There is a cartoon Maya Wanjari drew in the GMC college magazine sometime in the mid-1970s. In the first frame, two women water a small plant and talk. In the second, the plant has grown into a full tree, heavy with flowers — and the women are still talking, their conversation uninterrupted, entirely indifferent to the passage of time. Prakash Wakode recalled it at a reunion nearly fifty years later, with the vividness of someone who had understood, at the time, that it was more than a cartoon. It was a precise observation about what women’s conversations sustain. It was also, without intending to be, a self-portrait of the kind of doctor Maya Wanjari would become: someone who sat with her patients long enough for things to grow.
Nagpur All the Way Through
Maya was born in Nagpur — her father a Telegraph Master in the Central Telegraph Office, her mother a homemaker. The city was her entire educational geography. She attended Nutan Bharat Vidyalaya, Abhyankar Nagar, where Avinash Deshmukh was a school contemporary. She then moved to Hadas High School — a school that sent an unusual concentration of students to the 1973 GMC batch: Pratibha Amin, Rajiv Laul, Sanjeev Chandorkar, Sanjay Gadre, Tara Bhat, Hari Paranjape, and Hema Deoras all passed through its classrooms. From Hadas she went to Hislop College, then to the Institute of Science, then to GMC Nagpur in 1973.
During her graduate years she was close to Vijaya Vithalkar, Vijayalaxmi Kane, Anjali Sapkal, Aruna Gattani, and Sandhya Mohgaonkar — a cohort of women who arrived at GMC from smaller towns, speaking English less confidently than their convent-educated classmates, and who found, after the first MBBS, that the gap was smaller than it had appeared. Maya represented GMC in All India Inter Medical Competitions for three consecutive years. She was also the one drawing cartoons for the college magazine, which tells you something about the range of what she considered worth attending to.
The Making of a Gynaecologist
Her rural internship was at the Rural Health and Training Centre, Saoner — the standard posting for the women of the batch, who arrived there with their tiffins and their stethoscopes and learned, in six months, something about the gap between the medicine taught in lecture theatres and the medicine required in a primary health centre. Urban internship followed at GMC Nagpur, then a house job in Infectious Diseases. She enrolled for MD (Obstetrics and Gynaecology) at GMC Nagpur and obtained her DGO in April 1980 and her MD in April 1983, her thesis on mid-trimester abortions by mechanical stimulation supervised by Dr. Agrawal.
The postgraduate years were more than an apprenticeship in clinical procedure. During her residency, she served as a Research Officer for Upjohn International and was a site investigator in a clinical trial comparing Clindamycin and Metronidazole in gynaecologic and obstetric sepsis. The exposure to formal clinical research — to the discipline of a protocol, to the difference between observation and evidence — refined her clinical thinking in ways that informal training alone could not.
Daga Hospital, Nagari Rugnalaya, and Prasad Maternity Home
After her MD, Maya served at Daga Hospital, Nagpur until 1992. She then served as Director of Nagari Sahakari Rugnalaya, Nagpur from 1996 to 2001. In December 1994, she founded Prasad Maternity and Nursing Home — a five-bed private hospital in South Nagpur, named for her son. Trained in gynaecological oncology and endoscopy, she built a practice around a population of women who were, by the structural facts of their situation, underserved.
SP Kalantri, writing of her, identified the population precisely: women who, through neglect, poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, or gender bias, had failed to receive proper antenatal care, or whose gynaecological problems had never been properly addressed. These are not unusual patients in a Nagpur private practice. They are, in fact, the majority of patients in any gynaecology practice that is not in a high-income neighbourhood and does not filter by ability to pay. What is unusual is a doctor who names them, who organises her practice around their needs, and who sustains that orientation across three decades of work.
In 1987, while still at Daga Hospital, Maya began giving time to the Nagarjuna Medical Trust in her neighbourhood — the kind of commitment that operates outside the formal working day and is therefore invisible in most career accounts. She was also an active Rotarian and participated in a Rotary hospital exchange programme that took her to institutions across Europe, sharpening her understanding of what gynaecological practice looked like in settings with different resources and different assumptions. The training in endoscopy and gynaecological oncology she pursued gave her skills that relatively few practitioners in South Nagpur possessed at the time.
What Good Gynaecology Requires
The qualities that make a good gynaecologist are specific and not easily faked. They include excellent communication — because the conditions that bring women to a gynaecologist’s consulting room are often the conditions they have been least able to speak about freely. They include attention to detail — because the difference between a normal examination and an abnormal one is often small and easy to overlook. They include dexterity — the hands-on technical skill that cannot be acquired from textbooks. And they include what Maya herself demonstrated across thirty years: the ability to deal with the emotional and social dimensions of women’s health, to hold those dimensions with the same seriousness as the clinical ones.
Her husband, Dr. Ramdas Brahmane, holds an MD in Microbiology and has taught at the Hind Institute of Medical Sciences, Safedabad, in Uttar Pradesh. His academic postings took him across institutions; Maya anchored herself in Nagpur, in the hospital she had founded, in the city that had educated her. Their sons chose different paths — one preparing for postgraduate entrance examinations, one an ophthalmologist now practising in Yavatmal. The household has the particular character of a family whose members took seriously the obligation to be useful, each in his or her own way, in the places where they found themselves.
The cartoon in the college magazine — the plant, the women, the unbroken conversation — was drawn fifty years ago. The practice it anticipated, the sustained attention to the lives of women that it illustrated, continued until Maya Wanjari had given it everything she had. That is, in the end, what the best doctors do: they keep talking, and the plant keeps growing.