The train from Chennai had been running for twenty-two hours when it pulled into Wardha East on the morning of February 28, 1975. The platform was nearly empty. John Premendran, twenty-seven years old, a freshly minted MSc from CMC Vellore, stepped down with a single bag and looked around. A cycle rickshaw was the only transport on offer. He climbed in and asked for the medical college.
The road ahead was flat and featureless — no shops, no landmarks, no reassuring sign that a college lay anywhere in this landscape. By his own later admission, a dark thought crossed his mind: what if the rickshaw puller simply disappeared with his luggage? He said nothing, held his bag closer, and watched the road unspool into the distance.
The man delivered him safely to the college gate, helped carry his bag to the Physiology department, and refused to make a fuss about it. John gave him five rupees — a sum that felt both inadequate and right — and stood at the entrance of what would become his home for the next thirty-four years.
The Son of a Historian
John Samuel Premendran was born on September 5, 1947, in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, the son of Dr. M. James Sudarsanam — a historian, a teacher, and the Vice Principal of Voorhees College. It was a household in which books mattered and precision was expected. Young John grew up wanting to be a doctor.
He came close. He sat the entrance examination for CMC Vellore’s MBBS programme and missed the cutoff by a margin narrow enough to sting. What followed was not defeat but redirection. He completed a BSc at Voorhees College — botany, zoology, chemistry — and then returned to CMC, this time for an MSc in Pharmacology. He was, it turned out, exceptionally good at it.
After a brief stint as a lecturer at CMC, he began looking for what came next. A classmate, Mrs. Nambiar, who had taken a position in the Physiology department at a new medical college in a village called Sevagram, mentioned that Pharmacology had a vacancy. John applied. An interview was called. He boarded the GT Express north, and arrived — as described — at an almost empty station on the edge of Vidarbha’s cotton country.
The village life felt, unexpectedly, familiar. He had grown up near Katpadi, a small town outside Vellore, and Sevagram’s pace did not alarm him. That Marathi was unknown to him mattered less than the fact that written Hindi was not. He settled.
Chalk, Blackboard, and the Art of Clarity
On March 1, 1975, John Premendran walked into the Pharmacology department for the first time as a member of staff. His salary was ₹530, paid in cash. He was housed in the boys’ hostel. His teaching tools were a blackboard and chalk.
He never asked for more.
For thirty-four years, through every wave of educational technology — overhead projectors, slide carousels, the eventual arrival of PowerPoint — Premendran taught pharmacology with chalk. His lectures on the autonomic nervous system, on chemotherapy, on central nervous system pharmacology were constructed, line by line, on a blackboard, in handwriting his students recognised as his own form of calligraphy. The same precision appeared in everything he wrote outside the classroom: his letters, his research notes, his correspondence with students after they had graduated and moved on. He wrote it all in green ink.
The green ink was not an affectation. It was simply his — a marker of a sensibility that valued the particular over the generic, the handmade over the mass-produced. Students who received letters from him decades later knew, before they opened the envelope, who had written it.
His other signature contribution was practical. Premendran had trained in experimental pharmacology at CMC Vellore, where dog dissection was conducted with rigour. He brought that expertise to MGIMS and passed it on. A department attendant named Wankhede built a piston-and-lever apparatus to measure ureteric peristalsis in dogs, and the graphs it produced were exceptional. Research followed: plant extracts and snake venom, the behaviour of calcium and strontium and barium on muscle tissue. In 1989, this work became a PhD from Nagpur University.
When the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act ended animal experimentation in 1998, Premendran did not mourn the old methods for long. His first MD student, Dr. V. Bonde, was assigned a project on community-acquired pneumonia instead — a pivot made possible by his relationships across departments, with colleagues in Medicine and Paediatrics who welcomed a pharmacologist’s student into their wards without hesitation.
“His discipline and punctuality were clear in everything he did,” Bonde recalled. “And he made sure others followed his example.”
What the Village Made of Him
There was something Sevagram did to people who stayed long enough. The absence of distraction — no cinema, no metropolitan restlessness — turned inward energy outward, toward students, toward music, toward community. Premendran felt this.
Every December, he spent a month training nursing and medical students in Christmas carols. On the evening of the 24th, the group would walk to Dr. Sushila Nayar’s residence and sing for her. Dr. Nayar made a point of requesting him personally: “John, when will you bring your carol team?” After the singing, there were cakes and biscuits, and the kind of memory that a life accumulates without knowing it is accumulating anything at all.
On other evenings, he played the violin. He had begun learning Carnatic classical violin at twelve, under a teacher who charged ten rupees a month for lessons in both violin and harmonium. At MGIMS, he found a musical companion in Dr. Vivek Pophali, a faculty member in Medicine who played guitar. They performed together at college concerts — Pophali on guitar, Premendran on violin — while colleagues Dr. R.K. Gupta and Dr. M.D. Khapre contributed their voices.
He guided eleven MD students across three decades. One of the stranger dynamics of his career was that his first postgraduate student, Dr. V. Bonde, was fifty years old when he enrolled — five years older than his guide. The potential awkwardness was absorbed without comment. Premendran’s view of teaching had no room for hierarchy based on age. Learning was what mattered; the rest was arrangement.
The Man His Students Knew
Premendran was, by temperament, an introvert. He did not fill rooms with noise. Students who knew him only from the corridor might have found him reserved, perhaps even distant. Those who knew him longer discovered the warmth underneath the quietness — a man of strong religious conviction, soft speech, and a precise ethical sense that he applied as rigorously to small decisions as to large ones.
Dr. Swanand Pathak, from the 1993 MBBS batch, remembered one image above all others: Premendran arriving at the railway station to receive him when he came to Sevagram for the first time. “He was not only a remarkable mentor,” Pathak said, “but a man of great stature.” The gesture — a senior professor, turning up at a station to meet a student he had not yet taught — said something that no formal tribute could have said more clearly.
His wife Sheila, who came from Chennai and initially found village life an adjustment, became a fixture of Kasturba Vidya Mandir, where she taught mathematics and English to the children of MGIMS faculty — some of whom later became doctors themselves. She eventually became the school’s principal. On evenings and weekends, she tutored students at home. Decades later, her students — and their parents — still spoke of her with specific, undiminished gratitude.
What Remained
John Premendran retired from MGIMS on August 18, 2009, after thirty-four years. He was not done teaching: he joined Mamata Medical College in Khammam, spent eight more years in a Pharmacology department, and served briefly as its head.
His son Ben, admitted to MGIMS in 1995, completed both his MBBS and his MD in Anaesthesiology at the same institution where his father had taught. In 2020, Ben moved to Abu Dhabi, and in 2022 his parents followed.
Sheila Premendran died on January 31, 2024, at their home in Sevagram, after a long illness. She had returned to the place that had, against early expectations, become hers.
John Premendran now lives with his son in Abu Dhabi. He is in his late seventies. Whether he still plays the violin is not recorded. Whether he still writes in green ink, one suspects, is not really in question.