The questions, when they came, had nothing to do with medicine.
He was sitting before a panel that included Dr. Sushila Nayar, Ms. Manimala Choudhary, Santoshrao Gode, Narayandas Jajoo — and Mrs. Pratibha Patil, then Health Minister of Maharashtra, who happened to be his mother’s cousin and who, upon recognising him, leaned forward and said, “I’ll take over.” For the next fifteen minutes, she asked him about bananas.
How many trees per acre? What fertiliser? Which pests troubled the crop? Where did they sell, and at what price? How did they water the plantation — motor or channel? What did an acre yield in a good season?
Mangalsingh answered each question carefully, drawing on the knowledge of a boy who had grown up around farms in Jalgaon and Dhule. Not once did the conversation touch Physics, Chemistry, Biology, or anything else that the word “medical college interview” might reasonably suggest. When it was over, he walked out into the Sevagram afternoon wondering, not for the last time in his association with MGIMS, whether some fundamental confusion had taken place.
It had not. A few days later, his name appeared on the admission list.
That was how Mangalsingh Rajput — born in Nimgul village in Dhule district, the third of six siblings, son of an agriculture officer, a young man who had been enrolled in a BAMS course in Bombay half-heartedly and without conviction — entered the inaugural batch of MGIMS Sevagram on the strength of his knowledge of banana cultivation.
He would spend the next several years providing the college with memories it has not forgotten.
His childhood in Nimgul and Jalgaon was uncomplicated by ambition. His father worked in agriculture. No one in the family had worn a stethoscope or contemplated doing so. Mangalsingh studied at Adarsh Vidya Mandir and then Sarvajanik Vidyalaya in Jalgaon with the application of a decent student who has not yet found a reason to be exceptional. After his first year of B.Sc. at Ruia College in Bombay in 1969, he tried for a seat in one of the city’s medical colleges. Nothing came of it.
He and a friend named Babu Maheshwari — disappointed in equal measure — enrolled together in a BAMS course at Podar College. It was not what either of them wanted. They attended classes without enthusiasm, kept one eye on other possibilities, and waited for something to change.
Then, one evening, Mangalsingh’s father came home holding a prospectus and an application form. Narayandas Jajoo had sent them from Wardha — a new medical college, Gandhian principles, admission by interview. Mangalsingh filled out the form with the unhurried attention of someone who does not yet believe the form will amount to anything, and returned to his BAMS classes.
The interview letter arrived. He packed a small bag and travelled to Sevagram alone. He knew no one on the panel. He had no letters of recommendation, no political connections, no family association with the freedom movement. He had his mother’s cousin, who happened to be on the selection committee, and a thorough knowledge of banana farming.
It was, as it turned out, enough.
Sevagram received him and he received Sevagram, though the terms of the exchange were not immediately apparent to either party.
The mandatory khadi did not trouble him philosophically, but it troubled him aesthetically. The Wardha khadi was plain and coarse — functional, undeniable, and entirely without distinction. Mangalsingh and a few co-conspirators took the bus to Bombay, bought designer khadi in finer weaves and more considered cuts, had it stitched to their specifications, and returned to campus as what they privately considered the best-dressed batch of Gandhi-inspired medical students in the country.
He settled into hostel life with his roommates Vinod Ughade and Hardayal Singh, and quickly established the reputation that would follow him through all five years of his MBBS: if something mischievous had happened in the college or the hostel, Mangal was either behind it or nearby.
This was not entirely fair. It was also not entirely wrong.
In 1970, when the second batch arrived, the first batch welcomed them in the manner that had become, at institutions across India, an unofficial orientation ritual. The ragging was thorough. Juniors were reduced to tears, classes came to a halt, and the disruption continued long enough to reach the desk of Principal I.D. Singh.
He sent telegrams to the parents of the principal offenders. His tone was grave: Your son has been rusticated.
Mangalsingh’s father arrived from Jalgaon with the expression of a man who has been preparing for bad news and has now received confirmation. “What did my son do?” he asked Principal Singh.
The principal explained, at some length, the nature and extent of the disruption.
Mangalsingh’s father listened. Then he said, with the particular composure of a parent who has been living with the source of the problem rather longer than the institution has: “You are disturbed for eight hours. He has been disturbing me for four months. Let me just take him home.”
He was preparing to do exactly that when Vinod Ughade ran in, breathless, with news of a lightning strike. The batch had decided, in the improvised democracy of hostel corridors, to go on strike in solidarity. The strike lasted nine days. The Visar Council eventually relented. The rustication was revoked. The batch returned to class.
Mangalsingh’s father went back to Jalgaon.
Among the minor comedies that Sevagram provided, two achieved the status of legend.
The first concerned Professor Ramvishal Agrawal, the Pathology teacher — a quiet man, not given to theatrical gestures. One evening, around half past nine, there was a knock at Mangalsingh’s hostel door. He opened it to find Dr. Agrawal standing in the corridor.
“May I come in?” the professor asked.
He entered, looked briefly at the floor, and then — before Mangalsingh could understand what was happening — bent down and touched his student’s feet.
“Sir — what are you doing?” Mangalsingh stepped back, genuinely alarmed. “You are my teacher. I should be touching your feet.”
Dr. Agrawal straightened up, composing himself. He had a proposition. The Pathology practical examination was approaching, and he wanted a clean record — a hundred percent pass rate from his students. Mangalsingh’s presence in the examination hall was, he had calculated, incompatible with this ambition.
“Could you,” Dr. Agrawal enquired, with the careful dignity of a man asking something he knows he has no right to ask, “perhaps not appear for the exam?”
Mangalsingh laughed until he had to sit down.
The second legend concerned the Anatomy practical — and a train that arrived two and a half hours late.
Dr. Kadasne had recently been promoted to Civil Surgeon of Jalgaon and appointed as external examiner for the university Anatomy practicals. Some weeks before the examination, he had encountered Mangalsingh’s father near Jalgaon railway station. The conversation was brief and unremarkable, ending with the father mentioning his son’s roll number — twenty — and Dr. Kadasne noting it on a slip of paper and tucking it into his pocket.
On the day of the practical, the train from Jalgaon arrived at Wardha two and a half hours behind schedule. By the time Dr. Kadasne reached Sevagram, it was half past eleven in the morning. Dr. Kane — the Anatomy professor, a man of strictly maintained impatience — had already begun the viva in the old hospital’s dissection hall, working through students at his usual pace.
Dr. Kadasne entered. “Roll number twenty!” he called, across the hall.
Mangalsingh rose.
“Describe the anatomy of the palm,” Dr. Kadasne said.
He began. Behind Dr. Kadasne, Dr. Kane, seated at his table, closed his eyes and within moments was audibly asleep.
Dr. Kadasne, unaware of or indifferent to this development, leaned forward. “So — you are Mangal Rajput.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your father met me. Your mother always talks about me.” He patted Mangalsingh on the shoulder with the warmth of a man who has been carrying a social obligation and is pleased to discharge it. “How are you, beta?”
And that was the entirety of the Anatomy viva. No bones named, no muscles traced, no nerves mapped. Dr. Kadasne marked him the highest in his section. Even had Dr. Kane harboured intentions in the other direction, the arithmetic would have saved him.
Mangalsingh cleared his first MBBS Anatomy practical without being asked a single question about anatomy.
The episode that entered deepest into Sevagram mythology, however, took place in 1970, and required a half-bottle of rum, a DYSP with a grievance, and a lawyer’s clerk glimpsed at a railway station.
The student union elections had produced a victory for Mangalsingh’s group, and five friends — himself, Amarjeet, Hardayal, Avatar Singh, and one other — went to Monika Hotel in Wardha to celebrate. A bottle of rum was ordered. They were halfway through it when a friend appeared with urgent news: Principal Ishar Dayal Singh was coming.
The bottle was handed to the Sardar waiter. “Keep this. If anyone asks, say nothing.”
They left the hotel at speed. The principal’s jeep arrived. The waiter, confronted with authority, handed over the bottle and provided a full account of events.
Principal Singh returned to campus, typed rustication letters for all five, and filed the bottle as evidence.
The five students convened in a state of panic and strategic deliberation. Someone suggested a lawyer. They travelled to Nagpur to find Advocate Manohar, celebrated for his sympathies with students in difficulties. They waited all day. A clerk told them he was leaving for Bombay on the 5:30 train. They ran to the railway station, bribed the conductor, and climbed into the advocate’s compartment without tickets and without breath.
Manohar heard them out, shook his head, and declined the case. But he wrote a note on a slip of paper addressed to DYSP Sharma — Please help these students — and handed it over.
They disembarked at Badnera, reached Wardha by night, and knocked on Sharma’s door at half past nine.
He read the note. He listened. He burst out laughing. “Come tomorrow at five,” he said.
The next evening, Sharma arrived at Principal Singh’s residence with four constables. He knocked. Was this the principal of Sevagram Medical College? Did he have a licence to store liquor? He produced a search warrant. He seized the half-bottle of rum. He informed Principal Singh, in the tone of a man performing an official function without personal animus, that he could arrest him on the spot but would exercise restraint on account of his position.
He left. The evidence left with him.
At the rest house at five o’clock, Sharma handed the bottle back to the five students with a grin. “Your principal cannot take action against you now.”
They opened it and celebrated.
“Why did you help us?” Mangalsingh asked.
Sharma leaned back. Six months earlier, he said, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had visited Sevagram. His wife had wanted a front seat. At the last moment, Dr. Singh’s staff had displaced her to the back row for a group of VIPs. She had been furious.
“Yesterday,” Sharma said, “I saw a chance to get even.”
He had taken it. The students had provided the occasion.
Mangalsingh Rajput completed his MBBS, eventually, with the cheerful tenacity of a man who has survived rustication letters, failed examinations navigated by the intervention of friendly examiners, and a principal whose patience with him was a testament to something — possibly the Gandhian value of forbearance, possibly the simple recognition that a batch of sixty students contains multitudes and not all of them are Balkrishna Maheshwari.
He went on to practice medicine in Maharashtra, carrying with him from Sevagram what everyone carried from Sevagram: the understanding that medicine is practised among people, not above them, and that the quality of attention you bring to a patient has nothing to do with how many questions you answered correctly in your Anatomy viva.
When he thinks of Sevagram now, he thinks of bananas and a minister’s questions, samosas at Babulal’s, telegrams from the principal to worried parents, a half-bottle of rum that outlasted its usefulness as evidence, and a Pathology professor standing at a hostel door, willing to touch a student’s feet rather than see his record spoiled.
Some places teach you medicine. Sevagram taught him that too — and also, along the way, that life will offer its absurdities freely and without warning, and that the correct response is to remain resourceful, keep your friends close, and never underestimate what a farmer knows about bananas.
Dr. Mangalsingh Rajput completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the inaugural batch of 1969. He went on to medical practice in Maharashtra. He was born in Nimgul, Dhule district, and grew up in Jalgaon. He lives in retirement.