Lt. Col. S.K. Chatterjee

Professor & Head of Community Medicine · MGIMS

b. 3 February 1921, Jamalpur, Bihar   ·   d. 3 November 2020

Tenure: 1976 – 1982

Five medical colleges offered him a position when he retired from the army. Four were in cities. He chose the fifth — a rural campus in a cotton-farming village in Vidarbha. He arrived on 9 March 1976. His salary was the same as his army pay. He did not consider this a sacrifice worth mentioning.

Professor & Head of Community Medicine · Six Years at Sevagram · The Only Man in Sevagram

When Lt. Col. Sudhir Kumar Chatterjee retired from the Indian Army Medical Corps on February 29, 1976, after twenty-five years of service, five medical colleges offered him a position. He had just completed his MD in Preventive and Social Medicine at the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune, at the age of fifty-four. He was experienced, qualified, and entirely employable. Four of those colleges were in cities. The fifth was MGIMS, Sevagram — a rural campus on the edge of a cotton-farming village in Vidarbha, built on Gandhian principles, run by a woman whom he would later describe, without irony, as the only man in Sevagram.

He chose Sevagram. He arrived on March 9, 1976. His monthly salary was ₹1,531 — the same as his army pay. He did not consider this a sacrifice worth mentioning. What mattered, as those who knew him understood, was not the salary but the work. And the work at Sevagram, he had decided, was the kind that mattered.

Railway Quarters, Jamalpur

He was born on February 3, 1921, in Baidya Para, Jamalpur, Bihar — the fifth of nine children in a household shaped by the rhythms of the Indian Railways, where his father worked. The family ethos was not complicated: discipline, education, duty. He attended Hari Sabha Bengali Medium School, then Eastern Railway Boys’ High School, then Haji Mohsin College in Hooghly. He entered Calcutta National Medical College in 1939 and graduated in 1945.

The army followed. He joined the Indian Army Medical Corps in 1949, the same year he completed his Diploma in Public Health Administration at the All India Institute of Hygiene. Field postings took him to Siliguri, Srinagar, Gaya, and across the subcontinent — the life of a military doctor in newly independent India, making quick decisions in difficult places, learning that medicine practised under constraint was still medicine, and often the most consequential kind.

His daughter Gopa, who was nine years old when India went to war with Pakistan, remembered what those years felt like from the other side of the uniform: “How dreadful were the days when war broke out with Pakistan. Communication was scarce, and the uncertainty was agonizing. We would wait anxiously, hearts heavy with worry, longing for any news of his safety.”

He survived the wars. He moved through postings in Agra, Shillong, Delhi, Bombay, and finally Pune, where his role shifted from field medicine to teaching. At the Armed Forces Medical College, he spent four years as Reader and then Associate Professor in Preventive and Social Medicine. He was fifty-three when he enrolled for his MD. He obtained it in 1975. Then the army released him, and Sevagram called.

Khadi and a British Hat

He arrived at MGIMS as an Associate Professor and was promoted to Professor in November 1980. He headed the Department of Community Medicine through years in which the department was finding its shape — absorbing the legacy of Dr. B.K. Mahajan, who had left the previous month after building the village immersion programme and the GOPD from nothing, and pressing forward into the postgraduate training in community medicine that Mahajan had begun.

Colleagues remembered two things about him immediately. The first was his bearing. A quarter-century in the army had produced a particular quality of presence — erect, precise, economical with words, the kind of man who said “meet me in the department office” when he had something serious to discuss, and who meant it. His instructions were crisp. His expectations were clear.

The second thing they remembered was the hat. In Sevagram, where the Gandhian ethos meant khadi was standard dress for those who took the institution’s founding principles seriously, Chatterjee wore khadi — and paired it with a British-style hat. The combination was entirely his own: the military man who had absorbed the village, the retired officer who had chosen rural service, the Bengali from Bihar who had come to Maharashtra and put on its cotton while keeping something of his own formation visible on his head.

He had a particular phrase he returned to when describing Dr. Sushila Nayar. “The only man in Sevagram is Dr. Sushila Nayar,” he would tell colleagues — not as a comment on gender, he would explain, but as the most precise description of authority he could offer. Then he would tell the story. In April 1966, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was preparing to visit the United States, her ambassador B.K. Nehru was asked how President Johnson should address her. She answered without hesitation: “You can tell him that my cabinet ministers call me ‘Sir.'” Chatterjee told this story to explain Nayar. The parallel was clear to anyone who had encountered both women.

His daughter Gopa was in his classroom. She had secured admission to MGIMS in the same year he joined — 1976 — so that father and daughter arrived on campus together, one to teach, one to learn. His son Rajib graduated three years later, in 1979. The campus was, for those years, also home.

What Sevagram Did to a Soldier

The transition from military to civilian institutional life is rarely seamless, and Sevagram’s particular character — its Gandhian quietness, its deliberate simplicity, its ethos of service that asked for no salute — offered the army’s structures and habits nowhere to rest. Chatterjee absorbed this without apparent difficulty. He wore the khadi. He attended the department. He did the work.

What Sevagram gave him in return was duration — time in one place, with one community, long enough to see the students he had taught go on to practice and teach themselves. Dr. Ashok Mehendale, who graduated from MGIMS in 1976 and would eventually head the same department three decades later, was among those who passed through his classroom. The continuity mattered. The army had moved him constantly; Sevagram held him still long enough to accumulate something more than competence.

He officially retired in February 1981, then continued on contract until July 1982. When he finally left, the department he and Mahajan had built was a functioning entity — a postgraduate programme, a community medicine curriculum grounded in fieldwork rather than lecture halls, and a generation of doctors who had spent ten days sleeping on charpoys in Vidarbha villages and understood, in their bodies, what the epidemiological textbooks meant.

Still Teaching

He did not stop. In 1983 he joined Charutar Arogya Mandal — now Pramukhswami Medical College. In January 1986 he moved to Pravara Rural Medical College in Loni, teaching until December 1988. He was sixty-seven. The Royal Institute of Health and Hygiene, London, made him a Fellow in 1986. He was deputed to Nairobi and Tanzania under the Aga Khan Project. The career continued to expand outward, as it had throughout his life.

In his final years in Pune, he led a community tuberculosis surveillance team. On Sundays — not weekdays, Sundays — he conducted home visits, screening patients, counselling them, checking that they were taking their medication. He was, by that point, well into his eighties. The habit of going to where the patient was, rather than waiting for the patient to come, had been built at MGIMS and had never left him.

February in Pune

He lost his wife Gita in May 2017, after sixty-six years of marriage. The family had begun planning a centenary celebration for his hundredth birthday — February 3, 2021, the same date on which, a century earlier, he had been born in a railway town in Bihar. He died in November 2020, three months before the party.

There is something fitting, though not consoling, in the near-miss. He had spent his life just ahead of schedule — obtaining his MD at fifty-four, joining a new institution at fifty-five, still doing home visits in his eighties. That the hundredth birthday arrived without him is the kind of irony that a man of his precision would have noted, filed, and declined to make a fuss about.

His two children both graduated from the campus where he taught. His students went on to build the discipline he had helped establish. The khadi and the British hat are gone. The department remains.

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Lt. Col. S.K. Chatterjee

Professor & Head of Community Medicine · Six Years at Sevagram · The Only Man in Sevagram

When Lt. Col. Sudhir Kumar Chatterjee retired from the Indian Army Medical Corps on February 29, 1976, after twenty-five years of service, five medical colleges offered him a position. He had just completed his MD in Preventive and Social Medicine at the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune, at the age of fifty-four. He was experienced, qualified, and entirely employable. Four of those colleges were in cities. The fifth was MGIMS, Sevagram — a rural campus on the edge of a cotton-farming village in Vidarbha, built on Gandhian principles, run by a woman whom he would later describe, without irony, as the only man in Sevagram.

He chose Sevagram. He arrived on March 9, 1976. His monthly salary was ₹1,531 — the same as his army pay. He did not consider this a sacrifice worth mentioning. What mattered, as those who knew him understood, was not the salary but the work. And the work at Sevagram, he had decided, was the kind that mattered.

Railway Quarters, Jamalpur

He was born on February 3, 1921, in Baidya Para, Jamalpur, Bihar — the fifth of nine children in a household shaped by the rhythms of the Indian Railways, where his father worked. The family ethos was not complicated: discipline, education, duty. He attended Hari Sabha Bengali Medium School, then Eastern Railway Boys’ High School, then Haji Mohsin College in Hooghly. He entered Calcutta National Medical College in 1939 and graduated in 1945.

The army followed. He joined the Indian Army Medical Corps in 1949, the same year he completed his Diploma in Public Health Administration at the All India Institute of Hygiene. Field postings took him to Siliguri, Srinagar, Gaya, and across the subcontinent — the life of a military doctor in newly independent India, making quick decisions in difficult places, learning that medicine practised under constraint was still medicine, and often the most consequential kind.

His daughter Gopa, who was nine years old when India went to war with Pakistan, remembered what those years felt like from the other side of the uniform: “How dreadful were the days when war broke out with Pakistan. Communication was scarce, and the uncertainty was agonizing. We would wait anxiously, hearts heavy with worry, longing for any news of his safety.”

He survived the wars. He moved through postings in Agra, Shillong, Delhi, Bombay, and finally Pune, where his role shifted from field medicine to teaching. At the Armed Forces Medical College, he spent four years as Reader and then Associate Professor in Preventive and Social Medicine. He was fifty-three when he enrolled for his MD. He obtained it in 1975. Then the army released him, and Sevagram called.

Khadi and a British Hat

He arrived at MGIMS as an Associate Professor and was promoted to Professor in November 1980. He headed the Department of Community Medicine through years in which the department was finding its shape — absorbing the legacy of Dr. B.K. Mahajan, who had left the previous month after building the village immersion programme and the GOPD from nothing, and pressing forward into the postgraduate training in community medicine that Mahajan had begun.

Colleagues remembered two things about him immediately. The first was his bearing. A quarter-century in the army had produced a particular quality of presence — erect, precise, economical with words, the kind of man who said “meet me in the department office” when he had something serious to discuss, and who meant it. His instructions were crisp. His expectations were clear.

The second thing they remembered was the hat. In Sevagram, where the Gandhian ethos meant khadi was standard dress for those who took the institution’s founding principles seriously, Chatterjee wore khadi — and paired it with a British-style hat. The combination was entirely his own: the military man who had absorbed the village, the retired officer who had chosen rural service, the Bengali from Bihar who had come to Maharashtra and put on its cotton while keeping something of his own formation visible on his head.

He had a particular phrase he returned to when describing Dr. Sushila Nayar. “The only man in Sevagram is Dr. Sushila Nayar,” he would tell colleagues — not as a comment on gender, he would explain, but as the most precise description of authority he could offer. Then he would tell the story. In April 1966, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was preparing to visit the United States, her ambassador B.K. Nehru was asked how President Johnson should address her. She answered without hesitation: “You can tell him that my cabinet ministers call me ‘Sir.'” Chatterjee told this story to explain Nayar. The parallel was clear to anyone who had encountered both women.

His daughter Gopa was in his classroom. She had secured admission to MGIMS in the same year he joined — 1976 — so that father and daughter arrived on campus together, one to teach, one to learn. His son Rajib graduated three years later, in 1979. The campus was, for those years, also home.

What Sevagram Did to a Soldier

The transition from military to civilian institutional life is rarely seamless, and Sevagram’s particular character — its Gandhian quietness, its deliberate simplicity, its ethos of service that asked for no salute — offered the army’s structures and habits nowhere to rest. Chatterjee absorbed this without apparent difficulty. He wore the khadi. He attended the department. He did the work.

What Sevagram gave him in return was duration — time in one place, with one community, long enough to see the students he had taught go on to practice and teach themselves. Dr. Ashok Mehendale, who graduated from MGIMS in 1976 and would eventually head the same department three decades later, was among those who passed through his classroom. The continuity mattered. The army had moved him constantly; Sevagram held him still long enough to accumulate something more than competence.

He officially retired in February 1981, then continued on contract until July 1982. When he finally left, the department he and Mahajan had built was a functioning entity — a postgraduate programme, a community medicine curriculum grounded in fieldwork rather than lecture halls, and a generation of doctors who had spent ten days sleeping on charpoys in Vidarbha villages and understood, in their bodies, what the epidemiological textbooks meant.

Still Teaching

He did not stop. In 1983 he joined Charutar Arogya Mandal — now Pramukhswami Medical College. In January 1986 he moved to Pravara Rural Medical College in Loni, teaching until December 1988. He was sixty-seven. The Royal Institute of Health and Hygiene, London, made him a Fellow in 1986. He was deputed to Nairobi and Tanzania under the Aga Khan Project. The career continued to expand outward, as it had throughout his life.

In his final years in Pune, he led a community tuberculosis surveillance team. On Sundays — not weekdays, Sundays — he conducted home visits, screening patients, counselling them, checking that they were taking their medication. He was, by that point, well into his eighties. The habit of going to where the patient was, rather than waiting for the patient to come, had been built at MGIMS and had never left him.

February in Pune

He lost his wife Gita in May 2017, after sixty-six years of marriage. The family had begun planning a centenary celebration for his hundredth birthday — February 3, 2021, the same date on which, a century earlier, he had been born in a railway town in Bihar. He died in November 2020, three months before the party.

There is something fitting, though not consoling, in the near-miss. He had spent his life just ahead of schedule — obtaining his MD at fifty-four, joining a new institution at fifty-five, still doing home visits in his eighties. That the hundredth birthday arrived without him is the kind of irony that a man of his precision would have noted, filed, and declined to make a fuss about.

His two children both graduated from the campus where he taught. His students went on to build the discipline he had helped establish. The khadi and the British hat are gone. The department remains.