Before Anil Kumar Kaushik arrived at MGIMS in 1969, his family had already been in Sevagram for years.
His uncle, Dr. Ravi Shankar Sharma, had come to Sevagram in 1946 and joined Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan Andolan in Bihar — encouraging the voluntary donation of land to the landless, the great post-independence experiment in redistribution by conscience rather than legislation. In 1954, Vinoba had invited him to care for leprosy patients at Datta Pur, near Sevagram, and he had gone without hesitation, tending wounds and restoring dignity in the village that Gandhi had made his home. He was still there in 1969, still at his quiet work, when his nephew arrived as a medical student.
For most of the founding batch, Sevagram was a discovery. For Anil Kaushik, it was a homecoming to a place he already knew through the lives of the people he loved.
From Gajraula to Datta Pur
He was born on 4 March 1951, the fourth child in a family rooted in Gajraula, a town in Amroha district in Uttar Pradesh, where the lanes smelled of fresh earth after rain and the sky at dusk turned the colour of ripened wheat. The town had given India the filmmaker Kamal Amrohi — who brought to life the timeless Pakeezah — and was known for its mango orchards, its dholak makers, and the delicate artistry of its woodwork.
His father, Shri Rameshwar Dayal, wore khadi with the quiet dignity of one who believed deeply in its message of self-reliance and simplicity. He died when Anil was thirteen. The fragrance of his ideals — service, truth, simplicity — remained, carried forward by his son without formal instruction, the way the deepest things are transmitted: by observation, by example, by the particular quality of a household’s daily life.
His uncle Rama Shankar had worked alongside Jayaprakash Narayan and Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, rising to become a Member of Parliament and a minister. The family moved in the orbit of independent India’s most serious social reform projects, and Anil grew up understanding that public life could mean something more than the pursuit of office.
He schooled at Kura Model School, then New English High School in Bedi, and moved to Hislop College in Nagpur for his pre-medical studies. When his uncle Dr. Ravi Shankar Sharma learned of MGIMS and its founding principles — a medical college in Gandhiji’s village, admission based on values as much as marks, a commitment to rural service — he understood immediately that this was where his nephew should go. He knew Dr. Sushila Nayar. He accompanied Anil to the interview.
The questions were the right ones: Why do you want to be a doctor? What is the Swadeshi movement? What is the importance of khadi? Anil answered with the confidence that comes from truth, not rehearsed answers. He had grown up in a household where khadi was not a costume but a conviction, and the movement was not history but inheritance.
The Sevagram He Found
Sevagram in 1969 was a world of its own — bullock carts on dusty roads, the faint smell of neem and red earth in the wind, evenings that fell with the sound of temple bells in the distance.
From his second year, he shared a three-seater room with Balkrishna Maheshwari and Rajendra Deodhar — both Gandhian in their own ways, both from modest backgrounds. They patiently taught him their languages: Maheshwari’s Gujarati-inflected Hindi, Deodhar’s Marathi-textured speech. The batch was a mini-India — students from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Bihar, Kerala, Tamil Nadu — different religions, many languages, no barriers. Caste was never an issue.
Days began before dawn with Sarv Dharma Prarthana. Panditji would rap on doors at five in the morning; fifteen minutes later, students stood in the prayer ground. After prayers came Shramdan — sweeping, cleaning, scrubbing the campus. They carried their utensils to the mess, washed them themselves, and headed for classes. At night, sometimes, they joined filariasis detection camps: bending over microscopes, watching nocturnal parasites wriggling on slides in the dim light of the Sevagram laboratory. Vidarbha was heavily infested. MGIMS regularly sent surgical teams to the field. As students, they assisted in hydrocele and cataract surgeries in makeshift operating theatres under canvas tents — the full, unglamorous, essential work of rural medicine.
There were no games facilities in the beginning. Subhash Srivastava’s father donated money to buy cricket equipment. Later, a table tennis board arrived in Jawaharlal Hostel and became the evening gathering point — the sound of the ball crossing the table, the small competitions, the specific pleasure of a game that required no open space and no equipment budget beyond the board itself.
Teachers Who Left Their Mark
Professor I.D. Singh, who played the harmonium and sang bhajans each evening, cross-legged, before making his nightly hostel rounds at nine o’clock, asking students if they were doing well and offering help where it was needed. Dr. M.L. Sharma, whose Pharmacology lectures sparkled with humour delivered in the deadpan register of a man who knows exactly when his audience is about to laugh.
And Dr. S.P. Nigam — the Medicine teacher whose clinical teaching was a performance as much as an instruction. He once gave a lecture on gait that Anil has never forgotten: Nigam acting out each walking pattern with theatrical flair, becoming in turn the patient with foot drop, the patient with Parkinson’s, the patient with a painful hip, demonstrating what textbooks could only describe. That lecture was not about gait. It was about the difference between reading medicine and understanding it.
In the lecture halls and the wards both, the understanding being transmitted was the same: that the patient before you is a person whose body is telling a story, and your job is to listen carefully enough to understand what it is saying.
Jhansi: Thirty-Six Years in One Place
After his MBBS, the path was not straight. He spent time at Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi, completed his MD in Paediatrics at Lady Hardinge Medical College in April 1979, and did a senior residency at Kalawati Saran Children’s Hospital. He joined Aligarh Muslim University briefly as a lecturer before the UP Medical Services selected him, posting him to MLB Medical College in Jhansi.
He was there for thirty-six years.
It is the longest single institutional commitment in this archive — longer even than Hardial Singh’s thirty-four years at ESI Delhi. Jhansi received him when he was a young lecturer, and released him when he retired in 2020. Across those decades he watched the hospital grow, watched generations of students pass through, and contributed to the teaching and research that sustained it as an institution. His wife, Dr. Sadhna Kaushik, joined the Department of Pharmacology at MLB Medical College in 1985, rose to become Principal, and retired in 2020 — rejoining on a contractual basis thereafter, because the work was not finished.
They had built a life in Jhansi in the way that careers of sustained commitment build lives: not as a series of chosen destinations but as a gradual deepening of roots into a particular soil, until the place and the work and the people became inseparable.
What the Family Gave and What Sevagram Added
He thinks of his father’s khadi — worn every day, not as a symbol but as a habit — and of his uncle at Datta Pur, tending leprosy patients in the village next to the one where his nephew would study medicine twenty years later. He thinks of the nocturnal parasite wriggling on a slide at midnight, and of Dr. Nigam demonstrating a gait in a lecture hall, and of the table tennis board in Jawaharlal Hostel, and of the long friendships that the batch of 1969 has kept without effort because they do not require effort — they were formed in the kind of conditions that produce bonds that hold.
Sevagram gave him what his family had been pointing toward without quite being able to deliver it directly: the formal professional framework for a life of service. The khadi, the ideals, the commitment to the rural poor — these were already there, inherited from a father who died too young to pass them on in person and from uncles who had spent their lives demonstrating what they looked like in practice.
The medical degree was the instrument. The rest was already in place.
Dr. Anil Kumar Kaushik completed his MD in Paediatrics from Lady Hardinge Medical College, New Delhi. He joined MLB Medical College, Jhansi, as a lecturer in the UP Medical Services and served there for thirty-six years, retiring in 2020. His wife, Dr. Sadhna Kaushik, served as Professor and Principal of Pharmacology at the same institution. His uncle, Dr. Ravi Shankar Sharma, served leprosy patients at Datta Pur near Sevagram under Vinoba Bhave’s guidance. He lives in Jhansi.