The Centenarian Healer of Kolkata

On Christmas Day in 1901, in the quiet village of Kumrava in Bihar’s Nawada district, a child was born into a family of Unani physicians. His father, Mohammad Mohibbudin, was a hakim. The boy was named Syed Mohammad Sharfuddin Quadri. He would live to be 114, walk beside Mahatma Gandhi, and heal thousands without ever asking for a fee.

As a young man he joined the freedom struggle. In 1930 he marched with Gandhi on the Dandi Salt March and later shared a prison cell with him in Cuttack during the Civil Disobedience Movement. The experience of those years of sacrifice never left him.

In the mid-1930s the family settled in Calcutta. There Sharfuddin established the Swadeshi Dawakhana on Haji Mohammed Mohsin Square. Every morning after Fajr prayer he walked to his modest chamber and stayed until noon, examining more than a hundred patients a day—free of charge. He diagnosed by feeling the pulse, prepared medicines from herbs, roots and natural substances, and specialised in conditions such as infertility. He treated India’s first President, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, for breathlessness in 1942–43 with the same quiet care he gave the poorest neighbour.

He helped found the Calcutta Unani Medical College and Hospital and launched the magazine Hikmat-e-Bangala to keep the traditional system alive. In his Ripon Street neighbourhood he was simply “Hakim Sahab”—the doctor who healed with medicine and affection. He drank neem juice daily, walked after work, and remained active well into his second century.

In 2007, at the age of 106, the Government of India conferred the Padma Bhushan upon him for his contributions to Unani medicine and the freedom movement. He accepted the honour with characteristic humility, still more concerned about a proper waiting shed for his patients than about medals.

Hakim Syed Mohammad Sharfuddin Quadri passed away in Kolkata on 30 December 2015, three days after his 114th birthday, survived by his children. In the lanes of Ripon Street and in the memory of all who sat before him, the image remains of an old man rising before dawn, walking to his clinic, and offering the ancient wisdom of Unani healing without price—patriot, physician, and living example of selfless service.