Dr. Radheshyam Naik 

Professor & Head of Forensic Medicine · MGIMS

MBBS (Government Medical College, Nagpur) [1962]
MD Medicine (Government Medical College, Nagpur) [1970]
LLB (Nagpur) [1981]

b. 2 November 1938, Bahera, Chhattisgarh   ·   d. 1 April 2018

Tenure: 1977-2003

Professor & Head of Forensic Medicine · Twenty-Six Years at Sevagram · The Man Who Made Death Interesting

The day before he died, Dr. Bipin Tirpude drove out to Bahera — the ancestral village in Raipur district where Radheshyam Naik had chosen to spend the final chapter of his life. The Parkinson’s had slowed him, and the dementia had loosened some memories, but that afternoon, sitting with his oldest student — now the head of the very department he had built — Naik talked about Sevagram. He remembered the classrooms, the hostel, the boys and their parties. He asked, quietly, whether it might be possible to go back and visit.

Tirpude said yes. He began making arrangements — a lunch, a gathering of the old department staff, a small reunion in the place that had occupied Naik for more than two decades. On April 1, 2018, a Sunday, before any of it could happen, Naik died at home. He went the way he had lived: without fuss, without spectacle, without the bustle he had spent his whole career carefully avoiding.

The Zamindar’s Son from Bahera

Radheshyam Naik was born on November 2, 1938, in Bahera, a village eighty kilometres north of Durg in what is now Chhattisgarh. He arrived on Krishna Janmashtami, so his parents named him accordingly. His father, Shri Man Rakhan Lal, was a zamindar who would later give a substantial portion of his land to Vinobaji’s Bhoodan movement. The son inherited something of that willingness to hold things loosely.

He went to Government Medical College, Nagpur, earned his MBBS in 1962, and stayed for an MD in Medicine, completing it in 1970 under Dr. J.N. Berry — the legendary physician who ran the Department of Medicine with the quiet authority of someone who had seen everything and forgotten nothing. Three years under Berry left a mark. Naik emerged from them precise, unhurried, and constitutionally incapable of panic.

But medicine was not where he ended up. In those years, medical schools routinely pulled faculty from general medicine to staff their forensic departments — Forensic Medicine being the specialty nobody volunteered for. When Naik was asked to make the move, he made it without argument. He set about learning a new field with the same methodical thoroughness he had brought to the one he was leaving.

What followed was one of the stranger academic CVs in Indian medicine. To the MD in Medicine he added a Diploma in TB and Chest Diseases, then an LLB, then a Diploma in Business Management, then an MA in Public Administration, then an MA in Political Science. He studied law partly because a forensic physician who understands courts is worth more than one who does not, and partly because Naik simply liked to learn things. When he sat for his LLB finals, he topped the examination at Nagpur University. His first MD student, Dr. S.K. Singhal, topped the first year. Teacher and student attended law classes together in the early 1980s, sitting in the same lecture hall, taking the same notes. Neither seemed to find this arrangement unusual.

Making the Cadaver Interesting

Forensic Medicine has a structural disadvantage as a teaching subject: its patients are dead. Students who have spent their early clinical years learning to read a living body find themselves asked to redirect that attentiveness toward a corpse. Most resist. The subject had acquired a reputation as dull, mandatory, and to be survived rather than studied.

Naik understood this, and he met it head-on. His lectures were scheduled every Tuesday and Saturday, and they had a hundred percent attendance — not because he demanded it, but because students wanted to be there.

He used Bollywood. His two favourite films for the purpose were Waqt (1965) and Ittefaq (1969) — both crime films, both built around mysteries of identity and evidence — and he used scenes from them to anchor legal medicine concepts in images his students already carried. He owned two licensed 12-bore guns, and when the curriculum reached firearms injuries, he brought them out. The students examined them. The mechanism of injury was no longer abstract.

“Forensic Medicine is traditionally perceived as a dry subject,” said Dr. Ashok Mehendale, from the 1976 batch, “but Dr. Naik knew the art of injecting humour, spicing the tedious topics with humour and enlivening his classes. To the class he was a stress buster — jokes, witty metaphors, humorous similes, puns, sarcasm, or a funny story. He was an entertainer as well as an educator.”

The one-liners circulated long after graduation. His Chhattisgarhi-inflected Hindi mixed into English mid-sentence — not as an apology for imperfect language but as a genuine expression of someone thinking in several registers at once. Dr. Bipin Tirpude, who spent fifteen years working alongside him, remembered the lectures as improvised performances: the man knew his subject, trusted his audience, and rarely needed notes.

He also had the instinct of an institution-builder. In the early 1980s, before most medical schools in Maharashtra had moved in this direction, Naik started postgraduate training in Forensic Medicine at MGIMS. Over the next two decades, he guided fifteen MD students while simultaneously pushing to separate forensic autopsies from the general pathology workflow, establishing forensic medicine as a discipline with its own rigour and its own institutional territory.

He also, almost incidentally, ran the cine club. Sevagram in the late 1970s had no television. The campus was a long way from anything resembling entertainment. Naik — by then also warden of the boys’ hostel — began screening a film every weekend. The cine club ran for years, a weekly punctuation in the quiet of a village campus where evenings would otherwise have offered nothing but study.

The Commuter

He lived in Nagpur. He came to Sevagram on a scooter — one strategically stationed at each end of the commute, so that a scooter waited for him at Wardha station when he arrived by train, and another waited at Nagpur when he returned. The arrangement was purely practical, and he maintained it for years without complaint.

Dr. V.K. Gupta, from the 1976 batch, remembered him this way: “Cool in the classroom and well-versed with the subject matter, he was running the forensic department as a solo player. He never punished any hooligans. He was liberal with attendance and in the examination too.”

As hostel warden, his philosophy was similar. The boys made noise, threw parties, tested rules in the ways that boys always do. He watched with the expression of someone who had long since made peace with human nature. He was not lax so much as realistic — understanding that the energy that makes a student difficult to manage at twenty-two is often the same energy that makes him capable at forty.

His own son, Tarun, was in the MGIMS class of 1987 — Naik’s students were also his son’s classmates. Dr. Abhay Kelkar, from the same batch, remembered this without ambiguity: “I remember him for his impartial attitude towards his own son. No undue favours were ever granted to him.” The son had to sit the same examinations, answer the same questions, and earn the same passing marks as everyone else in the room.

Polite to a Fault

Dr. S.P. Kalantri was Naik’s neighbour for several years and also his physician. He wrote later: “Introverted, unassuming, and self-effacing, Dr. Naik was polite to a fault. Although he was armed with an MD in Medicine, he made light of his degree and played a perfect patient — listening to advice carefully and adhering to the treatment to the T.”

There is a particular kind of doctor — and Naik was one — who, having spent decades telling patients what to do, cannot bring himself to exercise any authority over his own care. He followed instructions. He did not bargain. He did not deploy his degree as a reason to second-guess. He simply listened, and complied, with the patience he had brought to everything else in his life.

After retirement he went to Nepal — Pokhara — and taught for several years at a medical school there, because the alternative was to stop teaching and that was not a serious option. He came back in 2014 and went to Bahera, the village where he had started.

What He Left

On the morning he died, the lunch in Sevagram was still being planned. His student was on the telephone. The tables had not yet been set.

He is survived by his wife; by Tarun, who operates at Chandulal Chandrakar Memorial Hospital in Bhilai; by Vishal, an engineer in Pune; and by Harsha, his daughter from the MGIMS batch of 1998, who is now in Manchester.

Three generations of students passed through his classrooms — from the 1975 batch to the 2004 batch. Somewhere in that span is almost every doctor currently practising forensic medicine in this part of India. They learned the subject from a man who had not chosen it, who had not trained for it in the conventional sense, who had simply been told to do it and had decided, without bitterness, to do it properly.

The Bollywood clips, the shotguns, the law classes with his own student, the weekend film screenings, the hundred-percent attendance on Tuesdays and Saturdays — these were the instruments of a teacher who had understood early that the subject was not the obstacle. The obstacle was indifference. And against indifference, he had a well-tested arsenal.

← Previous Dr. Nitin Gangane Director-Professor & Head of Pathology · Dean · MGIMS
⊞ All Architects
Next → Dr. Pratibha Narang Director-Professor & Head of Microbiology · Dean · Secretary, Kasturba Health Society · MGIMS

Dr. Radheshyam Naik 

Professor & Head of Forensic Medicine · Twenty-Six Years at Sevagram · The Man Who Made Death Interesting

The day before he died, Dr. Bipin Tirpude drove out to Bahera — the ancestral village in Raipur district where Radheshyam Naik had chosen to spend the final chapter of his life. The Parkinson’s had slowed him, and the dementia had loosened some memories, but that afternoon, sitting with his oldest student — now the head of the very department he had built — Naik talked about Sevagram. He remembered the classrooms, the hostel, the boys and their parties. He asked, quietly, whether it might be possible to go back and visit.

Tirpude said yes. He began making arrangements — a lunch, a gathering of the old department staff, a small reunion in the place that had occupied Naik for more than two decades. On April 1, 2018, a Sunday, before any of it could happen, Naik died at home. He went the way he had lived: without fuss, without spectacle, without the bustle he had spent his whole career carefully avoiding.

The Zamindar’s Son from Bahera

Radheshyam Naik was born on November 2, 1938, in Bahera, a village eighty kilometres north of Durg in what is now Chhattisgarh. He arrived on Krishna Janmashtami, so his parents named him accordingly. His father, Shri Man Rakhan Lal, was a zamindar who would later give a substantial portion of his land to Vinobaji’s Bhoodan movement. The son inherited something of that willingness to hold things loosely.

He went to Government Medical College, Nagpur, earned his MBBS in 1962, and stayed for an MD in Medicine, completing it in 1970 under Dr. J.N. Berry — the legendary physician who ran the Department of Medicine with the quiet authority of someone who had seen everything and forgotten nothing. Three years under Berry left a mark. Naik emerged from them precise, unhurried, and constitutionally incapable of panic.

But medicine was not where he ended up. In those years, medical schools routinely pulled faculty from general medicine to staff their forensic departments — Forensic Medicine being the specialty nobody volunteered for. When Naik was asked to make the move, he made it without argument. He set about learning a new field with the same methodical thoroughness he had brought to the one he was leaving.

What followed was one of the stranger academic CVs in Indian medicine. To the MD in Medicine he added a Diploma in TB and Chest Diseases, then an LLB, then a Diploma in Business Management, then an MA in Public Administration, then an MA in Political Science. He studied law partly because a forensic physician who understands courts is worth more than one who does not, and partly because Naik simply liked to learn things. When he sat for his LLB finals, he topped the examination at Nagpur University. His first MD student, Dr. S.K. Singhal, topped the first year. Teacher and student attended law classes together in the early 1980s, sitting in the same lecture hall, taking the same notes. Neither seemed to find this arrangement unusual.

Making the Cadaver Interesting

Forensic Medicine has a structural disadvantage as a teaching subject: its patients are dead. Students who have spent their early clinical years learning to read a living body find themselves asked to redirect that attentiveness toward a corpse. Most resist. The subject had acquired a reputation as dull, mandatory, and to be survived rather than studied.

Naik understood this, and he met it head-on. His lectures were scheduled every Tuesday and Saturday, and they had a hundred percent attendance — not because he demanded it, but because students wanted to be there.

He used Bollywood. His two favourite films for the purpose were Waqt (1965) and Ittefaq (1969) — both crime films, both built around mysteries of identity and evidence — and he used scenes from them to anchor legal medicine concepts in images his students already carried. He owned two licensed 12-bore guns, and when the curriculum reached firearms injuries, he brought them out. The students examined them. The mechanism of injury was no longer abstract.

“Forensic Medicine is traditionally perceived as a dry subject,” said Dr. Ashok Mehendale, from the 1976 batch, “but Dr. Naik knew the art of injecting humour, spicing the tedious topics with humour and enlivening his classes. To the class he was a stress buster — jokes, witty metaphors, humorous similes, puns, sarcasm, or a funny story. He was an entertainer as well as an educator.”

The one-liners circulated long after graduation. His Chhattisgarhi-inflected Hindi mixed into English mid-sentence — not as an apology for imperfect language but as a genuine expression of someone thinking in several registers at once. Dr. Bipin Tirpude, who spent fifteen years working alongside him, remembered the lectures as improvised performances: the man knew his subject, trusted his audience, and rarely needed notes.

He also had the instinct of an institution-builder. In the early 1980s, before most medical schools in Maharashtra had moved in this direction, Naik started postgraduate training in Forensic Medicine at MGIMS. Over the next two decades, he guided fifteen MD students while simultaneously pushing to separate forensic autopsies from the general pathology workflow, establishing forensic medicine as a discipline with its own rigour and its own institutional territory.

He also, almost incidentally, ran the cine club. Sevagram in the late 1970s had no television. The campus was a long way from anything resembling entertainment. Naik — by then also warden of the boys’ hostel — began screening a film every weekend. The cine club ran for years, a weekly punctuation in the quiet of a village campus where evenings would otherwise have offered nothing but study.

The Commuter

He lived in Nagpur. He came to Sevagram on a scooter — one strategically stationed at each end of the commute, so that a scooter waited for him at Wardha station when he arrived by train, and another waited at Nagpur when he returned. The arrangement was purely practical, and he maintained it for years without complaint.

Dr. V.K. Gupta, from the 1976 batch, remembered him this way: “Cool in the classroom and well-versed with the subject matter, he was running the forensic department as a solo player. He never punished any hooligans. He was liberal with attendance and in the examination too.”

As hostel warden, his philosophy was similar. The boys made noise, threw parties, tested rules in the ways that boys always do. He watched with the expression of someone who had long since made peace with human nature. He was not lax so much as realistic — understanding that the energy that makes a student difficult to manage at twenty-two is often the same energy that makes him capable at forty.

His own son, Tarun, was in the MGIMS class of 1987 — Naik’s students were also his son’s classmates. Dr. Abhay Kelkar, from the same batch, remembered this without ambiguity: “I remember him for his impartial attitude towards his own son. No undue favours were ever granted to him.” The son had to sit the same examinations, answer the same questions, and earn the same passing marks as everyone else in the room.

Polite to a Fault

Dr. S.P. Kalantri was Naik’s neighbour for several years and also his physician. He wrote later: “Introverted, unassuming, and self-effacing, Dr. Naik was polite to a fault. Although he was armed with an MD in Medicine, he made light of his degree and played a perfect patient — listening to advice carefully and adhering to the treatment to the T.”

There is a particular kind of doctor — and Naik was one — who, having spent decades telling patients what to do, cannot bring himself to exercise any authority over his own care. He followed instructions. He did not bargain. He did not deploy his degree as a reason to second-guess. He simply listened, and complied, with the patience he had brought to everything else in his life.

After retirement he went to Nepal — Pokhara — and taught for several years at a medical school there, because the alternative was to stop teaching and that was not a serious option. He came back in 2014 and went to Bahera, the village where he had started.

What He Left

On the morning he died, the lunch in Sevagram was still being planned. His student was on the telephone. The tables had not yet been set.

He is survived by his wife; by Tarun, who operates at Chandulal Chandrakar Memorial Hospital in Bhilai; by Vishal, an engineer in Pune; and by Harsha, his daughter from the MGIMS batch of 1998, who is now in Manchester.

Three generations of students passed through his classrooms — from the 1975 batch to the 2004 batch. Somewhere in that span is almost every doctor currently practising forensic medicine in this part of India. They learned the subject from a man who had not chosen it, who had not trained for it in the conventional sense, who had simply been told to do it and had decided, without bitterness, to do it properly.

The Bollywood clips, the shotguns, the law classes with his own student, the weekend film screenings, the hundred-percent attendance on Tuesdays and Saturdays — these were the instruments of a teacher who had understood early that the subject was not the obstacle. The obstacle was indifference. And against indifference, he had a well-tested arsenal.