The Dog Chain & Hospital Bed

On November 27, 1973, Aruna Shanbaug, a staff nurse at the KEM Hospital in Mumbai, was brutally attacked by a male sweeper, Sohanlal Valmiki. He raped and sodomised her, while strangling her with a dog chain

- Shweta Desai

RUBABDAR, a Marathi word which translates to intimidating, is how Vaishali Gawde, the former matron, remembers the aura of the late staff nurse Aruna Shanbaug at King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital at Parel, Mumbai.

Her dashing personality was offset by a sharp tongue and short temperament that simultaneously commanded admiration and respect from colleagues, patients and passersby.

“When she would go on the rounds in the hospital, strutting her way, we would be awestruck and intimidated at the same time. She was a strict disciplinarian, a stickler for rules, who would not tolerate any nonsense,” Gawde recalls of her senior colleague when she joined KEM as a nursing student in 1969. 

Four years later, on the morning of November 28, 1973, as Gawde entered the sprawling hospital premises to begin her duties in the main building, she was shocked by what she saw and heard. Shanbaug had been found by cleaners in a distressing state—lying in a pool of blood, naked, with a dog chain around her neck. “We could not believe that someone like Aruna could be violated like this by a Class IV employee. We all worked as a family and as a team, going on rounds together and checking the security of all buildings. It was terrifying to learn what had happened to her,” Gawde recalls.

The previous evening, 25-year-old Shanbaug was brutally attacked by a male sweeper, Sohanlal Valmiki, who raped and sodomised her, while strangling her with a dog chain in the basement of the Cardiac Vascular Thoracic (CVT) building. After the assault, he left her there with the chain still around her neck, cutting off oxygen to her brain. This led to a brain stem contusion, cervical cord injury and cortical blindness. The severe injuries left Shanbaug in a vegetative state, unable to move or speak.