A heart valve that saved a life for 46 years symbolises how Christian missions in India fused faith with modern science. Organisations which say they represent Hinduism and Islam have yet to match that achievement.

For centuries, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity have been the three most visible religions in India. How each engages with superstition and science is a question worth close examination. Of all the modern sciences, the most important are the science of production and medical science. Both of them, however, are dependent on a modern system of education.

Let me share a story. On June 7, 2025 Kancha Kattaiah, 77, died peacefully while sitting on the commode in the washroom as the artificial valve fixed in his heart failed. It had been inserted in his heart 46 years earlier; the surgery was done at the Christian Medical College (CMC) Hospital Vellore, Tamil Nadu, in 1979.

It was a first generation steel valve developed by the Edward Life Science company of America in the 1960s. It was an innovation by the company to save patients from the dangerous heart disease of losing a valve due to rheumatic fever or for other reasons. Kattaiah had rheumatic fever over and above a massive smallpox attack in his childhood. In the process, he was diagnosed with a loss of the mitral valve in his heart. If the artificial valve was not invented thanks to the advanced and combined medical science of modern allopathy and surgery, he would have died when he was hardly 32 or 33.

Kattaiah was from a small village shepherd-farmer family from Telangana, which is 600 km away from Vellore. He travelled to CMC risking everything. According to doctors who operated upon such patients and replaced valves in recent times, his survival for so long with a single valve was a medical miracle. I know these details because he was my brother.

In 1960 Dr. Albert Starr, a surgeon at Oregon Health and Sciences University, successfully implanted the first Starr-Edwards mitral valve in the US. In India, the first such surgery was done at CMC Vellore in 1962. In those days, no other hospital in India had that kind of surgical equipment and trained cardiac surgeons.

Though it was a private hospital, it was compassionate in its culture and values. They were not in the money-making business like the private hospitals of today. Grace and compassion as human values were constructed into the Christian mission thought. Medical innovation in the Christian world was part of that thought.

CMC was started in Vellore by an American Christian missionary woman Dr. Ida. S. Scudder in 1900. This was the first ever established full fledged hospital in India. The government-owned AIIMS was established only in 1956 in Delhi. The Christian Medical College became a model medical college and hospital in India in the post-Independent period as well.

For a long time, the CMC survived with American mission mobilisation of resources, technology and trained manpower. The American church network helped this kind of medical science develop within America and also in other parts of the world. India is a major beneficiary of this mission work.

In Western India, the first schools, including a teacher training college, were started by the same American Mission. Savitribai Phule and Fatima Shaik were trained in that teacher training centre.

A question arises in my mind – why did Hindus and Muslims in India not develop Ayurvedic or Unani hospitals with their own innovations in surgical science like allopathic hospitals? After all, Hindus and Muslims claim the Ayurveda and Unani forms of medicine are part of their culture and traditions. Why didn’t Hindu missions or a ‘social service’ organisation like the RSS, which claims that it is unparalleled in the world, or a globally connected Muslim organisation like the Jamaat-e-Islami, develop their own Ayurvedic and Unani medical colleges and hospitals that could match the American Christian missionary one like the CMC, established 125 years ago in India?

The Satya Sai Baba mission established a major hospital in Puttaparthi, but with the same Western, allopathic medicine, not Ayurveda. Mata Amrutanandamayi, who runs her own mission, runsanother  allopathy hospital in Kochi, Kerala.

The RSS’S claims and the reality

The ruling RSS claims in its post 2014 period of hegemony that ancient India – by which they mean Hindutva – is the repository of all knowledge. So why it  did not develop Ayurveda as an equally advanced medical science like allopathy which the Christian missions did? While the RSS/BJP want to claim that Hindu texts contain all the wisdom of science, why did those books not produce an innovation of something like a valve which could save a heart patient like Kattaiah?

Unless the superstitious character of a religion is not fought with rational thought, scientific innovations do not happen. No individual scientist can innovate unless a rational secular society comes into being. But the RSS wants to remove the word secularism from the constitution. They need to study the CMC’s functioning to understand – and respect –  how medical science operates in a combination of religion, reason and secularism.

Unless a religious philosophy is science friendly, as a sister evolutionary thought process, religion will just slip into more and more superstition without allowing science to emerge and advance from its fold. Unfortunately, the self-styled champions of Hinduism and Islam have done exactly the same in India. Hence they still depend on Christian education and health and other science institutions and innovations in the West.

In fact, for a long time before and even after independence, Christian schools and hospitals were the main source of education and health for the Hindu and Muslim elite. Shashi Tharoor, who wrote Why I am a Hindu, got his English education in St. Stephens College, Delhi.

When Kattaiah suffered from rheumatic fever in the 1960s, it was the Baptist Mission Hospital, Hanamkoda, Warangal that cured him. This was established in 1902. Kattaiah’s illiterate mother stayed with him as her son was treated for more than 20 days along with getting a free supply of food and medicines. This kind of medical help was possible because of the hospital’s spiritual philosophy of compassion and innovation.

Why haven’t the RSS or the Jamaat-e-Islami as religious mission organisations offered such service to Hindus and Muslims – not to speak of all Indians – in critical areas like health and education?  If religious organisations keep on communalising their own civil societies, they cannot produce imaginative scientists. Communalism breeds fear and hatred of the ‘Other’ where compassion and grace towards people from other religions would be projected as weakness.

Twenty five years after the establishment of the CMC in Vellore, the RSS was formed as a missionary organisation. What have they done in the domains of education and medicine for Indians at large in the past hundred years?

This question is important because they oppose everything foreign. If that foreign artificial valve was not put in Kattaiah’s heart he would not have survived for 46 years after surgery.

In the medical field, the RSS and its other wings want to promote Ayurveda in schools and colleges. The RSS and its other organs like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) keep propagating that their ancient medical knowledge is superior to Western knowledge. Why then did the RSS and its associates not establish a hospital like CMC and establish a life science research centre within the Ayurveda tradition?

Why the Muslim elite, like the Hindutva elite, rushes to allopathic medical centres

On the contrary, they went on promoting under their shadow several superstitious networks run by Babas, or remedies like cow urine therapy and so on, which are the opposite of established science.

The Muslim emperors and sultans who ruled large parts of India for more than a thousand years may have established some Unani medical centres but they also did not develop their own surgical medicine. The Unani medical centres work on oral medicine treatment. There is no surgical science developed by Unani medicine.

That is why the Muslim elite, like the Hindutva elite, rushes to allopathic medical centres for emergency and critical surgeries. In fact, the rich among them go to the US for treatment if it is a heart or brain surgical issue.

Leave alone ancient and medieval Hindu pundits, even the present Hindutva missionary networks like the RSS and others pushed Hinduism into the process of superstition. Indian Islam also did not allow Islam to emerge into a religion that could negotiate with science.

Christianity that started as a blind belief based faith slowly emerged into a religion that began to establish a relationship with science as its sister, slowly overcoming its superstitious dogmas. In my view Hinduism and Islam have deeper relations with superstition by not allowing science to co-exist with them.

Science and religion need to be treated as part of the same evolutionary process in human civilisation, whereas superstition is a negation of both.

Superstition needs to be fought on an everyday basis. If religion allows superstition to grow, like weeds in the crop, it kills the scientific thinking of humans. This is where these two religions need to undergo huge reform within themselves, allowing secular thought and science to develop in their civil societies.

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

This article went live on August twelfth, two thousand twenty five, at three minutes past five in the evening.

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