The Vidarbha Cricket Association ground in Sadar was strung with fairy lights that evening, and the air smelled of marigold and something fried and sweet. Classmates from the 1969 and 1971 batches had come in their best clothes, and the laughter was the particular kind that fills a space when people are genuinely glad to be in it. But behind the celebration, if you had looked carefully, were the shadows of months of argument and ultimatum and the long, exhausting work of standing firm against people who love you and are wrong.
Ratnamala Golhar had not arrived at this reception easily. The man beside her, Subhash Shrivastava, was from Nagpur — a different caste, a different language, a different world by the reckoning of her family in Deoli. His family had given their blessing without hesitation. Hers had threatened to sever ties. They had not been idle threats. The months before the wedding had contained real grief, real silence, real doors that might not open again.
She had stood firm anyway.
Those who knew her well were not surprised. She had form. Years earlier, when her father died and her mother said softly, your father wanted you to become a doctor — that was his last wish — Ratnamala had abandoned mathematics, turned to biology, and rebuilt her entire academic direction around a sentence spoken once by a woman still deep in grief. She was not the kind of person who heard something important and then negotiated with it. She heard it, and she moved.
A Legacy of Practical Dignity
She was born on 16 February 1952 in Delhi Taluka of Wardha district, the daughter of Shyam Raji Golhar, an engineer trained at Banaras Hindu University. Engineering in those years carried none of the prestige it would later acquire; the government salary was modest, and her father had returned to their ancestral village of Deoli to tend the family land. It was a life of practical, unspectacular dignity — the kind of life that leaves children with a clear sense of what things cost and what they are worth.
When Ratnamala was in the ninth grade, her father died. The household went quiet in that particular way of families where the person who held things together is suddenly gone. She was a strong student — she had been among the top ten girls in the district — but the direction of her ability was still unset. She had chosen Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics for the science stream, drawn toward the precision and abstraction of those subjects, already imagining some version of a life in research.
Then her mother spoke.
Your father wanted you to become a doctor. That was his last wish.
That was enough. She abandoned Mathematics, took up Biology, and began again. She did not resent the pivot. She understood it as a form of faithfulness — to her father, to her mother, to the particular weight that a dying man’s wish carries in a household where very little is taken lightly.
She joined J.B. Science College in Wardha for her pre-university and B.Sc. Part I, and it was here that the English problem announced itself. All through school, she had studied in Marathi. The curriculum now demanded fluency in a language she could read haltingly but could not yet think in. She approached it the way she approached most obstacles — methodically, without complaint. Dictionary in hand, sentences repeated until they came naturally, vocabulary assembled word by word over months. Within two years, the door that had seemed locked had opened. She found her footing.
She was athletic too. Kho-kho, track events, sprints — she brought the same competitive energy to sport that she brought to everything else. At MGIMS, she would throw herself into whatever was offered: volleyball, handball, discus. The pleasure of testing what the body could do was not separate from the pleasure of testing what the mind could do. They were the same impulse.
Her seniors at J.B. Science College included names that would later resonate across Indian public health — Shyam Babhulkar, Girish Mulkar, Raju Choudhary, who would become part of MGIMS lore, and Ulhas Jajoo and Abhay Bang, who went to GMC Nagpur. She moved among them without intimidation. She had been told she was capable, and she believed it, which is rarer than it sounds.
The Medal and the Admission
The story of her admission to MGIMS is one she still cannot fully explain.
The first batch had no premedical entrance examination. Selection was by B.Sc. Part I marks and an interview. Candidates who came before the panel were questioned — about Gandhi, about rural service, about their willingness to wear khadi and live simply in a village. The panel wanted to know what kind of person was walking through the door.
Ratnamala was never asked a single question.
She sat before the panel, which included Santoshrao Gode, the Zilla Parishad president of Wardha. Years earlier, when she had topped her district in the 10th board examinations, Santoshrao Gode had presented her with a medal and a bicycle at a public ceremony. Whether he remembered her in that interview room, whether some recognition passed across his face, she cannot say. She was not called. She was not questioned. And yet, when the admission list was posted, her name was on it.
She has always thought of it as destiny. Given everything that came before and everything that came after, it is hard to argue with her.
Sanctuary in the Library
In the hostel, she found her world expanding. She shared rooms across the years with Sophia from Nagpur, then with Sanjeevani Gole and Meena Savarkar from the 1971 batch. Mornings began with Nalini Ranade’s voice rising at five o’clock in Vaishnava Janato, the hymn filling the corridor before the day had properly begun. You could resist it or you could let it become part of the rhythm of waking. Most people, after a while, let it become the rhythm.
The Mahadev library was her sanctuary. Its shelves held more than the medical curriculum — history, mythology, biography, the great epics. She read the Ramayana and the Mahabharata cover to cover, moved through the Bhagavad Gita not as a religious obligation but as a reader looking for something that held up under scrutiny. She found, in those texts, the same thing she found in medicine at its best: a rigorous attention to the question of how a person should live. The library became the place where the day’s smaller frustrations dissolved into something larger and more patient.
Her teachers impressed her variously. Dr. S.M. Patil, barely in his late twenties, taught bedside medicine with a clarity that outran his age. Dr. Sudershan Dhawan in ophthalmology — and his wife beside him — were meticulous and encouraging. It was Dr. Dhawan who said to her once, watching her work: Your hand is steady and precise. Ophthalmology suits you. She held that observation for a long time, turning it over. Had circumstances been different — had the Sitapur posting for postgraduate ophthalmology been possible — her career might have taken an entirely different direction. She has wondered about it, occasionally, without regret.
The Smile Across the Table
In 1970, during her first MBBS year, she noticed Subhash Shrivastava.
He was from Nagpur, Hindi-speaking where she was Marathi, from a different community and a different world by the accounting that mattered to families in that era. The attraction was immediate and mutual and, for both of them, uncomplicated in itself. The complications were entirely external.
For Subhash, his family was straightforward: if you are sure, you have our blessing. His mother, his uncles, his aunts — they received her without reserve. For Ratnamala, the opposite was true. Her family saw the caste and language difference and could not see past it. The arguments ran for months, through the final years of MBBS and into the internship. There were threats. There was the genuine possibility of a break that would not heal.
She did not waver.
She had, after all, already learned — from her father’s death, from the mathematics she had abandoned, from the biology she had chosen in its place — that the important decisions in her life had been made by listening to a voice that knew what was true and then following it without revision. The voice that said marry this man was the same voice that had said become a doctor. She trusted it.
The reception at the Vidarbha Cricket Association ground was crowded and warm and filled with the kind of joy that arrives after difficulty has been passed through rather than around.
People who ask why Subhash chose anaesthesia and Ratnamala chose gynaecology receive an answer that is both honest and slightly disarming. They didn’t know what they were choosing. They were newly married, young, and bewildered by the landscape of post-MBBS options. Subhash encouraged her toward gynaecology because it would keep them in the same operating theatre — him on one side of the drape, her on the other. We’ll meet every day, he said. It may have been the most pragmatic career decision in the history of Indian medicine. It worked.
A Career of Service and Change
She completed her DGO in Nagpur and joined MGIMS as faculty, remaining until 1983. She registered for her MD in Gynaecology at BJ Medical College in Pune, where she encountered something that took her some time to name precisely: the studied indifference of an institution toward outsiders. Examiners who marked harshly, who made their preferences visible, who had decided before the viva began how seriously they were going to take a candidate who had not trained among them. After repeated attempts, she withdrew from the MD programme and returned to Nagpur. The decision was practical, not defeated — she had a practice to build and patients who needed her.
Her two sons, Sangeet and Amit — both born in the MGIMS years, one in Sevagram and one in Nagpur — watched their parents closely enough to make a clear-eyed decision. They became engineers. They live in the United States. She understands why. She has sat with them over the years, explaining emergencies and late nights and the texture of a professional life in which patients do not observe weekends, and she has seen the quiet calculation in their eyes. They were not wrong. She does not ask them to have chosen differently.
What she does carry, with a directness that does not soften with age, is a grief about what the profession has become. Medicine, as she first encountered it at Sevagram — austere, purposeful, bound by an ethic of service that was simply assumed — has, in too many places, become something else. Investigations ordered for revenue rather than need. Procedures recommended for margins rather than patients. The Hippocratic oath recited at graduation and then, quietly, set aside. She has watched this happen over decades. She has, at one point, become its victim herself — subjected, she believes, to a cardiac intervention that was not warranted.
The profession she chose because of her father’s last wish deserved better than this. She still believes it is capable of better. The believing is harder now than it was in the Mahadev library at five in the morning, with Nalini Ranade’s voice in the corridor and the whole future still unwritten.
When she closes her eyes and reaches back toward Sevagram, she does not find the lecture halls or the ward rounds. She finds red earth after rain. A hostel room full of the sound of someone singing. Friends bent over books in the library at a late hour, the lamp drawing a small circle of warmth in the dark.
She finds a boy from Nagpur smiling at her across a dissection table, and the life that followed from that smile — complicated, full, and entirely her own.
Sevagram gave her a degree, a vocation, and a marriage. It gave her, more than anything, the evidence that a single sentence, heard at the right moment by someone prepared to act on it, can be enough to build a life on.
Her father had known that. She learned it in his absence.
Dr. Ratnamala Golhar completed her MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the inaugural batch of 1969, and her DGO from Nagpur. She served on the faculty at MGIMS until 1983 before establishing a gynaecological practice in Nagpur. She lives in Nagpur with her husband, Dr. Subhash Shrivastava, anaesthesiologist and fellow alumnus of the batch of 1969.