For fourteen years I served — reluctantly — as Medical Superintendent of Kasturba Hospital, Sevagram. Those years taught me the nuts and bolts of running a hospital: soothing tempers and coping with shortages, buying equipment, handling midnight crises, and watching friendships form, fray, or fade.
When I returned to wards and classrooms, Sevagram gave me something rarer than work: time. I had edited MGIMS annual reports and thought I knew its story. I was wrong.
The truth arrived in small, quiet moments. On a ward round I mentioned our founder, Dr. Sushila Nayar, to a first-year resident. He drew a blank. “Sir… Sushila Nayar, who?” A week later, at 6 a.m., Mr. Dhirubhai Mehta, President of the Kasturba Health Society, rang me — unwell. I examined him and asked a resident to fetch an ECG. “Sir, Dhirubhai who?” came the reply.
That was the moment I understood: the builders of MGIMS were slipping from memory inside the very institution they had created. My generation may be the last to have worked alongside them — learning, arguing, admiring, sometimes exasperated. If we did not gather their stories now, they would fade into rumour, then nothing.
Everyone knows Anna Sagar, the lake by the Dean’s office. Few recall it is named for Annasaheb Sahasrabuddhe, Kasturba Health Society Vice-President and later a Padma Vibhushan awardee. The name remained; the man did not.
I turned to digitised annual reports and, with permission, early faculty files from the Kasturba Health Society. At first the typed memos — pay, leaves, resignations — seemed dry. Then personal letters surfaced, many carrying Dr. Sushila Nayar’s handwritten notes in the margins. The pages warmed; the giants of my youth became human.
Phone calls followed. I spoke for two hours with Dr. K. N. Ingley, our retired Professor of Physiology, then in his late eighties. His recall was sharp — early arrivals, colleagues, the texture of student life. My iPhone battery died; my wife wondered who could hold me that long. That became the pattern.
Three years of reading, talking and verifying produced ninety-three profiles: founders, society members, deans, and the early teachers and doctors who gave MGIMS its start. These are not hagiographies. The people who built this institution brought ambition, vanity, courage, flaws, and generosity — the full human mixture. Some came from conviction, others for a pay cheque. Some stayed; some left. Many were inspiring and difficult, often both. Institutions grow that way: through ordinary people who show up, clash, persist, and build.
I write from inside, not outside — having known some, heard of others, inherited their world. That closeness brings both perspective and bias. I have aimed for fairness, not detachment. A true historian may note slips in date or detail. Memories falter; records gap. Still, memories hold what papers miss: the feel of a time and the character of an institution.
I hope these profiles help students, staff, and alumni see MGIMS anew — not as bricks and reports, but as people: their vision and compromises, their ideals and routines, their grit and generosity. Sevagram hides depths beneath its calm. These pages recover a small part of that life.
Here are MGIMS’s architects, as I found them.
Dr. S. P. Kalantri MGIMS, Sevagram · 18 March 2026