Dr. Jayaram Anbalagan

Professor of Anatomy · MGIMS

MSc Anatomy (JIPMER) [1974]
PhD Anatomy (MGIMS, Sevagram) [1994]

b. 6 August 1948, Puducherry   ·   d. —

Tenure: 1983 – 2005

When the 1985 batch planned their twenty-fifth reunion, there was no debate about who should be brought back to Sevagram. They flew him in from Puducherry. Not a founding trustee, not a dean — an anatomy teacher.

Professor of Anatomy · Builder of the Research Programme · The Teacher They Flew Back from Puducherry

When the 1985 batch of MGIMS alumni planned their twenty-fifth reunion, there was no debate about who should be brought back to Sevagram. They flew him in from Puducherry. Not a founding trustee, not a dean, not a hospital administrator — an anatomy teacher. The gesture said everything about what Dr. Jayaram Anbalagan had been to the people who sat in his classes.

He was not what the role traditionally produced. The anatomy professor of institutional legend is a figure of severity — exacting, intimidating, the keeper of a discipline that first-year students find overwhelming and often fear. Anbalagan was something different. He was quiet, unhurried, possessed of a calm authority that never needed raising its voice. In the dissection hall, his chalk moved across the blackboard with a precision that turned complex structures into clear visual stories. Students who arrived anxious and confused left his classes with the specific relief of having understood something they thought was beyond them.

“Some people don’t just leave impressions behind,” a former student, Sadhana Bose, said of him. “They are the impression.”

Puducherry to Faridkot: An Unlikely Journey

Jayaram Anbalagan was born on August 6, 1948, in Pondicherry — now Puducherry — to Jayaram and Duraikannu Ammal. He did not set out to be a doctor. In the 1960s, AIIMS, PGI, and JIPMER launched MSc programmes in Anatomy, Physiology, and other basic sciences to address India’s acute shortage of medical teachers. The programmes offered a generous stipend — ₹500 a month — to attract bright science graduates. Anbalagan joined JIPMER’s Anatomy programme, initially drawn by practical considerations, and stayed for reasons that had nothing to do with them.

He completed his MSc in Anatomy from JIPMER in 1974. In 1975, he left Puducherry and traveled 2,500 kilometres north to Faridkot, Punjab, to join the newly established Guru Gobind Singh Medical College as a Demonstrator. The first batch of MBBS students was arriving, the Anatomy department needed to be built from nothing, and Anbalagan threw himself into both — teaching by day, helping construct a department by incremental institutional effort, learning that building something from scratch required a different kind of stamina than inheriting something already standing.

He was promoted to Lecturer in 1980. By then, Punjab was changing. Militant violence and government crackdowns had made daily life unpredictable for those from outside the state. The unrest came closer. Safety could no longer be assumed. He made the difficult decision to leave — moving south to Vijayawada, where he joined Siddhartha Medical College as Assistant Professor of Anatomy.

He was still settling into the new city when a telegram arrived. It was from Dr. K.S. Sachdeva — his former principal at Guru Gobind Singh Medical College, now Dean of MGIMS in Sevagram. The message was brief: Come to Sevagram.

He was puzzled. How had Dr. Sachdeva found his address in Vijayawada?

When his train arrived at Sevagram station, he found Dr. Sachdeva on the platform, waiting to receive him. That personal gesture — a Dean coming to the station — told him something about the institution before anyone had explained it in words. Over the next few days, he met Dr. Sushila Nayar, Manimala Chaudhary, and Dr. G.R.K. Hari Rao. He felt, as he later described it, a sense of purpose in the place — a rhythm of life that settled something in him. He accepted the post.

In December 1983, he arrived at MGIMS as Reader in Anatomy. He would stay for twenty-one years.

The Teacher in the Dissection Hall

He stepped into a department led by Dr. G.R.K. Hari Rao, with Mrs. R.R. Fulzele as Tutor and Mrs. Belsare as faculty. The department was small, the resources limited, the cadaver shortage a chronic constraint that made every dissection a carefully rationed learning opportunity. Anatomy education at MGIMS in the 1980s was traditional and rigorous — blackboard, chalk, Gray’s Anatomy, Cunningham, and the expectation that students would memorise origins, insertions, and nerve supplies with thoroughness.

Within this environment, Anbalagan’s teaching style found its fullest expression. His blackboard diagrams were exceptional — drawn freehand with a precision that made them more useful than most illustrations in textbooks, emerging structure by structure as he narrated what the body was doing and why it mattered. He knew when to push students deeper and when to ease back. He understood the specific anxiety of first-year students confronting a cadaver for the first time and calibrated his manner accordingly — never soft enough to allow complacency, never severe enough to produce the paralysis that prevents learning.

He was fluent in Tamil, Hindi, Punjabi, and Telugu when he arrived. He added Marathi at Sevagram — a language learned not from necessity but from the desire to belong more completely to the community he had joined.

In 1984, he began his PhD under Dr. Hari Rao’s supervision, studying the histology of the pituitary gland — specifically the structural variations in its cells across species and the onset of foetal pituitary function through secretory granule appearance. When Dr. Hari Rao left MGIMS in 1987, Anbalagan found a new guide in Dr. S.S. Navgiri, Professor and Head of Anatomy at Government Medical College, Nagpur. He completed his doctorate in 1992 — eight years of part-time research conducted alongside full-time teaching, a demonstration of the particular persistence required to build an academic career without institutional support.

Building the Department’s Research Foundation

One of his most consequential contributions was establishing a PhD programme in Anatomy at MGIMS — a process that proved far harder than anyone anticipated. When the department first applied to Nagpur University for research recognition, the inspection committee rejected the proposal, citing inadequate facilities and the absence of a recognised guide. It was a significant setback.

Anbalagan did not accept it as permanent. Working with Dr. Narendra Samal, Head of Pathology, and Dr. Ved Prakash Mishra, he systematically addressed every deficiency the university had identified — upgrading the laboratory, strengthening the academic framework, satisfying each specific requirement. The approval came. The department produced its first PhD scholars, and the research culture Anbalagan had fought to establish became a lasting feature of the department’s identity.

His partnership with Dr. S.K. Ghosh — who led the department from the late 1980s until 2007 — was the central professional relationship of his MGIMS years. They were temperamentally opposite: Ghosh was a passionate Bengali, outspoken and quick to express himself; Anbalagan was a soft-spoken Tamilian who preferred silence to confrontation. What they shared was an unshakable commitment to the discipline and an identical standard of expectation for their students. Their complementarity gave the department a stability and coherence that carried it through nearly two decades.

When Dr. Ghosh decided to host the 43rd National Conference of the Anatomical Society of India in Sevagram in 1994 — a national event in a small village with minimal infrastructure — he entrusted the organisation entirely to Anbalagan. As organising secretary, Anbalagan managed delegate registration, guest speakers, fundraising, accommodation, food, train bookings, and the logistics of hosting hundreds of academics in a place that was not built for conferences. The event was a success. Every delegate was treated, as those who attended remembered, like family.

He served as Vice President of the Anatomical Society of India in 1998–99, co-led symposia at the All India Congress of Cytology and Genetics held at MGIMS in 1996 and 2001, and attended the International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology in Delhi in 1994. His research contributions in microdissection and stereological methodology extended his influence beyond the institution.

The Departure and Its Aftermath

In 2005, he made the decision to leave. His mother was frail and needed care. His sons, Vinod Kumar and Karthik Kumar, were preparing for college. The balance of obligation had shifted. He submitted his resignation and left Sevagram on March 9, 2005 — not to retire, but to continue teaching at Mahatma Gandhi Medical College and Research Institute in Puducherry, where Mahatma Gandhi’s name, as he noted with quiet humour, followed him from Sevagram back to his birthplace.

Dr. Ghosh left MGIMS himself in December 2007, just months after Anbalagan. The two departures, so closely spaced, marked the end of the department’s longest sustained period of academic coherence. The lecture halls they had filled for two decades stood quiet in a different way.

At MGMCRI Puducherry, Anbalagan became Professor, then Vice Principal, then Professor Emeritus after retiring in 2019 — continuing to guide students and doctoral scholars well past formal retirement. The medical faculty of the institution nominated him for the Dronacharya Award, the recognition for exceptional teaching. It was, characteristically, his colleagues who put his name forward. He would not have done it himself.

He still wears khadi. Asked about his years in Sevagram, he does not speak of research output or departmental achievements. He speaks of the community. “MGIMS was more than a workplace — it was a family,” he has said. “Life in Sevagram was simple yet deeply fulfilling, with shared moments binding us together. It taught me that true contentment comes not from what we have, but from the purpose we serve.”

Twenty-four batches of MGIMS medical students learned anatomy from him. Many of them are now doctors approaching the end of their own careers, their bodies carrying the knowledge he gave them in their bones and hands — knowledge acquired in a dissection hall in a village in Vidarbha, from a Tamil man who came to Sevagram on a telegram and stayed for twenty-one years.

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Dr. Jayaram Anbalagan

Professor of Anatomy · Builder of the Research Programme · The Teacher They Flew Back from Puducherry

When the 1985 batch of MGIMS alumni planned their twenty-fifth reunion, there was no debate about who should be brought back to Sevagram. They flew him in from Puducherry. Not a founding trustee, not a dean, not a hospital administrator — an anatomy teacher. The gesture said everything about what Dr. Jayaram Anbalagan had been to the people who sat in his classes.

He was not what the role traditionally produced. The anatomy professor of institutional legend is a figure of severity — exacting, intimidating, the keeper of a discipline that first-year students find overwhelming and often fear. Anbalagan was something different. He was quiet, unhurried, possessed of a calm authority that never needed raising its voice. In the dissection hall, his chalk moved across the blackboard with a precision that turned complex structures into clear visual stories. Students who arrived anxious and confused left his classes with the specific relief of having understood something they thought was beyond them.

“Some people don’t just leave impressions behind,” a former student, Sadhana Bose, said of him. “They are the impression.”

Puducherry to Faridkot: An Unlikely Journey

Jayaram Anbalagan was born on August 6, 1948, in Pondicherry — now Puducherry — to Jayaram and Duraikannu Ammal. He did not set out to be a doctor. In the 1960s, AIIMS, PGI, and JIPMER launched MSc programmes in Anatomy, Physiology, and other basic sciences to address India’s acute shortage of medical teachers. The programmes offered a generous stipend — ₹500 a month — to attract bright science graduates. Anbalagan joined JIPMER’s Anatomy programme, initially drawn by practical considerations, and stayed for reasons that had nothing to do with them.

He completed his MSc in Anatomy from JIPMER in 1974. In 1975, he left Puducherry and traveled 2,500 kilometres north to Faridkot, Punjab, to join the newly established Guru Gobind Singh Medical College as a Demonstrator. The first batch of MBBS students was arriving, the Anatomy department needed to be built from nothing, and Anbalagan threw himself into both — teaching by day, helping construct a department by incremental institutional effort, learning that building something from scratch required a different kind of stamina than inheriting something already standing.

He was promoted to Lecturer in 1980. By then, Punjab was changing. Militant violence and government crackdowns had made daily life unpredictable for those from outside the state. The unrest came closer. Safety could no longer be assumed. He made the difficult decision to leave — moving south to Vijayawada, where he joined Siddhartha Medical College as Assistant Professor of Anatomy.

He was still settling into the new city when a telegram arrived. It was from Dr. K.S. Sachdeva — his former principal at Guru Gobind Singh Medical College, now Dean of MGIMS in Sevagram. The message was brief: Come to Sevagram.

He was puzzled. How had Dr. Sachdeva found his address in Vijayawada?

When his train arrived at Sevagram station, he found Dr. Sachdeva on the platform, waiting to receive him. That personal gesture — a Dean coming to the station — told him something about the institution before anyone had explained it in words. Over the next few days, he met Dr. Sushila Nayar, Manimala Chaudhary, and Dr. G.R.K. Hari Rao. He felt, as he later described it, a sense of purpose in the place — a rhythm of life that settled something in him. He accepted the post.

In December 1983, he arrived at MGIMS as Reader in Anatomy. He would stay for twenty-one years.

The Teacher in the Dissection Hall

He stepped into a department led by Dr. G.R.K. Hari Rao, with Mrs. R.R. Fulzele as Tutor and Mrs. Belsare as faculty. The department was small, the resources limited, the cadaver shortage a chronic constraint that made every dissection a carefully rationed learning opportunity. Anatomy education at MGIMS in the 1980s was traditional and rigorous — blackboard, chalk, Gray’s Anatomy, Cunningham, and the expectation that students would memorise origins, insertions, and nerve supplies with thoroughness.

Within this environment, Anbalagan’s teaching style found its fullest expression. His blackboard diagrams were exceptional — drawn freehand with a precision that made them more useful than most illustrations in textbooks, emerging structure by structure as he narrated what the body was doing and why it mattered. He knew when to push students deeper and when to ease back. He understood the specific anxiety of first-year students confronting a cadaver for the first time and calibrated his manner accordingly — never soft enough to allow complacency, never severe enough to produce the paralysis that prevents learning.

He was fluent in Tamil, Hindi, Punjabi, and Telugu when he arrived. He added Marathi at Sevagram — a language learned not from necessity but from the desire to belong more completely to the community he had joined.

In 1984, he began his PhD under Dr. Hari Rao’s supervision, studying the histology of the pituitary gland — specifically the structural variations in its cells across species and the onset of foetal pituitary function through secretory granule appearance. When Dr. Hari Rao left MGIMS in 1987, Anbalagan found a new guide in Dr. S.S. Navgiri, Professor and Head of Anatomy at Government Medical College, Nagpur. He completed his doctorate in 1992 — eight years of part-time research conducted alongside full-time teaching, a demonstration of the particular persistence required to build an academic career without institutional support.

Building the Department’s Research Foundation

One of his most consequential contributions was establishing a PhD programme in Anatomy at MGIMS — a process that proved far harder than anyone anticipated. When the department first applied to Nagpur University for research recognition, the inspection committee rejected the proposal, citing inadequate facilities and the absence of a recognised guide. It was a significant setback.

Anbalagan did not accept it as permanent. Working with Dr. Narendra Samal, Head of Pathology, and Dr. Ved Prakash Mishra, he systematically addressed every deficiency the university had identified — upgrading the laboratory, strengthening the academic framework, satisfying each specific requirement. The approval came. The department produced its first PhD scholars, and the research culture Anbalagan had fought to establish became a lasting feature of the department’s identity.

His partnership with Dr. S.K. Ghosh — who led the department from the late 1980s until 2007 — was the central professional relationship of his MGIMS years. They were temperamentally opposite: Ghosh was a passionate Bengali, outspoken and quick to express himself; Anbalagan was a soft-spoken Tamilian who preferred silence to confrontation. What they shared was an unshakable commitment to the discipline and an identical standard of expectation for their students. Their complementarity gave the department a stability and coherence that carried it through nearly two decades.

When Dr. Ghosh decided to host the 43rd National Conference of the Anatomical Society of India in Sevagram in 1994 — a national event in a small village with minimal infrastructure — he entrusted the organisation entirely to Anbalagan. As organising secretary, Anbalagan managed delegate registration, guest speakers, fundraising, accommodation, food, train bookings, and the logistics of hosting hundreds of academics in a place that was not built for conferences. The event was a success. Every delegate was treated, as those who attended remembered, like family.

He served as Vice President of the Anatomical Society of India in 1998–99, co-led symposia at the All India Congress of Cytology and Genetics held at MGIMS in 1996 and 2001, and attended the International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology in Delhi in 1994. His research contributions in microdissection and stereological methodology extended his influence beyond the institution.

The Departure and Its Aftermath

In 2005, he made the decision to leave. His mother was frail and needed care. His sons, Vinod Kumar and Karthik Kumar, were preparing for college. The balance of obligation had shifted. He submitted his resignation and left Sevagram on March 9, 2005 — not to retire, but to continue teaching at Mahatma Gandhi Medical College and Research Institute in Puducherry, where Mahatma Gandhi’s name, as he noted with quiet humour, followed him from Sevagram back to his birthplace.

Dr. Ghosh left MGIMS himself in December 2007, just months after Anbalagan. The two departures, so closely spaced, marked the end of the department’s longest sustained period of academic coherence. The lecture halls they had filled for two decades stood quiet in a different way.

At MGMCRI Puducherry, Anbalagan became Professor, then Vice Principal, then Professor Emeritus after retiring in 2019 — continuing to guide students and doctoral scholars well past formal retirement. The medical faculty of the institution nominated him for the Dronacharya Award, the recognition for exceptional teaching. It was, characteristically, his colleagues who put his name forward. He would not have done it himself.

He still wears khadi. Asked about his years in Sevagram, he does not speak of research output or departmental achievements. He speaks of the community. “MGIMS was more than a workplace — it was a family,” he has said. “Life in Sevagram was simple yet deeply fulfilling, with shared moments binding us together. It taught me that true contentment comes not from what we have, but from the purpose we serve.”

Twenty-four batches of MGIMS medical students learned anatomy from him. Many of them are now doctors approaching the end of their own careers, their bodies carrying the knowledge he gave them in their bones and hands — knowledge acquired in a dissection hall in a village in Vidarbha, from a Tamil man who came to Sevagram on a telegram and stayed for twenty-one years.