Professor & Head of Pharmacology \u00b7 Sixteen Years at Sevagram \u00b7 The Doctor Who Was Also a Celestial Singer<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Anybody with a bit of hard work and rote-learning could become an engineer or doctor,” Dr. M.D. Khapre said, “but music and singing could not be learnt this way. It required exceptional imagination, passion, and talent. I wanted to be a devoted Hindustani Classical vocalist in my adolescence but ended up being a doctor instead.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said this without bitterness. He had made peace with the compromise decades earlier, and the compromise had not been complete \u2014 music had remained present throughout his life in Sevagram, filling his home with mehfil sessions and bhajans, carrying him onto the stage of Dhanwate Rang Mandir in Nagpur in the early 1980s, resonating through cultural evenings at MGIMS where his baritone stopped whatever else was happening in a room. He was a doctor who taught pharmacology as though it were a performance art, and a musician who had chosen medicine as his profession, and over time the two vocations became so intertwined that those who knew him could not easily say which was the larger part of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gajanan Ambulkar, who knew him for decades, remembered him simply: “His heart belonged to music, and we often wondered if he was a doctor or a celestial singer.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Madhav Dattatraya Khapre was born on February 4, 1937, in Nagpur, into a family of some standing \u2014 his father was a lawyer and landlord, their home a mansion called Khapre Wada on Pataleshwar Road in Badkas Chowk. He attended New English High School, a kilometre from home, and entered Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1955.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The path to pharmacology came through proximity and character. Dr. Dashputre, the Head of Pharmacology at GMC, lived near the Khapre family. His influence drew Madhav toward the department for his MD. Under Dashputre, and alongside Dr. M.L. Sharma, Dr. V.R. Deshpande, and Dr. P.R. Kherdikar, he learned the discipline as both science and craft \u2014 understanding not just mechanism and dosage but the pedagogical challenge of making a subject that students feared into one they could inhabit with confidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He began his career as an assistant medical officer at Mayo Hospital, Nagpur, then joined the GMC Pharmacology department as Lecturer in July 1967. In 1970, the Government of Maharashtra deputed him to MGIMS as Reader in Pharmacology. He arrived on February 21, 1971, joining Dr. M.L. Sharma, who had come the previous December. They were the entire department. Sharma was forty-one. Khapre was thirty-three. They had sixty first-year students before them and a great deal to build.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr. Sharma and Dr. Khapre were, by every account, complementary rather than interchangeable. Sharma was the senior figure \u2014 the Professor, the Principal, the institutional presence. Khapre brought a different register: lighter, more playful in manner, the music always visible beneath the surface, a warmth in the classroom that students felt immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Together they established the culture of the Pharmacology department. Their lectures wove in humour without sacrificing rigour. They used jokes not as decoration but as delivery mechanisms \u2014 making a drug’s mechanism memorable by embedding it in a story, making an adverse effect stick by attaching it to something funny. Notes taken in their classes were passed down through successive batches as treasured documents, used long after the teachers themselves had moved on. During the 1980s, when textbooks by Satoskar from KEM Mumbai and K.D. Tripathy from MAMC Delhi became the standard references, Khapre’s classroom notes circulated alongside them as a parallel curriculum that students trusted more completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He understood the linguistic challenge his classroom presented \u2014 Marathi, Hindi, and Punjabi speakers, many with limited English fluency, confronting pharmacological terminology for the first time. He moved between English and Marathi during lectures with natural ease, not as a concession but as a genuine teaching decision, understanding that concepts needed to land in the language where the student actually thought. Students felt seen rather than accommodated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Pharmacology is like a puzzle,” he would say. “Each drug is a piece, and it’s our job to fit them together to create effective treatment plans for patients.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was promoted to Professor in 1977. He returned briefly to GMC Nagpur before resuming his MGIMS professorship in April 1980, teaching seven batches between 1978 and 1985. In 1988, after leaving Sevagram, he mentored Dr. S. John Premendran through a PhD thesis examining the impact of calcium, strontium, and barium on various muscle tissues and their interactions with calcium antagonists \u2014 pure pharmacological science that reflected how seriously he took the research dimension of his discipline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While completing his final MBBS years, he had explored Indian classical music under the tutelage of Pandit Annaji Kshirsagar, immersing himself in the teachings of the two legendary Vishnus \u2014 Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande and Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar. He did not confine himself to any single Gharana. He was devoted to Ustad Amir Khan’s style, and held deep reverence for Sant Gyaneshwar and Gulabrao Maharaj of Madhan, Vidarbha \u2014 a devotion that eventually produced an audio cassette of Maharaj’s bhajans that he pressed and distributed among friends and colleagues at his own cost, asking nothing in return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His home in Sevagram became a gathering place. For college events and the Ganpati festival, he organised musical mehfil sessions where his baritone resonated through the air \u2014 bhajans from the Ashram Bhajanavali alongside classical compositions. Sudam Ambulkar sang; Hari strummed the tanpura; talented medical students including Avinash Wagh played the tabla; Shyam Babhulkar and others joined. The sessions ran late. There was tobacco, paan supari, tasty chivda, and music until the night was well advanced. On those evenings, the distinction between the pharmacology teacher and the classical vocalist had entirely dissolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Chairman of Sargam \u2014 MGIMS’s musical society \u2014 and cultural in-charge for the college’s annual day, he was the animating force behind the institution’s cultural life. He performed songs from iconic Hindi films of the 1950s, transported listeners into nostalgia with the ease of someone who understood that music’s function was to carry people somewhere they needed to go. He taught acting to MGIMS staff members. When Sujata, the school-going daughter of hospital cashier Mr. D.R. Bele, had performances lined up in Wardha and Nagpur, he accompanied her to the venues personally. The music teacher in him could not distinguish between his students in medicine and anyone else around him who was trying to learn something difficult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the early 1980s, he performed in a Marathi drama titled Pankh Labhale Aaj Suranna<\/em> at Dhanwate Rang Mandir, Nagpur, alongside established actors including Pandit Prabhakar Deshkar. The doctor from Khapre Wada had made it, after all, to the stage he had imagined in adolescence \u2014 not as a full-time musician, but fully present, on his own terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gajanan Ambulkar, eighty-two years old when he shared his memories, offered an image that said more than any professional assessment could. Dr. Khapre appeared at his father’s funeral in the rain \u2014 not light rain, but the kind that turns Vidarbha streets to ankle-deep mud. He came anyway. He shouldered the arthi. He marched forward in the mud without comment, because the family needed him there and he had come to be there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I will forever cherish the memory of his presence at my father’s funeral,” Ambulkar said. “Rain pouring relentlessly. Undeterred by ankle-deep mud, he marched forward, shouldering my father’s arthi \u2014 a symbol of profound respect.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the man the pharmacology lectures came from, and the mehfil sessions, and the quiet presence at performance venues. The kindness was not a separate quality from the teaching or the music. It was the source of all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He left MGIMS in August 1987, taught briefly at GMC Aurangabad, took voluntary retirement in June 1988, then taught at Dr. Punjabrao Deshmukh Memorial Medical College, Amravati, and subsequently at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Sawangi, until 2005. Each institution received the same quality of attention he had given Sevagram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I spoke with him by telephone on May 30, 2023, he was eighty-six years old. His voice carried nostalgia and warmth in equal measure. “The two decades I spent in Sevagram during the 1970s and 1980s were the golden days of my life,” he said. The bond he had formed with the people, the joy in the work, the shared love of classical music, the sense of belonging \u2014 these had woven themselves into the fabric of his soul in a way that age had not loosened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the last years of his life, his health declined. A renal tumour required a nephrectomy. In January 2026, he developed bilateral femoral artery occlusions. Sepsis and multiorgan failure followed. His family, not wishing to prolong his suffering, asked the intensivists to withhold further life support. He died at Viveka Hospital in Nagpur on January 18, 2026 \u2014 a fortnight before what would have been his eighty-ninth birthday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He had wanted to be a Hindustani Classical vocalist. He became a pharmacologist who taught like a performer, organised the cultural life of an institution, shouldered the arthi in the rain, and made his home a place where the music never stopped. He did not choose between the two lives. He lived both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n\n\nThe Man Gajanan Ambulkar Remembered<\/h2>\n\n\n
\n\n\nAfter Sevagram, and the Final Chapter<\/h2>\n\n\n