He was born on 4 March 1951, the fourth child in a family rooted in the soil of Uttar Pradesh. His earliest world was Gajraula, a town in Amroha district where the lanes smelled of fresh earth after rain and the sky at dusk turned the colour of ripened wheat. His father, Rameshwar Dayal, was a man who had inhaled Gandhian values so thoroughly that they had become a kind of second nature — he wore khadi with the quiet dignity of one who genuinely believed in its message, not because an institution demanded it.

Anil lost his father at thirteen. The loss left a wound that never entirely closed, but it also clarified something. His uncle, Rama Shankar, had worked alongside Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia, and would eventually become a Member of Parliament and a minister. Another uncle, Dr. Ravi Shankar Sharma, had gone to Sevagram in 1946 and joined Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan Andolan in Bihar, later returning to care for leprosy patients at Dattapur near Sevagram. It was through this uncle, living and working in the orbit of Gandhi’s village, that Anil first heard of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences.

Amroha, Moradabad, and the Long Road

Amroha itself was a place of quiet distinction. It had given India the filmmaker Kamal Amrohi — whose Pakeezah would become a classic of Urdu cinema — and was known for its mango orchards, its dholak-makers, and the delicacy of its woodwork. Delhi was several hours away in those years; the world outside felt genuinely distant.

Anil did his schooling at Gajraula, then Hasanpur, and went on to Hindu College in Moradabad for his twelfth and first year of B.Sc. The distance from these places to Sevagram was not merely geographical. It was a journey from one India to another — from the Gangetic plains with their particular texture of language and kinship to the flat red earth of Vidarbha.

In 1969, the MGIMS selection process was singular. There was no entrance examination. Selection was by interview, by recommendation letters, and by the candidate’s family background — specifically their connection to the freedom struggle, to khadi, to the Bhoodan Andolan and the Gandhian social movements. For Anil, with his uncle at Dattapur and the family’s deep embeddedness in the same world that had produced MGIMS, the fit was almost pre-ordained.

He travelled alone from Gajraula to Dattapur, carrying a suitcase and his uncle’s faith. Dr. Sushila Nayar knew the uncle well. His name had already reached her desk. The interview asked what it always asked: why medicine, what is swadeshi, what does khadi mean? He answered from truth, not from preparation. He was selected.

A Room That Was Mini-India

From his second year, he shared a three-seater room with Balkrishna Maheshwari and Rajendra Deodhar — both Gandhian, both from modest backgrounds, both Marathi-speaking. They taught him Marathi with the patient generosity of people who understood that language is a form of welcome. He learnt.

The 1969 batch was, as he would say for the rest of his life, a mini-India: Maharashtra and Gujarat, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Bihar, Kerala and Tamil Nadu — different religions, many languages, no barriers that time and proximity did not dissolve. Caste was never a topic. It was simply not the currency of the place.

Days began before dawn with the Sarva Dharma Prarthana, a warden rapping on doors at five in the morning. After prayers came shramdan — sweeping, cleaning, scrubbing the sandas. They carried their own utensils to the mess, washed them afterwards, and headed to class. The assigned village for community work was close to the Ashram.

At night, sometimes, they joined filariasis detection camps, bending over microscopes looking for the nocturnal movement of parasites on slides. Vidarbha was heavily infested. MGIMS regularly sent surgical teams into the field. As students, they assisted in hydrocele and cataract surgeries conducted in makeshift operating theatres under canvas tents in village courtyards.

Babulal, the Harmonium, and the Cine Club

There were no games facilities at first. His batchmate Subhash Srivastava changed that, persuading his father — a contractor in Nagpur — to donate ₹10,000 for cricket equipment. Soon there were matches against Science College Wardha and teams from Nagpur. A table tennis board arrived in Jawaharlal Hostel not long after, and became the evening destination for anyone who needed to stop thinking about medicine for an hour.

The annual functions were the social peak of each year. Principal I.D. Singh played the harmonium at these evenings. Dr. M.D. Khapre accompanied him on tabla. Students discovered in themselves capacities they had not suspected — for singing, for acting, for verse. The Wardha district magistrate attended. The world outside Sevagram briefly entered, and was impressed.

A Cine Club was founded and became popular. One year, a junior student sang Jhoom Barabar Jhoom Sharabi in front of Dr. Sushila Nayar. She stopped the function immediately and gave the organisers a very precise dressing-down. Sevagram’s idea of culture was not, as it turned out, infinitely flexible.

The Lecture on Gait

In the lecture halls, some teachers became legends by the sheer quality of their teaching. Dr. M.L. Sharma’s pharmacology lectures sparkled with well-timed humour. Dr. S.P. Nigam, their medicine professor, was a master of the clinical hour. Anil would remember for the rest of his life a lecture Nigam gave on gait — the different ways disease inscribes itself in the way a person walks — in which the professor performed each gait with theatrical flair, becoming before the class a man with Parkinson’s, with cerebellar ataxia, with foot-drop. It was a performance so precise and so illuminating that it turned a topic in a textbook into something a young doctor would recognise instantly at a bedside thirty years later.

Dr. O.P. Gupta joined as a medicine lecturer in the second year — gentle, sincere, from Chirgaon near Jhansi. Dr. Ravinder Narang took surgery, his wife Dr. Pratibha Narang pathology; Dr. Vishwanath Chaturvedi ENT, his wife Dr. Pushpa Chaturvedi paediatrics — both from AIIMS Delhi. The college was assembling, teacher by teacher, into something real.

Anil was counted among Professor Nigam’s favourite students. When internship came, it felt natural to begin in medicine.

The Road from Sevagram to Jhansi

In February 1975, he was selected by Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi. He completed rotations in medicine and paediatrics, then appeared for several postgraduate entrance examinations. An offer came first from Banaras Hindu University, where he briefly joined MD Paediatrics. In April 1977, an offer from Delhi University changed course again. He joined Lady Hardinge Medical College, completed his MD in Paediatrics in April 1979, and eventually made Jhansi his home — a city where his professional life took root.

After a senior residency at Kalawati Saran Children’s Hospital and a short lectureship at JN Medical College Aligarh, he was selected for the UP Medical Services and joined MLB Medical College, Jhansi, as a Lecturer. He remained there until his retirement in 2020 — a span of decades in the same institution, watching the city change around him while the wards remained, season after season, the same mix of suffering and recovery.

His wife, Dr. Sadhna Kaushik, joined the Department of Pharmacology at MLB Medical College in 1985 and rose to become its Principal, retiring in 2020. They were two MGIMS alumni who had found each other and built a life in Jhansi, in a medical college far from Sevagram but shaped, still, by what Sevagram had made of them.

What Sevagram Left Behind

Looking back, Anil Kaushik describes Sevagram not as a college but as a crucible — the word several of his batchmates reach for, independently, when they try to explain what the place did to them. Friendships were made there that have lasted sixty years. Values were absorbed, not taught. The discipline of prayer and shramdan was not something a student agreed to — it was something that entered the body through repetition and became part of the way one moved through the world.

Medicine, he learnt in those years, was not a profession entered at nine and left at five. It was a way of life with obligations that extended into the evening and the midnight and the early morning. The filariasis camps, the village surgeries under canvas, the patients who came barefoot with more hope than money — these were not supplementary experiences. They were the education.

The mini-India of his three-seater room — three languages, three backgrounds, one small space — was in some ways the best preparation for a career in a public hospital in UP, where a doctor sees, on any given morning, the full range of what the country is.

Dr. Anil Kumar Kaushik completed his MD in Paediatrics from Lady Hardinge Medical College, Delhi. He served as faculty at MLB Medical College, Jhansi, from the 1980s until his retirement in 2020. His wife, Dr. Sadhna Kaushik, retired as Principal of the Pharmacology Department at the same institution. They live in Jhansi.