Not in the way that most of his classmates had been — passing through on a school excursion, or reading about it in a history textbook, or carrying in their minds the blurred image of a village associated with a great man. Raju Deodhar had actually been here, as a six-year-old boy, staying with his father’s cousin Dr. Anant Ranade, wandering the sun-drenched paths of the ashram while the adults talked about medicine and freedom and the particular obligations that the one imposed on the other. He had listened without understanding, watched without comprehending, absorbed without knowing he was absorbing. Now, in the summer of 1969, twenty-one years old and standing outside the principal’s office waiting to see if his name was on the merit list, he recognised something in the red earth and the neem shade and the unhurried pace of the place. He had been here before. In some sense that he could not quite articulate, he had never entirely left.
The Legacy of the Charkha
To understand Raju Deodhar, you have to understand his father first.
Keshav Ganesh Deodhar was not a doctor or a politician but something rarer — a man who had made his convictions the organizing principle of his entire life, without drama and without deviation. He had walked alongside Gandhi in the salt march of 1930, coordinating logistics for the Dandi campaign as part of the Arun Group. Later, he had done something that changed the lives of handloom weavers across rural India: he introduced the Ambar charkha, a more efficient spinning wheel that allowed village women to earn more in less time. Where Gandhi had given spinning its symbolic weight, Keshav Deodhar gave it a better mechanism. He had introduced Dr. Anant Ranade to Gandhiji personally, steering him toward the nascent Kasturba Hospital at Sevagram, where Ranade would spend his working life.
Raju was born on 22 May 1948 in Nashik. His childhood was shaped by this father — a man who travelled constantly across India promoting the Ambar charkha, who lived by the Gandhian calendar of khadi and simplicity and service, who brought home not gifts from his journeys but stories and convictions and the quiet authority of someone who has chosen his life deliberately. As a boy, Raju would accompany him sometimes on visits to Sevagram. He stayed with Dr. Ranade, listened to conversations he was too young to follow, and walked the ashram paths in the particular way of children who are not quite sure whether they are guests or belong.
He grew up knowing that Sevagram was a place his family had helped build. Whether that knowledge felt like a weight or a gift probably depended on the day.
A Dream Deferred
In 1968, Raju was sitting for his Inter-Science examinations at Ramnarayan Ruia College in Matunga, Bombay. His father was travelling, as he always was, somewhere across India with his charkhas and his cause. Then word came: Keshav Deodhar had fallen ill. He was admitted to JJ Hospital. Raju went to him, but his father did not recover. He died before Raju had finished his practical examinations — before the son could complete the last formal step between himself and the future his father had always assumed he would have.
He was seventeen. His younger brother was in the seventh grade. The family had no obvious income beyond what his father had earned, and what his father had earned had never been the point. The dream of a medical career, which had felt natural and proximate and almost inevitable a few weeks earlier, now seemed presumptuous. He had no idea how to afford it even if the marks had been sufficient. He enrolled in a pharmacy course in Jalgaon — not quite medicine, not quite surrender, a practical choice made by someone who had not yet given up but could not see the path forward clearly.
He stayed in Jalgaon for a year. He studied pharmacy without great enthusiasm. He kept his father’s absence in a quiet corner of his mind, visiting it but not living there.
The Return to the Red Earth
Then the news came from Sevagram.
A new medical college was opening — sixty seats, selection by interview. The institution was to be called Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences. It would be built on Gandhian principles. It would serve the rural poor. Its founders included Dr. Sushila Nayar, Dr. Jivraj Mehta, people whose names Raju had heard at the dinner table since childhood.
He did not need to think about it for very long.
He wrote to Dr. Ranade — his father’s cousin, his childhood host in Sevagram — and asked to stay with him while he attended the interview. Dr. Ranade said yes, as he always had. Raju came to Sevagram, walked again the paths he had walked as a six-year-old, and sat before a panel that read, as he put it later, like a roll call from the freedom movement: Dr. Sushila Nayar, Dr. Jivraj Mehta, Anna Saheb Sahasrabudhe, Manimala Choudhary, Santoshrao Gode.
They did not ask him about Gandhi. They did not test his commitment to rural service or probe his understanding of Gandhian economics. They already knew his family. They asked him, gently, why he had not simply gone to a medical college in Bombay.
He answered honestly. He told them about his father’s death, the interrupted examinations, the pharmacy course in Jalgaon. He told them he had come back to Sevagram because it was the only medical college in India that felt, in some unargued way, like his.
When the list was pinned up, his name was on it.
The Monastery and the Charkha
The early weeks were a controlled improvisation. There were forty-six boys and fourteen girls, and no hostel to put them in. Students were scattered across Sevagram in whatever spaces the village could offer. Raju was billeted with Smt. Dhotre — whose husband, Raghunath Dhotre, had been among the founding members of the Kasturba Society — along with classmates Balkrishna Maheshwari and Anil Kaushik. It was a simple house, with the particular warmth of a home that has made room for people it was not obliged to accommodate.
The mess was makeshift and entirely egalitarian. Boys and girls brought their own thalis, katoris, floor mats. They sat cross-legged together, ate simple food, washed their utensils at a shared tap, and walked back to wherever they were sleeping. There was no ceremony. The institution was too new for ceremony; it was still finding out what it was.
Mornings began at 5:30 with Sarv Dharma Prarthana — the all-religion prayer. Laxman Radakrishna. Pandit ,[ populrly called L.R.Pandit] austere and punctual, ensured no one missed it. After prayers came campus cleaning and soot katai — cotton spinning, a daily half-hour at the charkha that was simultaneously practical, symbolic, and, for most students, mildly baffling. The Gandhian routine unsettled many. One boy from Gujarat, who had arrived speaking only Gujarati and found himself unable to follow the English textbooks or the Hindi prayers, packed his bag in the middle of the night and tried to leave. “This isn’t a college,” he said, to no one in particular, “it’s a monastery.” He was persuaded, somehow, to stay. Six months later, Gopal Gadhesaria — one of the seven Gujarati students who had arrived that first week knowing no Hindi — ranked second in the university.
Principal I.D. Singh, who also taught Physiology, understood early that the most useful thing he could do for these students was to sit with them in their rooms in the evenings and teach them, in whatever combination of Hindi and English they could manage, the material that the textbooks were conveying in a language they did not yet fully possess. He did this quietly, without making it a programme or a policy. It was simply what needed doing.
Lessons from Babulal and Indurkar
There was a bicycle in the batch. One. It belonged to Madhavan Pillai from Kerala, and he guarded it with three chains and the vigilance of a man who knows that what he has is irreplaceable in the current circumstances. One night, someone broke all three chains, disassembled the bicycle entirely, and vanished. Pillai did not speak for several days. The bicycle was eventually reassembled; the three chains were never adequately explained.
There was Babulal.
In his ever-creased khadi kurta and pyjamas, Babulal ran the college canteen with a combination of practical generosity and total informality that made him, over the five years of an MBBS degree, into something more than a canteen owner. He lent money to students who had run short before the end of the month, kept no record of what he was owed, never asked. If you were hungry, he fed you. If you were homesick and sat down at one of his tables at an odd hour with no particular intention of buying anything, he would eventually appear with tea. Raju Deodhar said, many years later, that in Babulal you could find a bit of Gandhi — not the historical Gandhi, but the practical daily one, the man who believed that a person in need in front of you was a complete and sufficient claim on your attention.
The teachers arrived from GMC Nagpur and elsewhere, and many of them had been warned that posting to Sevagram was a professional backwater — a village college, a Gandhian experiment, a place for idealists and the insufficiently ambitious. Some came reluctantly. Several came and discovered, to their own surprise, that what the institution lacked in facilities it made up in something harder to name. Dr. Govind Manohar Indurkar in Anatomy once found a group of students outside Babulal’s canteen at ten o’clock at night, having walked back from a film in Wardha to find the mess shut. He took them home without discussion. His wife set a pan on the stove. The chapatis arrived hot. The six students ate with the gratitude of the young and famished, and the meal was never mentioned again by any of the parties involved, because in Sevagram it was simply what you did.
Raju Deodhar watched all of this and understood something that his father had tried, in a different register, to teach him: that an institution is not its buildings or its facilities or its formal procedures. It is the sum of what the people within it are willing to do for one another, without being required to.
A Career of Systems and Service
The final examinations came in 1974. The batch of 1969 had spent five years becoming something, and they demonstrated it clearly. Balkrishna Maheshwari — who had arrived that first week as one of the seven Gujarati students without Hindi — topped the university. Gopal Gadhesaria came second. Madhavan Pillai, the man with the bicycle, won the gold medal in Medicine. Dr. B.S. Chaubey, the professor of Medicine from Nagpur who had once dismissed the village college with the particular confidence of someone who has not yet been proved wrong, summoned Pillai for a retest. He was certain there had been a mistake. There had not been.
The skeptics were, for a time, quiet.
After MBBS, Raju Deodhar’s path diverged from the one his younger self might have drawn on a map. He moved into a career in healthcare administration and public health — work that was less visible than clinical practice but, in its accumulated effect, no less significant. He served across institutions, carrying with him the Sevagram understanding that medicine is not only what happens between a doctor and a patient, but what a system does or fails to do for the people it is meant to serve.
He carried something else too: a habit of thought that had been his father’s before it was his. The sense that the village, the rural poor, the person without access — these were not peripheral concerns. They were the centre. Everything else was arrangement.
He sometimes thinks about the six-year-old boy on the Sevagram paths, listening to conversations he could not yet follow. He wonders what that boy would have made of the knowledge that he would one day study medicine in those same red-earthed lanes, sleep in rooms a few hundred metres from the ashram where Gandhi had once walked, eat cross-legged on the floor of a makeshift mess and call it home.
He thinks the boy would have understood. He was always more at home in Sevagram than anywhere else. It just took twenty years and a pharmacy course in Jalgaon and the death of an extraordinary father to find his way back.
Dr. Rajendra Deodhar completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the inaugural batch of 1969. He went on to a career in healthcare administration and public health, working across institutions with a sustained commitment to rural and community medicine. He remains connected to the values and friendships that Sevagram gave him.