Bundi is a walled city in the Hadoti region of Rajasthan — step-wells, lake palaces, painted havelis, and an old fort above it all. It is 210 kilometres south of Jaipur and sits near the Madhya Pradesh border, closer in character to central India than to the desert Rajasthan most outsiders imagine. Shakuntala Bhatia has lived there since 1980. She arrived as a young doctor from Nagpur, married a physician she had met after graduation, and stayed for the rest of her working life — practicing first privately, then for three decades in government service, and finally, at the women’s hospital where she rose to in-charge in 2011.
She is one of the quieter presences in the GMC 1973 batch: rarely at reunions, rarely traceable through the usual networks, living in a city that most of her classmates could not immediately place on a map. That she is in Bundi at all is itself a story worth telling.
Nagpur Beginnings
Shakuntala was born in New Delhi on 15 June 1955, the daughter of a government officer who later became Director of the Training Centre of the Indian Bureau of Mines at Civil Lines, Nagpur. Her schooling was entirely in Nagpur — St. Ursula Girls’ High School, Civil Lines, where Rekha Sapkal and Alka Mehta were classmates — and she completed her premed education at St. Francis De Sales College, Seminary Hills. She joined Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973.
After graduation, she interned at the Primary Rural Health Centre, Saoner, and at GMC Nagpur — the standard rural and urban pairing for the women of her batch — and then served briefly at Paratwada in Amravati district. It was after this, on 27 January 1980, that she married Dr. Vijay Bhatia, a physician who had completed his MD in Medicine from Sawai Mansingh Medical College, Jaipur. He was posted in Bundi. She followed.
Government Service in Bundi
The move to Bundi was not a hardship posting in the way that Melghat or Gadchiroli would have been for her contemporaries — but it was a long distance from the professional networks she had built, and from the city where she had trained. Rajasthan in 1980 was not Maharashtra. The patient population, the prevalent diseases, the social dynamics of a woman doctor in a conservative district town — all of it required adjustment.
She made the adjustment. She joined government service and spent close to three decades as a medical officer at the district hospital, Bundi. The work was steady and wide-ranging: outpatient care, inpatient management, the ordinary emergencies of a district hospital with limited resources, the slow accumulation of experience that comes from seeing the same illnesses in the same population across many years. She worked alongside her husband until his death in 2007, when diabetes and haemorrhagic stroke ended his life.
She continued. In 2011, she rose to become in-charge of the women’s hospital in Bundi — a recognition, after three decades, of her competence and reliability. She held that post until the end of her service career.
After Dr. Vijay Bhatia
Dr. Vijay Bhatia’s death left Shakuntala in a house in Bundi with a son still in training and a daughter in the early years of her career. Grief of this kind — the loss of a professional partner and a life companion — rarely appears in the official record of a doctor’s career. It belongs to the domestic archive that institutional memory almost never captures.
Her son, Ishan, went on to complete MBBS and MD (Anaesthesiology) from Bharatiya Vidyapeeth’s Medical College, Pune, served as senior resident at a Delhi government hospital, completed a fellowship in pain management at Daradia, and is now an attending consultant in anaesthesia and pain management at Aakash Healthcare in Delhi. He married Gazal Garg; they have a daughter, Naira. Her daughter, Jiya Malik, completed an M.Sc. in Chemistry — with a gold medal — and works as a government officer, married to Yatin Malik, a branch manager with Fullerton India. Their son Daniel has given Shakuntala her introduction to grandparenthood, and she has embraced it fully.
Still in Bundi
She missed the December 2013 class reunion — family commitments had the stronger claim — and her absence was noted by Alka Deshpande, who recalled her with warmth. The classmates of the 1973 batch who scattered farthest and stayed longest in their adopted towns are often the ones the archive knows least about, not because they did less, but because they did it far from the circuits of professional visibility.
Shakuntala Bhatia practiced medicine in Bundi for more than three decades. She raised two children in a city that was not her own. She buried her husband there. She stayed.
There is a version of the 1973 batch that is dominated by its most prominent figures — the neurologists and cardiologists, the professors and deans. But the archive also belongs to the general practitioners who went to district towns and government hospitals and stayed, year after year, without recognition from any body larger than the patients who knew their names.
Shakuntala Bhatia is one of those. Bundi is where she went and where she remained.