Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences seal — Sevagram

Manimala Choudhary

Secretary, Kasturba Health Society

b. 1923, Bengal   ·   d. 26 February 2002, Sevagram

Tenure: 1948 – 2002

Founder of Kasturba Health Society • Builder of MGIMS • Chhoti Behenji of Sevagram

She arrived in Sevagram having already lived several lifetimes. She had survived tuberculosis, a lobectomy, years in a sanatorium, nursing training in Lahore and Patna and Solapur, a marriage she could not fully inhabit, and a separation from her daughter that would never entirely heal. She was twenty-seven years old. She had come because Mahatma Gandhi told her to. On her way back to join the ashram, she heard on the radio that Gandhi had been shot dead.

She came anyway.

That decision — to continue toward a place whose animating spirit had just been extinguished — tells you most of what you need to know about Manimala Roy Chaudhary, known to everyone in Sevagram as Chhoti Behenji, the little elder sister, counterpart and complement to Dr. Sushila Nayar’s Badi Behenji. She was Secretary of the Kasturba Health Society from its founding in 1964 until 1988. She supervised the construction of MGIMS — its operation theatres, wards, lecture halls, hostels, kitchen, water supply, library. She helped found the first nursing school in rural India. She built a school for the children of staff. She outlasted nearly everyone around her, living in Guru Nanak Colony, Sevagram, until her death on February 26, 2002 — fifty-four years after she first arrived.

No medical degree. No administrative qualification. Just an absolute clarity about what she was there to do.

Bengal, Tuberculosis, and the Long Road to Sevagram

Manimala was born in Bengal in 1923 — the exact date unrecorded, as with so much of her early life. Her family was elite: her uncle was a distinguished High Court judge, her brothers were educated in England as barristers. Her father had become a sanyasi after her mother’s death, leaving four children to be raised by relatives. Loss and displacement marked her from the beginning.

She was married after matriculation to a doctor serving the French government in Kakinada. She was still a teenager. Within a few years, tuberculosis found her — the same disease that had already taken her younger brother, brought back from England along with his barrister’s degree.

She left her one-year-old daughter with her mother-in-law and traveled to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Kausani, in the hills of what is now Uttarakhand. The year was sometime in the early 1940s. Streptomycin had not yet been discovered. Isoniazid did not yet exist. The treatment prescribed was rest, fresh air, and nutritious food. She stayed for almost four years.

When her family’s money ran out after the first two years, she began knitting sweaters and shawls to pay her way. She also began nursing the other inmates — feeding them, educating them, sitting with them. The surgeon in charge noticed. He offered to send her to Lahore for formal nursing training at the medical college there. She went.

In Lahore she spent four years. She learned to read and write Gurmukhi and Urdu. She underwent a pulmonary lobectomy — part of her diseased lung removed — and recovered. She completed her nursing training and then kept going, traveling to Patna and Solapur for further specialisation in nursing administration and surgical nursing.

By the time she returned to Kakinada, her daughter was nearly ten years old. Manimala tried to resume the life of a doctor’s wife in a prosperous household. Within months, she knew she could not. The training she had put herself through, the suffering she had witnessed and survived, had made her into something that a comfortable domestic life could not contain. She was restless with a purpose she had not yet found.

Gandhi’s Instruction

A distant relative — Sarojini Naidu — suggested she visit Gandhi at Sevagram. Her sister lived in Nagpur, nearby. She went.

Gandhi listened to her and then directed her to Dr. Sushila Nayar, who had recently established a small five-bed hospital in Sevagram. The instruction was simple. The consequences were vast. Manimala returned to Calcutta to pack her things. On the journey back to Sevagram, the news came through: Gandhi had been assassinated on January 30, 1948.

She did not turn back.

She arrived in Sevagram and was placed under the guidance of Barbara Hartland — renamed Vasantiben by Gandhi — an Englishwoman who had volunteered at the ashram since 1945 and helped run its self-help groups and the dispensary that Dr. Sushila Nayar had established. When Hartland returned to England after Gandhi’s death, she handed every responsibility to Manimala. Manimala became matron of Kasturba Hospital, managing the wards, the maternity and child welfare centre, and the growing stream of patients from Sevagram and the surrounding villages.

She was not prepared for what she found. Coming from an elite Bengali family, she was taken aback by the scarcity — of water, of food variety, of basic infrastructure. She took offence the first time a villager called her Bai, a word that carried derogatory connotations in north and eastern India. She learned Marathi. She learned what Bai meant in Maharashtra — respect, familiarity, affection. She became Mothi Daktarin Bai to the villagers: the tall lady doctor, so called because she stood taller than Dr. Sushila Nayar. She wore the word with pride.

Yin and Yang

When Dr. Sushila Nayar returned from America in 1950 and eventually came back to Sevagram to lead the Kasturba Health Society in 1964, she found in Manimala Chaudhary her essential counterpart. Their natures were almost opposite. Dr. Nayar blazed — impulsive, visionary, impatient with obstacles, capable of summoning political will and financial resources through sheer force of personality. Manimala was calm. She absorbed the energy around her and translated it into systems, buildings, protocols, and relationships.

Together, Badi Behenji and Chhoti Behenji built MGIMS.

It was Manimala who supervised the physical construction of the institution — the operation theatres, the wards, the lecture halls, the hostels, the kitchen, the water supply, the solar panels, the library. While Dr. Nayar secured the funds and the faculty and the government approvals, Manimala stood on the building sites, managed the contractors, and made the decisions that turned blueprints into functional spaces.

She had a quality rare in institutions: she could identify talent and potential in people that formal credentials would have dismissed. She hired and trained men and women from the surrounding villages — people without degrees or professional experience — and built them into the administrative and support backbone of MGIMS. This occasionally irritated her MD-holding colleagues. She was not deterred. Her experience had taught her to see what formal education sometimes obscures: the human being in front of her, and what they were capable of becoming.

She managed principals. Dr. B.G. Kane, the first principal of MGIMS, reported to her. So did Dr. I.D. Singh, Dr. M.L. Sharma, and Dr. K.S. Sachdeva. They were doctors and academics. She was a nurse. They respected her anyway — for her integrity, her simplicity, and the quality of her judgment. She guided them not through authority but through the accumulated wisdom of someone who had been building this institution since before any of them arrived.

She maintained Gandhian practice throughout: khadi clothing, community meals, prayer meetings, shramdaan, yoga. She ensured MGIMS extended its services to neighbouring ashrams, including Vinoba Bhave’s ashram at Pavnar. She helped establish the first nursing school in rural India in partnership with the Catholic Mission. That school has since grown into a degree college. She founded Kasturba Vidya Mandir, the school that educated the children of MGIMS staff — supported by the wives of senior doctors who gave their time to make it work. She encouraged staff to form a cooperative housing society; many of the families who lived on campus in rented quarters retired to houses they owned.

The Bullock Cart and the Insurance Scheme

Long before the Kasturba Health Society was formally registered, Manimala and Dr. Anant Ranade were riding bullock carts through the villages of Vidarbha at harvest time, collecting jowar as health insurance premium. A handful from one family, a sack from another — voluntary contributions that entitled rural families to hospital care at Kasturba. It was a moral gesture before it was a financial scheme: the recognition that health was not a commodity to be purchased in illness but a shared responsibility maintained in good health.

The scheme formalised over the years. Families paid ₹10 annually, then ₹35, then ₹600. By 2024, it covered nearly four lakh individuals. It remains one of the oldest community health insurance models in India, studied and cited by researchers and policymakers. It began in a bullock cart. Manimala was in it.

Confidante, Counsellor, Conscience

Her relationship with Dr. Sushila Nayar was the central professional bond of both their lives. It was built on deep mutual trust and — crucially — on Manimala’s willingness to speak plainly. She told Dr. Nayar what she thought, even when it was not what Dr. Nayar wanted to hear. In an institution whose director commanded considerable authority, this was not a small thing.

It was Manimala who, in 1964, traveled to Delhi with Dr. Anant Ranade and refused to leave until Dr. Nayar agreed to return to Sevagram and lead the newly forming Kasturba Health Society. “You must not refuse to help,” she told her. It was characteristic — direct, urgent, entirely in the service of something larger than either of them.

As Dr. Nayar’s health declined in her final years, Manimala’s presence became an anchor. When Dr. Nayar died on January 3, 2001, Manimala was among those who had known her longest and most completely.

What She Carried

Her daughter Bithika never forgave the separation. She grew up resenting Gandhi and Sevagram for taking her mother away during her earliest years — a wound understandable to anyone who thinks about it honestly. She chose to remain a homemaker, keeping her distance from the world her mother had inhabited. But Manimala’s two granddaughters — Prabhati Lahiri, MGIMS batch of 1983, and Deepika Lahiri, batch of 1990 — both became doctors, both received their degrees from the institution their grandmother had helped build. Something passed across the generation that had withheld it.

Manimala spent seventeen years in Sevagram after stepping down as Secretary in 1988, living in Guru Nanak Colony among the doctors and staff who were her family. She was twice nominated for the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation Award for lifetime achievement. She was present at the deaths of colleagues she had worked alongside for decades.

She died on February 26, 2002, at home in Guru Nanak Colony. Nearly all of Sevagram and the surrounding villages came to pay their respects. She was buried among the people she had served.

Two years earlier, almost to the day, Dr. Sushila Nayar had died. The two women had arrived in Sevagram within months of each other, both in their twenties, both drawn by Gandhi’s vision, both without any clear understanding of where it would take them. They had built something that neither could have built alone. They left within two years of each other, as if the institution they had created was finally strong enough to stand without them.

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Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences seal — Sevagram

Manimala Choudhary

Founder of Kasturba Health Society • Builder of MGIMS • Chhoti Behenji of Sevagram

She arrived in Sevagram having already lived several lifetimes. She had survived tuberculosis, a lobectomy, years in a sanatorium, nursing training in Lahore and Patna and Solapur, a marriage she could not fully inhabit, and a separation from her daughter that would never entirely heal. She was twenty-seven years old. She had come because Mahatma Gandhi told her to. On her way back to join the ashram, she heard on the radio that Gandhi had been shot dead.

She came anyway.

That decision — to continue toward a place whose animating spirit had just been extinguished — tells you most of what you need to know about Manimala Roy Chaudhary, known to everyone in Sevagram as Chhoti Behenji, the little elder sister, counterpart and complement to Dr. Sushila Nayar’s Badi Behenji. She was Secretary of the Kasturba Health Society from its founding in 1964 until 1988. She supervised the construction of MGIMS — its operation theatres, wards, lecture halls, hostels, kitchen, water supply, library. She helped found the first nursing school in rural India. She built a school for the children of staff. She outlasted nearly everyone around her, living in Guru Nanak Colony, Sevagram, until her death on February 26, 2002 — fifty-four years after she first arrived.

No medical degree. No administrative qualification. Just an absolute clarity about what she was there to do.

Bengal, Tuberculosis, and the Long Road to Sevagram

Manimala was born in Bengal in 1923 — the exact date unrecorded, as with so much of her early life. Her family was elite: her uncle was a distinguished High Court judge, her brothers were educated in England as barristers. Her father had become a sanyasi after her mother’s death, leaving four children to be raised by relatives. Loss and displacement marked her from the beginning.

She was married after matriculation to a doctor serving the French government in Kakinada. She was still a teenager. Within a few years, tuberculosis found her — the same disease that had already taken her younger brother, brought back from England along with his barrister’s degree.

She left her one-year-old daughter with her mother-in-law and traveled to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Kausani, in the hills of what is now Uttarakhand. The year was sometime in the early 1940s. Streptomycin had not yet been discovered. Isoniazid did not yet exist. The treatment prescribed was rest, fresh air, and nutritious food. She stayed for almost four years.

When her family’s money ran out after the first two years, she began knitting sweaters and shawls to pay her way. She also began nursing the other inmates — feeding them, educating them, sitting with them. The surgeon in charge noticed. He offered to send her to Lahore for formal nursing training at the medical college there. She went.

In Lahore she spent four years. She learned to read and write Gurmukhi and Urdu. She underwent a pulmonary lobectomy — part of her diseased lung removed — and recovered. She completed her nursing training and then kept going, traveling to Patna and Solapur for further specialisation in nursing administration and surgical nursing.

By the time she returned to Kakinada, her daughter was nearly ten years old. Manimala tried to resume the life of a doctor’s wife in a prosperous household. Within months, she knew she could not. The training she had put herself through, the suffering she had witnessed and survived, had made her into something that a comfortable domestic life could not contain. She was restless with a purpose she had not yet found.

Gandhi’s Instruction

A distant relative — Sarojini Naidu — suggested she visit Gandhi at Sevagram. Her sister lived in Nagpur, nearby. She went.

Gandhi listened to her and then directed her to Dr. Sushila Nayar, who had recently established a small five-bed hospital in Sevagram. The instruction was simple. The consequences were vast. Manimala returned to Calcutta to pack her things. On the journey back to Sevagram, the news came through: Gandhi had been assassinated on January 30, 1948.

She did not turn back.

She arrived in Sevagram and was placed under the guidance of Barbara Hartland — renamed Vasantiben by Gandhi — an Englishwoman who had volunteered at the ashram since 1945 and helped run its self-help groups and the dispensary that Dr. Sushila Nayar had established. When Hartland returned to England after Gandhi’s death, she handed every responsibility to Manimala. Manimala became matron of Kasturba Hospital, managing the wards, the maternity and child welfare centre, and the growing stream of patients from Sevagram and the surrounding villages.

She was not prepared for what she found. Coming from an elite Bengali family, she was taken aback by the scarcity — of water, of food variety, of basic infrastructure. She took offence the first time a villager called her Bai, a word that carried derogatory connotations in north and eastern India. She learned Marathi. She learned what Bai meant in Maharashtra — respect, familiarity, affection. She became Mothi Daktarin Bai to the villagers: the tall lady doctor, so called because she stood taller than Dr. Sushila Nayar. She wore the word with pride.

Yin and Yang

When Dr. Sushila Nayar returned from America in 1950 and eventually came back to Sevagram to lead the Kasturba Health Society in 1964, she found in Manimala Chaudhary her essential counterpart. Their natures were almost opposite. Dr. Nayar blazed — impulsive, visionary, impatient with obstacles, capable of summoning political will and financial resources through sheer force of personality. Manimala was calm. She absorbed the energy around her and translated it into systems, buildings, protocols, and relationships.

Together, Badi Behenji and Chhoti Behenji built MGIMS.

It was Manimala who supervised the physical construction of the institution — the operation theatres, the wards, the lecture halls, the hostels, the kitchen, the water supply, the solar panels, the library. While Dr. Nayar secured the funds and the faculty and the government approvals, Manimala stood on the building sites, managed the contractors, and made the decisions that turned blueprints into functional spaces.

She had a quality rare in institutions: she could identify talent and potential in people that formal credentials would have dismissed. She hired and trained men and women from the surrounding villages — people without degrees or professional experience — and built them into the administrative and support backbone of MGIMS. This occasionally irritated her MD-holding colleagues. She was not deterred. Her experience had taught her to see what formal education sometimes obscures: the human being in front of her, and what they were capable of becoming.

She managed principals. Dr. B.G. Kane, the first principal of MGIMS, reported to her. So did Dr. I.D. Singh, Dr. M.L. Sharma, and Dr. K.S. Sachdeva. They were doctors and academics. She was a nurse. They respected her anyway — for her integrity, her simplicity, and the quality of her judgment. She guided them not through authority but through the accumulated wisdom of someone who had been building this institution since before any of them arrived.

She maintained Gandhian practice throughout: khadi clothing, community meals, prayer meetings, shramdaan, yoga. She ensured MGIMS extended its services to neighbouring ashrams, including Vinoba Bhave’s ashram at Pavnar. She helped establish the first nursing school in rural India in partnership with the Catholic Mission. That school has since grown into a degree college. She founded Kasturba Vidya Mandir, the school that educated the children of MGIMS staff — supported by the wives of senior doctors who gave their time to make it work. She encouraged staff to form a cooperative housing society; many of the families who lived on campus in rented quarters retired to houses they owned.

The Bullock Cart and the Insurance Scheme

Long before the Kasturba Health Society was formally registered, Manimala and Dr. Anant Ranade were riding bullock carts through the villages of Vidarbha at harvest time, collecting jowar as health insurance premium. A handful from one family, a sack from another — voluntary contributions that entitled rural families to hospital care at Kasturba. It was a moral gesture before it was a financial scheme: the recognition that health was not a commodity to be purchased in illness but a shared responsibility maintained in good health.

The scheme formalised over the years. Families paid ₹10 annually, then ₹35, then ₹600. By 2024, it covered nearly four lakh individuals. It remains one of the oldest community health insurance models in India, studied and cited by researchers and policymakers. It began in a bullock cart. Manimala was in it.

Confidante, Counsellor, Conscience

Her relationship with Dr. Sushila Nayar was the central professional bond of both their lives. It was built on deep mutual trust and — crucially — on Manimala’s willingness to speak plainly. She told Dr. Nayar what she thought, even when it was not what Dr. Nayar wanted to hear. In an institution whose director commanded considerable authority, this was not a small thing.

It was Manimala who, in 1964, traveled to Delhi with Dr. Anant Ranade and refused to leave until Dr. Nayar agreed to return to Sevagram and lead the newly forming Kasturba Health Society. “You must not refuse to help,” she told her. It was characteristic — direct, urgent, entirely in the service of something larger than either of them.

As Dr. Nayar’s health declined in her final years, Manimala’s presence became an anchor. When Dr. Nayar died on January 3, 2001, Manimala was among those who had known her longest and most completely.

What She Carried

Her daughter Bithika never forgave the separation. She grew up resenting Gandhi and Sevagram for taking her mother away during her earliest years — a wound understandable to anyone who thinks about it honestly. She chose to remain a homemaker, keeping her distance from the world her mother had inhabited. But Manimala’s two granddaughters — Prabhati Lahiri, MGIMS batch of 1983, and Deepika Lahiri, batch of 1990 — both became doctors, both received their degrees from the institution their grandmother had helped build. Something passed across the generation that had withheld it.

Manimala spent seventeen years in Sevagram after stepping down as Secretary in 1988, living in Guru Nanak Colony among the doctors and staff who were her family. She was twice nominated for the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation Award for lifetime achievement. She was present at the deaths of colleagues she had worked alongside for decades.

She died on February 26, 2002, at home in Guru Nanak Colony. Nearly all of Sevagram and the surrounding villages came to pay their respects. She was buried among the people she had served.

Two years earlier, almost to the day, Dr. Sushila Nayar had died. The two women had arrived in Sevagram within months of each other, both in their twenties, both drawn by Gandhi’s vision, both without any clear understanding of where it would take them. They had built something that neither could have built alone. They left within two years of each other, as if the institution they had created was finally strong enough to stand without them.