A Map and a Mystery

When the telegram arrived from the principal’s office at Sevagram, Dev Krishna Gupta did something that would have puzzled most of his future classmates.

He spread out a map of India and looked for the place.

He was seventeen and a half, born in Sangat village in Bathinda district, Punjab, and raised in a world whose edges had not yet extended beyond the city of Bathinda itself. He had not been to Delhi. He had not been to Bombay. Central India was not a region he had thought about with any particular attention. He ran his finger across the map until he found it — somewhere near Nagpur, deep in Maharashtra — a small dot carrying a name that meant nothing to him yet and would, within a few years, come to mean almost everything.

He packed a bag and set off.

The journey from Bathinda to Wardha required a change in Delhi, and at Delhi station something happened that Dev Krishna has thought about often in the decades since. He met a boy barely a year younger than himself who assessed the situation — the GT Express, the full platform, the imminence of departure — with the practical clarity of someone accustomed to navigating crowds. Train bhari hoti hai, he said. Jaise aaye, chadh jaayein. As soon as the train pulled in, he leapt aboard and reserved a seat.

Dev Krishna had arrived at Delhi station knowing no one. He left it with a reserved seat and a small, unasked-for demonstration of the kind of generosity that asks nothing back — which was, as it turned out, a reasonable preview of the institution he was travelling toward.

From Sangat to Sevagram

He was born on 4 January 1952, the middle child of seven in an Agrawal Bania household in Sangat. His father ran a large business in the town. The family was vegetarian, observant, and disciplined — no eggs, no alcohol, a household whose routines were established and whose expectations of its children were clear. Dev Krishna had studied at the local government school in Sangat, passed his matriculation, and moved to Rajendra College in Bathinda for his pre-medical studies. He was considered good at English, which at Rajendra College in those years was a distinction worth having.

The newspaper clipping that changed everything had been found not by his father but by his uncle — Dr. Brij Lal Gupta, a leading cardiac surgeon in Bombay, a man whose professional life represented one possible answer to the question of what a doctor could become. The uncle read the advertisement, cut it out, and sent it by post. Dev Krishna’s elder brother filled out the application on his behalf. The admission process that followed — telegram, interview, result — was conducted with the minimal infrastructure of an institution still assembling itself in a village in Vidarbha.

After the interview — conducted by Dr. Jivraj Mehta and Dr. Manimala Chaudhary, in English and Hindi, questions he answered as best he could — Dev Krishna did not take the train home to Bathinda to wait. He went to Bombay and spent a few days with his uncle. It was the right decision, emotionally if not logistically: the uncle who had started this chain of events was the right person to wait with. The telegram confirming admission arrived there, in the cardiac surgeon’s home in Bombay, and Dev Krishna received it in the company of the man who had made it possible.

His father travelled with him to Sevagram for the admission. He stayed a few hours — long enough to pay the fees and settle his son into the hostel — and then took the long train back to Bathinda. The 36-hour journey was one he would not need to repeat; his son was now, in some essential way, somewhere else entirely.

The Language, the Dust, the Prarthanas

He was allocated a room in the boys’ hostel and shared it with Shaikh Wasif Ahmed and Yogendra Paul. A few weeks later, Manoj Verma from Amla joined them. He had khadi stitched locally — there was no khadi shop in Sevagram, so students either cycled to Wardha or found a tailor willing to work with the cloth. The vegetarian food, the morning prayers, the shramdan, the daily discipline of the campus — none of these troubled him. He had been raised in a household where such things were not foreign.

What took time was everything else. The language — Marathi threading through daily life, Hindi in the hostels, English in the lecture halls, the whole multilingual texture of a campus that had gathered students from every corner of India into a small village in Vidarbha. The dust itself — Wardha district in the dry months, the particular quality of the heat. The prarthanas, sung at dawn in the ashram, which took on meaning slowly, the way all morning rituals do, becoming inseparable from the act of beginning the day.

And then, gradually, Sevagram grew on him.

The teachers were the largest part of this. Dr. M.G. Kane and Dr. Indurkar in Anatomy, Dr. Khapre in Pharmacology, Dr. Trivedi, Dr. Ingle, Dr. S.P. Nigam in Medicine — they did not merely instruct. They demonstrated. They examined patients in front of students, explained their reasoning aloud, showed the difference between examining someone and interrogating them. The lesson was technical and it was also ethical, and at Sevagram the two were not kept in separate compartments.

Prof. I.D. Singh’s Physiology lectures left a particular residue. There was a chart he drew during one lecture on iron metabolism — bold lines, careful proportions, the kind of diagram that a teacher makes when he knows the material well enough to render it visual without preparation. Dev Krishna can see it still: the chart on the blackboard, the chalk moving with confidence, a map of the body’s internal economy as clear and useful as any map he had ever consulted.

He had arrived in Sevagram staring at a map of India, trying to find the place. He left it carrying, among other things, a map of the human body drawn by a principal who loved sport and Physiology in equal measure, and who believed that a well-taught student was a well-made doctor.

The First Postgraduate

He completed his MBBS and internship and went to Bombay for his MS — returning, as if by instinct, to the uncle who had set the whole journey in motion. He believes he was the first postgraduate from his batch at Sevagram. Madhavan Pillai probably came second. It was a distinction that mattered not for the ranking it implied but for what it said about the preparation: that a student from a provisional institution in a village without a proper hostel in its first year, taught by faculty who had been posted there from GMC Nagpur and had faced derision for the transfer, had been trained well enough to proceed immediately to postgraduate study in Bombay.

After his MS, he moved to the United Kingdom. He has been there for forty-seven years.

This is not the ending that Dr. Sushila Nayar had in mind when she selected students for the inaugural batch — she was building doctors for India’s villages, not for England’s hospitals. But Sevagram’s training was not, it turned out, a preparation exclusively for rural Maharashtra. It was a preparation for medicine practised anywhere, under any conditions, with any patient population. What it installed in its students was not a regional specification but a way of being a doctor: attentive, humble, present, incapable of treating a patient as a number.

Dev Krishna Gupta carries this in England the way his batchmates carry it in Nagpur and Mumbai and Nanded and Kozhencherry — not as a conscious philosophy but as a habit so old it has become invisible. He never forgets a patient’s name. He explains the diagnosis slowly. He does not turn away a patient because they cannot pay, in the National Health Service where payment is not the question, but the instinct that the instinct runs against is the same instinct his teachers at Sevagram were running against fifty years ago, in wards where patients arrived barefoot with more hope in their eyes than money in their pockets.

What the Map Could Not Show

He was the boy who had never been beyond Bathinda. He is, now, the doctor who has spent nearly five decades in England and still walks his hospital corridors with the particular quality of attention that a village in Vidarbha taught him in the early 1970s.

The map he stared at in Bathinda showed him where Sevagram was. It could not show him what Sevagram was — that a place could be physically small and professionally formative in inverse proportion, that the absence of infrastructure could produce, paradoxically, a richness of human attention between teachers and students that larger and better-resourced institutions had found ways to avoid.

The boy on the platform at Delhi station — the one who leapt onto the GT Express and reserved a seat for a stranger — was, in miniature, the whole of Sevagram: the readiness to make room, to help without being asked, to treat the person beside you as someone whose journey matters.

Dev Krishna Gupta has been making room for patients in English hospitals for forty-seven years. The habit started on a train platform in Delhi, was consolidated in a village in Maharashtra, and has not stopped since.

Dr. Dev Krishna Gupta completed his MS from Bombay following his MBBS and internship at MGIMS, Sevagram, where he is believed to have been the first student from the 1969 batch to proceed to postgraduate training. He moved to the United Kingdom after his postgraduation and has practised medicine there for forty-seven years. He was born in Sangat village, Bathinda district, Punjab. His uncle, Dr. Brij Lal Gupta, was a cardiac surgeon in Bombay.