Rejuvenation, Polity and Education: A Doctor's Freedom Struggle

Dr Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, a prominent physician spent his life fighting for India's freedom, leading Congress and Muslim League at different times and becoming the voice for the foundation of Jamia Millia Islamia alongside his grafting experiments.

Dr Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, a pioneer physician and politician; Source: Jagran

In the winter cold of December, in the suburbs of eastern Uttar Pradesh was born a boy who went on to become a doctor. Well, thousands of kids are born every day who choose medical fields and then serve society. But what was so different about this kid?

Things began pretty normally - schooling from a private English school and medical degree from the college in Madras set his foundation stone. However, science was not his only interest. India was still a colony and Congress seemed a good opportunity towards independence. This inspired him to join the Indian National Congress and he soon moved up the ladder and started presiding over the sessions of the Congress.

This was followed by a scholarship and off he flew to Edinburgh where he studied even more arduously and wrote a thesis on the treatment of syphilis, the sexual disease and earned further degrees.

Then what? Bright students get easy jobs and he too was appointed in a hospital in London, which to this day has a ward on his name - Ansari ward after Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari.

While in England, Ansari's involvement in the freedom movement became even more direct. But the nation and nationalism called him back and on his return, he joined both Congress and the Muslim League in the hope of a free country. His visions soon pushed him ahead and he became the President of the League, all while he kept practising medicine.

When the voice for Khalifa was raised, he prepped a team to visit Turkish to tend the wounded. His life has been an amazing mixture of medicine and politics!

But soon Ansari's interests changed. Earlier, he was treating the wrong parts, now he was keener on replacing them. He met several pioneers who dedicated their life's work to grafting animal testicles to humans. This all began with a simple question of how could an aged person produce heirs? His readings in xenotransplantation opened for him a relatively unexplored gate.

Meanwhile, in the political arena, the growing dissension in the League, separatism and Jinnah's rise, made him distant from it. In this loss, he found consolation in the Congress and his dear friend, the Mahatma.

This was also the time, when he thought of putting into action a vision he had, to get rid of the British hegemony. He was among those who set the foundation of one of India's most prestigious university, Jamia Millia Islamia and also served as its chancellor till his death.

His earlier interests made a comeback in the last decade of his life.

His interests took a shape in the form of the book Regeneration of Man, a compilation of his own grafting experiments. He is known to have conducted 700 such operations!

This work he shared with his close friend - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who was a frequent visitor at Ansari's home in Delhi and with great interest read the work in a day. While Gandhi was critical about the persistence of youth in an uncertain life, Ansari knew his experiments were aimed at solving the disability of old age.

It is a bit of a surprise, that of all his contributions, his work with the scalpel has been largely ignored. Seems like no one wants to talk about the loss of the monkeys, sheep and bulls who had to donate their testicles for the experiments of Ansari. These parts found their way to human bodies. The beginning? His patients suffered declining mental and sexual powers!

While all this may sound ridiculous today, the early twentieth century was nuanced for such experiments. Moreover, what was available only for the elite in the West was available to all in India by the efforts of our protagonist. And hence, all from merchants to bankers to civil servants to labourers were his clients!

While life was going good with a dream, a hope and amidst experiments, a heart attack in a train that left from Mussoorie took away his life on 10 May 1936. Today, he rests in the premises of the institution he found but his experiments in medicine and politics have become immortal.