Beginning of life in the United Kingdom for one of the pioneers of Manipuri emigrants overseas
- First part of the book: Dr Mohendra's Memoir to be published -

Dr Mohendra Irengbam *

Author and Margaret with our MP Marsha Singh at the Terrace Bar of Parliament Building on the north bank of the River Thames, opposite St Thomas' Hospital [tall building on the right] on the south bank of the River, connected by Westminster Bridge on the left. There are 30 bars in the building for the MPs and their guests to quench their thirst. There are 650 members of Parliament. There are special whisky brands that are distilled only for the House of Lords and House of Commons.

There are many expatriates from Manipur all over the world, whose life stories would be interesting to read. In my case, it might not be worth the read. It is just that I am one of the 'pioneers' who made it out to London 55 years ago. It is a humble story of finding my self- pride. And, how I rescued myself from a sinking ship as it touched the water. It is an expression of an innate joy and gratitude of having opportunity and longevity to be able to write how I survived with freedom to express myself freely about the reality I encountered.

I have been motivated to write this memoir by none other than my close friend Dr Thangjam Premchand Singh, who retired as Professor of Medicine, a specialist in Diabetes at RIMS, Imphal. He asked me to write about my life in the UK and what inspired me go there in the first place.

Dr Premchand has been to London himself, for a couple of years as one among the few young meritorious doctors who were sponsored by the Government of India for research studies. Over the years he has published a few papers on diabetes in peer reviewed respectable international medical journals. He became internationally renowned and has been invited to a few international conferences, to present his papers on Diabetes that is ubiquitous in Manipur.

My love for writings is not about myself. I have been writing for over 10 years as a newspaper columnist. I have also written 5 books. What was really stopping me from writing this memoir until now? Fear of being characterised as arrogant. An extremely embarrassing episode that was incident in my life-essay a few years ago, has always been a stark reminder. Once bitten twice shy.

During one of my annual pilgrimages to Imphal I was approached to be a panellist of 3 doctors at a discussion forum, hosted by Dr Ratankumar, the Managing Director of Mother's Care Children's Hospital, Sagolband in Imphal. It was he said, for me to answer some questions about the practice of medicine in Britain.

Dr (ex-Prof) Th Premchand MD

I was asked 2 question by the moderator: (1) why did I become a doctor? I answered truthfully that I wanted to be famous. (2) How did we initiate the clinical care of a patient in the UK? The previous panellist from Shija Hospital explained that their approach to patient care began with a spiritual invocation. I said, we in the UK don't have time for such things. Besides, most doctors in the UK are atheists. He did not ask me another question. And I had to sit it out for over an hour in the glare of the light.

I believed he thought I was egotistical. He did not ask me to elaborate on my statement. It did not occur to him that I might be telling the truth. Sometimes, 'Truth is stranger than fiction', remarked sagely by Mark Twain. Real life like can be more remarkable than invented ones. I actually meant to say that a career in medicine empowers one to help people to be respected by others. Instead of a moderator he became an arbitrator. He stopped asking me any more questions. His exultation left me wondering how the hell I could possibly harm my dignity.

With this self-mortification rather than self-flagellation as a prologue, I would like to rephrase the way I talk about myself. I might seem prideful but I am not. I am just confident rather than arrogant. I am always happy to learn from others. In the line Friederic Nietzsche, the German philosopher, a guru of modern thinking, described: "Arrogant man" as "he, who desires to appear more than he is or passes for. Arrogance is the attitude one has that he is absolutely superior; everyone else is an idiot."

In this memoir, I am merely giving my background as it was, to explain why I thought it was necessary for me to become a Specialist in medicine, which because of my upbringing and the level of my qualifications, I had come to expect. Being self-confident, I felt it was an essential aspiration that I could achieve for my life and work.

The story I am going to recount now, is a narrative patchwork, rich in repressed memory and with defiant vitality and the belligerent matter-of-fact truism. It belonged to a time of my life when I had to fend for myself without the backing of my family. A time when there was no specialist in any field of medicine in Manipur. A time when I tried to overcome my feelings of inadequacy because of my procrastination towards obtaining a postgraduate degree.

This is the story about my anachronism piled on escapism in an era of post-world-two in Manipur. There is nothing arousing about the story. It is only a pioneering diaspora story of my effort to get over myself, by eventually arriving in London 'on the wagon train to London' like Zane Grey's American Western, 'Santa Fe Trail'. You will probably guess where you are almost before you begin to read, which is to say, you will soon be aware that you don't know where you are at all.

I am mindful that, I might have been a teensy little bit responsible for the frustrated, cramped state I had found myself in. Though I write this light heartedly now, it was mindboggling at that time. But I was positive I would overcome it somehow. I was prepared to face the hard reality that I had to stand on my own two feet and not just dwell on privilege-inflated ideas.

History gets closer as time runs faster at my age. It belonged to an epoch, more than 75 years ago in 1945 when there was not even a single MBBS-qualified doctor in Manipur. It began in an eon, when Manipur was entering a new era of modern civilisation with the coming of advanced scientific modern (Western) medicine, which started in the West, after the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century.

Manipur, just before the war and after, had a handful doctors with diplomas in Medicine (LMP = Licentiate Medical Practitioner).They had helped to save a lot of lives with the knowledge they acquired at Berry White Medical School in Dibrugarh, the parent Institute of Assam Medical College, the first Medical College in Northeast India.

Author in 1948

The British Empire building simply neglected Manipur as it was not cost-effective. There were only nascent medical services. When the Japan Lan (WWII) ended in 1945, medical practice in Imphal was rudimentary and non-existent in the villages of the valley and the hill areas of Manipur.

The last British time doctor in Imphal with the designation of Civil Surgeon, was a Bengali, Dr Gangesh. In 1952, my father took me to see him when I returned from Bombay with weight loss and constant abdominal discomfort that could not have been diagnosed by specialists in Bombay. He gave me a prescription of Homeopathic medicine. It was in 1968 when my ailment was diagnosed as Irritable Bowel Syndrome during my studies in Edinburgh.

In the early 1950s only one doctor with MBBS degree had arrived. Dr Nando Roy whose father was also a doctor with LMP diploma. As he had done his training in surgery (House surgeon) as a trainee graduate, he soon became the surgeon in charge of the only Civil Hospital in Imphal. Dr Karam Gopal (LMP) acted as the anaesthetist, using the basic ether and chloroform anaesthesia. They however, did a really good job indeed.

The transformative impact of the Japan Lan was as much responsible for the postwar development in medical practice in Manipur as for political turning points. Manipuris began to reinvent themselves and remained relevant to the changing modern world. They unleashed a process of revolution in 'nation building' that transformed culture, society, religion and the practice of scientific medicine.

By 1980s, there was a tremendous improvement in the 'standard of care' in medicine in Manipur, with the arrival of trained 'specialists' in several disciplines. A medical specialist is a person devoted to a particular branch of medicine by virtue of advanced training. A 'standard of care' is the level of care that is widely accepted in the medical community, as appropriate treatment based on scientific evidence and in collaboration between medical professionals involved in the treatment of a given condition.

Imphal is now cluttered with all kinds of medical specialists and there are modern hospitals with all the mod cons and an array of modern scientific equipment. Gone are the days when a few Manipuris who could afford, would go to Dibrugarh for certain diseases that could not be diagnosed in Imphal due to lack of medical acumen of the doctors or lack of diagnostic tools or both. Some would go for fairly routine surgical operations. Those who could not afford, naturally would die.

Many patients also would die in the hands of a maiba (indigenous doctor) who would diagnose a person with abdominal swelling with fluid (Ascites) due to liver cirrhosis as a result of malnutrition, as the ill- effects of encountering a Lairen – Lairen Oknaba. They would treat the patient with Thou Touba (Propitiation of the evil spirits). Meiteis are stubbornly attached to rituals far more than to our beliefs.

Those were many medical conditions at which the hoity-toity would take umbrage at the very idea of expertise of a doctor. The patients of course, would die. Those beliefs that ran counter to worldview of modern medicine was difficult to oppose, as it was the component of religion.

Before the establishment of Medical College in Dibrugarh, many patients used to go to the Welsh Mission Hospital in Shillong for major operations as at that time one Doctor Robert Hughes was quite well-known. He was famous for performing the first lower segment Caesarean section without antibiotics. I also did it many years later in Churachandpur as an emergency and in the absence of any antibiotic.

While trying to find a balance between humility and confidence for alpha and beta readers through the entire narrative, there might be lexes that may sound assertive. If there are, I would like to distance myself from them. There is nothing noble in being superior to our fellow man.

The story began long years ago, when I was a newly qualified doctor in 1964 in Imphal. I came back home with a profusion of pride and prejudice, and fairly proficient in the practice of medicine but up to a limit of my training, and how I came to London with a grand idea of improving the standard of practice of medicine in Imphal on return. Paradoxically, I ended up living in the UK, instead.

To serve as a traditional beginning, let me launch this narrative with a poem after my heart. The poem is titled Mont Blanc. It was one of the bests by the English romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelly, which I read in the English language classes at college.

The poem makes me recapitulate whether my life has streamed from nothing to something or from something to nothing. It is also intended to create an effect, and to further the main purpose of this storyline, as to why I migrated to the UK and what has become of my life. And, whether my own ethical antennae were blunted by leaving my own country and making England my home.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in a small market town of Horsham in Surrey, south of the River Thames. He died from Tuberculosis very young at the age of 29 when his boat capsized in a sudden storm, off the coast of the Gulf of Spezia in Italy.

Mont Blanc is the tallest peak, 4,810 metre, in the Alps Mountains in Europe, which stretches from Italy through France to Switzerland. He wrote the poem in 1816 as an Ode, while travelling to Chamonix Valley in the French Alps, after holidaying by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. 'Ode' is a lyrical poem with an outpouring of praise of an individual, an idea, or an event. English poets often use it with an emotive and literary language.

Percy Shelley was Lord Byron's contemporary. Byron, an English romantic poet, was famous for his epic poem of Don Juan, a great womaniser Spanish legend, as a man easily seduced by women. Byron himself was more famous/infamous for his various love affairs and incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augustus Maria Leigh (nee Byron).

Only the first of the 5 stanzas of the poem is quoted here. It is followed with a critique by Michael O'Neill. Percy Shelley was fortunate that he had a famous wife, Mary Shelley, who is immortal with her novel Frankenstein (1818). She survived him. Without her, young Percy would have faded from public view. Mary also wrote Frankenstein, while holidaying in a village by Lake Geneva in 1816.

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
[Percy Bysshe Shelley]

The poet Shelley says a 'feeble brook' is not simply a tributary to the 'vast river'. Instead, the river is said to 'burst and race' over its – the brook's – rocks – thus introducing the question of whether a brook is still a brook when a river runs in its channel. He is talking about the changeableness of the identity of any individual entity. For the brook, in becoming part of the river, both loses its identity as a brook and transcends itself, gaining access to a forcefulness it never had as a 'feeble brook'.


Author's website: drimsingh.com