to think that they should follow the mob. They surrender to faith and begin to hate science. In such an atmosphere, one may become an engineer by routine training, or a doctor or a so-called lab scientist. But there is no critical creative mind in that social milieu– in that factory, in that hospital or in that lab where innovations need to take place. The RSS-BJP kind of ideological campaign of faith makes us compete with another blind faith nation, like Pakistan.   

Kattaiah, who survived for more than 45 years with a scientifically made valve to repair a damaged heart, should serve as an example that science is the main source of life, not faith. Faith is only a supplement for confidence-building, not a source of cure. Hence, the villagers were right when they shouted a slogan in his memorial meeting of celebration of his science life “Long Live Science” in his native village on June 16, 2025. 

The writer is a political theorist, social activist, and reformer. His latest book is The Shudra Rebellion. The views are personal.

https://www.newsclick.in/conflict-between-science-and-faith-india

by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Amit Shah is Home Minister. I wish he had been minister for foreign affairs and made that statement on “English Shame”. Before making that statement, even as home minister he should have asked his son Jay Shah to resign from the chairmanship of International Cricket Council (ICC) and said so. All cricket council meetings take place in English, in India and abroad. Isn’t Amit Shah ashamed of having a son who only speaks in English in all meetings in India or outside?

Why did Amit Shah, a mother tongue nationalist, put his son in an English medium school? The internet source informs that he studied in English medium school and later in Nirma University in Ahmedabad. In which language his professors taught him? In which language did he write his graduation examination? Naturally in English. Was Shah not ashamed of putting his own son right from LKG in the English medium school?

Top Baniya industrialists of Gujarat like Mukhesh and Anil Ambani not only studied in top class private English medium schools, but ran the most expensive private English medium, Dhirubhai Ambani International school in Mumbai. Though Gautham Adani was a school drop out, his children studied in high end English medium schools. Adani Group runs a most expensive English medium school. Do all the young school going children, studying in those schools, speak in English or in Gujarati or Marati in schools with their teachers? Can Amit Shah convert all those private schools into Gujarati medium or Marati medium?

He should have asked the Mukesh Amabani’s family to convert the Dhirubhai Ambani International English medium school, into Marati medium. So also Adani’s International English medium school, Ahamedabad, into Gujarati medium. He should have sent a notice to Ashoka University, Haryana and other private universities to teach multi-regional languages based on the student’s mother tongue, who takes admission, not even in Hindi for everyone, because Hindi is not a mother tongue of every child born in India nor it is friendly language of all Indians as he is repeatedly propagating. Amit Shah out of total ignorance of languages keeps saying that the history of India remains enfolded in regional languages or in Hindi. Absolutely false. Peoples’ and nations’ history remains in the productive knowledge systems. English as a richest language of the world could grasp Indian history much better than in Hindi or in regional languages

HYPOCRISY IS NOT NATIONALISM

The RSS/BJP hypocrites are trying to destroy the future of the younger generation of Shudra/OBC/Dalit/Adivasis by promoting the private sector to use English language in every sphere, and forcing the Government sector systematically to remain in regional languages. Of course the Congress after Independence initiated the English medium in the private sector system and the State Governments were asked to the Government schools in their respectives regional languages. That restricted the regional youth mobility. The Shudra leaders including Sardar Vallbai Patel did not realize its implications to the future Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis rural agrarian masses.

The Bengali and Tamil Brahmins understood the future of English more than any other regional upper castes immediately after Independence. They captured the academic and bureaucratic power from the Nehruvian days because of English. Gita Ramaswamy, a Tamil Brahmin, who later became communist revolutionary wrote in her book Land, Guns, Caste, Woman that in the 1960s her conservative Brahmin parents put all five girl children in Christian English medium schools and used to hate Christianity at home. At the same time they used to buy a lot of English novels for children to read so that the girls could learn good English; allowed them to see English cinemas. She later became an English and Telugu book publisher.

This could be true of Bengali nationalist and communist Brahmins. But nobody from that background wrote an honest autobiography as Gita did. Hypocrisy is the inner essence of Brahmanism. Amit Shah wants to spread this hypocrisy as the Indian Hindutva nationalist ideology. All this is to keep the Dalit/Shudra/Adivasis forces as slaves in the globalized world. Even earlier the Brahminic intellectuals preached this kind of mother tongue theory to the productive masses, while educating their own children in Christian missionary schools. After the pro-Hindutva private English medium schools grew the present RSS/BJP regime is starving the Christian English mediums schools so they could be closed down.

The Western India Gujarati and Marati Brahmin/Baniyas understood the importance of English slightly later and captured the industrial power through the English language itself. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are their representatives at Delhi. Their only problem is they cannot speak in English. There is no conscious intellectual force among Shudra/OBC/Dalit/Adivasis within the RSS/BJP structures to check this hypocritic propaganda within those organizations. Even in their own organizations English educated Brahmin/Baniya/Kayastha/Khatri/Ksatriya intellectuals deal with global issues. The Shudra/OBC/SC/STs are confined to rural organizational work.

Outside BJP only Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarju Kharge are fighting on an everyday basis even on the question of English and regional language status as well. Now they are saying all children must learn English and regional language. Rahul Gandhi’s consistent fight for equality in all spheres is changing the political scenario.

The Congress party must formulate its long term ideological position about public private English and regional language education. No power on earth can eliminate the English language from India. The RSS/BJP know that well. Their own financers, national and international, do not accept their children getting pushed into the regional language school education. Now the RSS/BJP need an internationally operative intellectual class. If that is not so, why did they choose only English speaking members of parliament across the world for global outreach after the India-Pak recent war? What is the other qualification of Shashi Tharoor except English communication skills?

SENTIMENTALIZING LANGUAGE ISSUE

The Modi Government and the RSS keep telling the innocent masses that they should not send their children to English medium schools by sentimentalizing that English is a foreign language. But for the Brahmin/Baniya middle class and upper middle class it is a mother tongue. What is the mother tongue of the India air-travel class? Is it not English?

The propaganda of English Shame is actually schemed one against the interests of the vast rural agrarian and artisanal masses who are slowly moving into English medium education. In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana after English medium Government school education is made on par with private sector English medium schools the NDA the rich forces of Andhra Pradesh started saying “If the poor study in English medium who will work in our agrarian fields?”. That is the real fear. Amit Shah is trying to protect that class interest by forcing the rural working class children to the regional languages.

In the recent past the nation noticed that some of the poorest family youth could manage to crack IAS and IPS competitive exams because of their English. This is because they too are accessing the English language and managing to acquire a grip on global knowledge. They cannot compete with the English educated rich if they too acquire skills in English language.

In states like Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, where Government schools were converted to English medium teaching and learning with the help of bilingual (mirror nor image) books, a new paradigm of education started emerging in the rural areas. Furthermore, with the availability of AI tools to learn English in any place a lot of rural children from working class families are changing the course of the rural education system. Spreading English among Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs is really scary for the RSS/BJP Brahmin Baniya forces who earlier controlled English as their preserve after Independence.

Amit Shah’s attack on Ambedkar in the parliament a few months back and making the most obnoxious statement against English language, while promoting private sector English medium education, in the private sector as a preserve of their own. Once the rural poor are educated in English medium they too become entrepreneurs. This is the real fear of Amit Shah and his class.

Rahul Gandhi’s stand that English should be learnt by all class youth along with their own regional language has thrown up a challenge to the RSS/BJP Government at Delhi. The RSS/BJP forces are anti-poor by their very operations. They want to permanently distance the productive masses from English education as their ancestors did with regard to Sanskrit. Their gaze now turned to SC/ST/OBCs as they thought they won over Muslims. Amit Shah is only an open voice. They want to smuggle the SC/ST/OBC future by keeping the English language away from them.

Unfortunately the regional parties and the communists, while ruling a state like Kerala have no clear stand on this decisive language issue. It is time that the OBC/SC/STs must turn against them also.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. His latest book is The Shudra Rebellion.

https://countercurrents.org/2025/07/the-rss-bjp-leaders-and-their-family-members-must-be-ashamed-for-studying-in-english-medium-schools-not-shudra-obc-sc-sts/

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Had a Hindutva organ ruled India after Independence and closed down CMC, Kattaiah would have died young; he broke superstition to let modern medicine save his life

Kancha Kattaiah was born in 1948 in a small forest zone village, Papaiah Pet, Chenna Rao Pet Mandal, Telangana. After school education up to 11tt grade in a small town nearby, he dropped out and got married. He then entered into his family’s double occupational job, shepherding and agriculture.

In 1976, he developed a major heart disease.

According to doctors in Hyderabad, who examined him as an outpatient, he would not survive, as two valves in his heart were dysfunctional.

To CMC Vellore

It was found out that only in the Christian Medical College Hospital (CMC) Vellore, Tamil Nadu, the valve replacement could be done, if at all possible. Even in the then united Andhra Pradesh capital Hyderabad, there was no fully trained cardiologist at that time. There was no medical technology like an echogram as well.

Kattaiah was a courageous man. He pulled together his financial resources and went to Vellore CMC. With the help of his younger brother – this writer, whom he had educated up to a masters in Hyderabad’s Osmania University – he applied for financial assistance for medical purposes from the Nizam Trust.

The Trust, at that time, was allotting grants for chronic heart patients. Kattaiah got Rs 8,000. That was his first financial lifeline.

It was diagnosed at CMC that his mitral valve in the heart needed to be replaced, and it could be done. His admission number in that life-changing hospital, 912829, is archaic. For the entire operation, his family spent Rs 50,000, mostly borrowed.

With that medical opinion, he picked up courage and hope of life that was already declared to end soon. He was operated on on December 17, 1979. He lived for another 46 years and passed away earlier this month in his Hyderabad apartment, aged about 77.

Source of science

The question is: why was such a pioneering valve replacement done in a Christian missionary hospital, but not in a Hindutva missionary hospital?

The claims of the present ruling RSS/BJP forces are that Hinduism, from ancient to now, is the source of all science, and we do not have to learn anything from the West.

Of course, the Western scientific growth happened by challenging the Christian dogma. But the medieval ancestors of the Hindu dogma were never challenged by the Brahmin intellectuals, who were custodians of all knowledge.

The Shudras, Dalits, and Adivasis, who constitute the majority of people whom they claim Hindu now, were not allowed to study the Hindu dogmas and challenge them to create a scientific base. In fact, they were not allowed to learn the Hindu religious language, Sanskrit. At no stage were Galileo and Copernicus allowed to emerge in the Hindu history.

Weakness of past

The modern organisers of the Hindutva forces do not accept the weakness of their past. They want to project weakness as strength; their superstition as science.

This is where Indian universities and research institutions are in danger, particularly the medical institutions. They are forcing Indian youth to read Sanskrit books that promote superstition as religion and science.

No doubt, there is a subtle relationship between religion and science. The historical spiritual discourse around the conflict between science and religion is framed in terms of Evolutionism Vs Creationism. The idea of God is based on human speculation.

But ideas like Karma in Hinduism and Original Sin in Christianity are superstitious but religious. Superstition cannot negotiate with science. Medicine is a science. The hospital is its institutional base.

Islam that arrived in India in the medieval times has created its own superstitious myths – that Allah cures all diseases. Indian Islam has not created a hospital of CMC standards.

Kattaiah’s anti-superstition life

Kattaiah realised well before he became a heart patient that superstition does not allow villagers to prosper. It adds only to their financial distress. He did not encourage superstitious practices in his house after his mother and father died, and he took over the responsibility of the family.

The village cultural atmosphere in those days was very superstitious. People would spend a lot of money around mantrics and villages, regional temples and priests.

Kattaiah overcame such superstitious beliefs by the end of his school education.

Normally, such a health condition generates fear and makes a person run to anything that constructs a myth around life. Kattaiah while going to Vellore had to halt at Tirupathi. When the attendant brother asked him whether he would go for a darshan of the deity, he said, “If the surgeon who operates on me is good I will survive and if the physician is good and recommends proper medicines I will live long, but not with the darshan of divine images.”

He proved himself so right by living for 45 years and six months with a single valve.

Nehruvian science Vs RSS anti-science

India is a country of superstitions. Even educated men and women, with the campaign of organisations like the RSS, Hindu Mahasabha and Bajrang Dal, are spreading superstitions against the Nehruvian scientific spirit, which encouraged Christian missionary hospitals and schools.

The RSS did not establish a single hospital matching CMC in Nagpur or elsewhere.

While the CMC was established by a Christian missionary organisation, Hindutva organisations have organised Kumbh Melas, temple visits, Kasi yatras, Durga poojas, and so on, but never focus on modern medicine.

In fact, modern medicine was seen as British colonial medicine and against the ancient indigenous Ayurveda. But Ayurveda did not advance like what they abusively call

did not advance like what they abusively call ‘English medicine. They never differentiated between science and colonialism.

Even in Telangana, people were forced to believe that dipping in the Ganga (often it just means some water body nearby) would cure them of diseases. They did not distinguish between religion and superstition.

The Star Edward steel valve

To go back to Kattaiah, he wanted to live by all means. He got operated on in CMC and the valve was replaced at a cost of Rs 50,000, raised through loans. It was a huge amount way back in 1979.

Dr Stanley John operated on him and placed a Star Edward steel valve just brought into the medical market in America. Dr George Cherian was his physician. That was the first ever manmade valve in the world. It worked for over four decades before failing earlier this month, causing his death.

Nehruvian nationalism allowed Christian hospitals akin to CMC and advanced institutions akin to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.

The CMC was established as a nursing and delivery clinic by an American missionary woman, Dr Ida Sophia Scudder. It has grown into a major world-class medical institution in India. It developed with the help of foreign mission funding and also money collected from patients over time. The government in Delhi supported its growth by allowing fund flow.

Opposite entities

Imagine the RSS/BJP being the first ruling force in India. They may have closed down CMC as a ‘conversionist’ and ‘beef feeding’ hospital. Beef was sold in the CMC canteen at a subsidised price both for attendees and patients for protein supply. Doctors recommended beef for patients like Kattaiah. There was no force-feeding of any food item.

Science and superstitions are opposite entities and human practices. The RSS spreads superstition, which does not have any theoretical capacity to negotiate with both science and religion. This is where anti-superstition laws are needed in India. Many heart and other disease patients died depending on superstitious practices, even after spending huge amounts.

Constant feeding of superstition into people’s minds was used as a tool to keep them as slaves of casteism and Brahminism.

Caste construct

One of the main institutions that the ancestors of the RSS ideologues constructed was caste. The caste system

has built superstitious beliefs into the mind of most Indians now. Caste is not a religious institution. It is a superstition in itself.

Had an RSS (though it calls itself a social organisation) kind of political force come to power after Independence and closed down

CMC, Kattaiah would have died 46 years ago. He set a record in the history of artificial valve survivors in India, maybe in the world.

We now know that medical science in the world has advanced far more, and daily discoveries are happening. But India remains backward in that field, and RSS/BJP anti-science and anti-English language is likely to keep us more backward. There is no discourse around the scientific spirit in India now.

(The late Kancha Kattaiah was the brother of the writer.)

About the Author

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Kancha llaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. His latest book is The Clash of Cultures – Hindutva – Mullah Conflicting Ethics.

https://thefederal.com/category/opinion/rss-science-cmc-kancha-kattaiah-christian-missionary-194284

by Bheenaveni Ram Shepherd

In a record-setting case, an Indian patient lived 46 years after receiving a first-generation Edwards-Starr heart valve at CMCH in Vellore in 1979. His survival defied medical expectations — a powerful testament to how science, institutional motivation, and family care can together extend human longevity.

In a world still reckoning with the aftermath of COVID-19, where health consciousness, structural inequality, and the social determinants of wellbeing dominate public discourse, it has never been increasingly important to understand how scientific belief and social care together intersect to shape human longevity — especially in the face of chronic illness. The life of Kancha Kattaiah — born on July 17, 1948, into a historically excluded shepherding caste in a remote village of southern India, and who died on June 7, 2025, in a small apartment in Hyderabad — offers not only an inspiring story of 77 years of survival, but also a compelling case study in how rational thought, family care, and access to medical science made one of the longest-surviving heart valve replacement cases possible.

Back in the late 1970s, when India’s life expectancy barely crossed the mid-50s, most advanced medical treatments remained confined to the privileged few. Open-heart surgery, particularly valve replacement, was considered miraculous and rare. For poor or rural Indians, chronic heart disease often led to quiet, early death. And yet, in 1979, Kattaiah — just 30 years old and already diagnosed with valvular heart disease — defied that future. He did not merely survive a complex heart surgery. He outlived expectations by decades, building a life that serves as a case study in how science and social support together can radically extend human life.

Born into a marginalised pastoralist community in Telangana, Kattaiah was no stranger to the systemic barriers that shape the lives of lower-caste Indians. His mother, Kancha Kattamma, was a formidable figure — a community leader known as Pedda Golla, who resisted feudal landlords and fought for grazing rights for shepherds. Her struggles sowed the seeds of critical thought and resistance in her children. Kattaiah, a bright student with a fiercely rational mind, carried that legacy into his youth. When local karanams—village tax officials—tried to prevent children from lower castes from accessing education, he confronted them directly: “Why do you send your children to school and stop ours in the name of tradition?”

Kattaiah did not believe in divine intervention. He was unambiguous about what could heal: “God will not save me from this illness. Only doctors, medicine, and proper food can cure sickness.” That belief would be put to the test when, at age 30, he was diagnosed with a severe valvular heart disease. The only solution was surgery to replace the damaged heart valve — an advanced procedure rarely available outside a few elite hospitals in India.

At the time, the Edwards heart valve, developed by the American company Edwards Lifesciences, represented a pioneering leap in cardiac care. Made from bovine or porcine tissue, this bioprosthetic valve mimicked the function of a natural human valve, improving blood flow and reducing the need for lifelong anticoagulation therapy. But such innovation came at a steep cost. The surgery at Christian Medical College Hospital in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, would cost Rs. 50,000 — an astronomical sum for any lower-middle-class family, let alone one from a marginalised caste background in late 1970s.

What followed, however, demonstrated the power of social care and institutional support. At the request of his younger brother, Prof. Kancha Ilaiah — with whom Kattaiah had lived his entire life — the Vice-Chancellor of Osmania University recommended a grant of Rs. 8,000, established by Nizam Trust for heart patients. Though it did not cover the full cost, the grant was more than financial aid — it was a signal that institutions, when guided by equity and humanity, can meaningfully extend life.

The surgery was performed at Christian Medical College and Hospital (CMCH) in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, by Dr. Stanley John — one of India’s first cardiothoracic surgeons and a recipient of the Padma Shri in 1975 — with Dr. George Cherian serving as the physician.  Founded in 1900 by Dr. Ida Sophia Scudder, CMCH traces its origins to the work of American medical missionaries from the Dutch Reformed Church, among them Scudder’s own family, who had served in India for generations. Though established on religious principles, CMCH became a place where faith never stood in the way of science. Unlike many religious institutions that have long prioritised ritual over reason, CMCH embraced a more inclusive and scientific ethos. It stood out as a space where belief and medicine coexisted — welcoming patients like Kattaiah, who, though irreligious, believed deeply in the promise of science.

His surgery was successful. He survived. And with that survival came not just extended years, but dignity and purpose — a testament to what happens when medicine meets compassion, and rationality is met with support. Over the following decades, Kattaiah’s life became an emblem of resilience. He had outlived not only a grim diagnosis but the assumptions of a casteist, fatalistic society.

Kattaiah’s extended life, however, was not without struggle. His condition placed restrictions on what medicines he could safely consume, and even minor illnesses became serious. It was his wife, Kancha Bharathi, who became the quiet pillar of his long recovery. She cared for him with patience and strength, attending to his daily needs with the attention one gives to a child. During the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors advised against vaccination due to his heart condition. He complied with strict self-imposed quarantine, practicing social distancing long before such habits became common.

That is where his story still echoes powerfully. It forces us to ask: How many lives remain shortened not because treatment doesn’t exist, but because access is denied? Kattaiah’s decades-long survival stands in stark contrast to the many who never made it to the operating table. It also testifies to the endurance of belief — not in the divine, but in rational hope, grounded in human systems that choose compassion over caste, and equity over exclusion.

Today, as healthcare becomes increasingly commercialised, and as universal health coverage remains a distant goal in many countries, this story offers a quiet yet firm reminder. Life is not simply extended by science — it is sustained by a shared moral duty to apply that science equitably. When access is fair, when care is personal, and when science is driven not by profit but by humanity, even the most fragile hearts can beat long into the future.

Kancha Kattaiah’s story is perhaps one of India’s longest surviving cases of heart valve replacement. But more than a medical record, it is a human record — of what is possible when rational hope, care, and science come together. His life did not defy death by miracle. It did so through medicine, support, and a belief in something far more radical than faith: reason, science, and love.

https://countercurrents.org/2025/06/a-rational-heart-how-reason-and-care-sustained-one-of-indias-longest-heart-valve-survivors/