In 1974, Shyam Bawage had been at GMC Nagpur for barely two months. He had not yet sat his first MBBS examination. And yet his classmates were already forming queues to attend his anatomy sessions in the dissection hall — listening, as the manuscript puts it, with awe and apt attention, as he walked them through the nerves, muscles, tendons, vessels, and viscera of the human body like a man who had known the place for years. He was 19. The body had no mysteries for him, or none he had not already begun to solve.
That capacity for absorption — for taking something difficult and holding it completely — would turn up again in very different territory, half a lifetime later.
The Boy from Pusad
Shyam was born in Pusad, 110 kilometres southwest of Yavatmal, the son of a farmer. He attended Koshetwar Daulatkhan Vidyalaya — the same school that produced Deepak Bahekar, Satish Bhaskarwar, and Prabhat Deshmukh. In the 1971 Higher Secondary examination, Bahekar ranked second in Vidarbha; Bhaskarwar ranked sixth; Shyam missed a ranking by a single mark. He completed his pre-medical year at RLT College of Science, Akola, and entered GMC Nagpur in 1973.
His reputation in the dissection hall was established almost immediately. Anatomy, for Shyam, was not a subject to be memorised but a landscape to be explored — and he explored it with the confidence of someone who genuinely enjoyed the territory. His classmates knew this, and showed up accordingly.
In 1982, Shyam completed his MS in Ophthalmology at GMC Nagpur — the same year as Archana Srivastava. His thesis examined aqueous outflow in chronic simple glaucoma. He worked through his MS under three supervisors in succession: Dr. Ishwar Chandra, then Dr. Tehra, then Dr. Dhawan. After graduation he practiced at City Post Office, Itwari, Nagpur, until 1994.
The Return, and the Turn Inward
In 1994, Shyam went back to Pusad. He was the only child; his parents would not settle in Nagpur, so he went to them. He practiced there for 16 years, teaching medical students, residents, and ophthalmologists along the way — Dr. Mahatme among his better-known students. He served as president of the Vidarbha Ophthalmology Society.
But 1989 had already changed the direction of his inner life. That year, as a member of the organising committee of a spiritual anushthan in Nagpur, he met the Jagadguru of the Rambhapuri Peeth in Karnataka. The encounter was decisive. Shyam began studying the Upanishads and the Siddhanta Shikhamani — an ancient dialogue between the yogi Shivayogi Shivacharya and the sage Agastya. What followed was not a retreat from the world but an expansion into a different dimension of it: discourses at Nanded, Parbhani, Hingoli, Amravati, Bhandara, Chandrapur, Achalpur, and Benares, conducted with, as the record notes, both humility and authority.
He donated two acres of land in Pathrot, 15 kilometres from Achalpur, to support this work. In 2010, he planted close to 400 trees on a two-acre farm nearby. Every August he lives in Pathrot for a month of spiritual discourse — speaking daily on the Narad, Brahma, and Shiv Puranas, the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, and the Upanishads.
“I remain in the company of the divine,” Shyam says, “and experience true love, peace and happiness which are more lasting than material attainments.”
Nashik: The Partial Return
In 2010, Shyam moved to Nashik, where he practices ophthalmology part-time at Shivkripa Multispecialty Eye Institute. The practice continues, but it does not define him as it once did. His son Shivkumar, MBBS and DOMS, completed fellowships in phacoemulsification surgery and now carries the ophthalmology practice forward. Shivkumar married dentist Devaki Kale in February 2021; their son Devanshi was born in November of the same year. Shyam’s father, who had farmed the land in Pusad and watched his son become a doctor, died in August 2023 at the age of 101, on Shravan Putrada Ekadashi. His mother, aged 94, followed a fortnight later, on the same day of the lunar calendar.
The boy who could recite the anatomy of the human body before he had sat an examination now speaks on the Vedas for a month each year to audiences who come to hear him from across Maharashtra. The territory has changed completely. The capacity for total absorption has not.