An Indian American who wrote about pioneering American and Indian women in a Bihar town has won a 74-year-old award that salutes media that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.”
Jyoti Thottam, daughter of an Indian nurse settled in the United States, has won the Christopher Award for her book, “Sisters of Mokama: The Pioneering Women Who Brought Hope and Healing to In-dia.”
Thottam, a senior New York Times Opinion editor, wrote about Americans and Indians – like her mother – who cared for all who came to their hospital in Mokama, a town some 100 km southeast of Patna, the Bihar capital, during the tumultuous period after WWII and the Partition of India.
Her mother, born in 1946 in the southern Indian state of Kerala, left home at the age of 15 and traveled to Bihar, which was among the bloodiest regions of Partition, to study nursing at Mokama’s Nazareth Hospital.
Fascinated by her mother’s story, Thottam set out to dis-cover the full story of Nazareth Hospital, which had been established in 1947 by the six Sisters of Charity of Nazareth nuns.
With no knowledge of Hindi, and the awareness that they would likely never see their families again, the sisters had traveled to Mokama. They opened the hospital a year later and soon began recruiting young Indian women as nursing students.