A Circle Completed in Obstetrics

There is a particular arithmetic in a doctor’s life when the hospital in which she trained becomes the hospital where her daughter now works. Dr. Swaraj Naik (née Chowdhry) understands this arithmetic well. She chose obstetrics and gynaecology at MGIMS partly by accident, partly by trust in the teacher who shaped her there. Her daughter, Dr. Trisha Naik, has chosen the same speciality. The thread that began in a village in Wardha district runs unbroken, a generation on, in a hospital in Jabalpur.

But the beginning, as beginnings often are, was simple and slightly frightened. She was seventeen years old, standing near the khadi shop in Sevagram Ashram on the morning of orientation camp, when she met a soft-spoken young man named Dr. Danny Naik. They exchanged a few polite words — just enough to ease the awkwardness of two young people in a new place. She did not know then that he would become her husband.

Chandigarh to Wardha

She was born on 15 August 1959 in Bareilly, but grew up in Chandigarh, where her father, Dr. S.B. Chowdhry, was a Professor of Commerce and Business Management at Punjab University. Her mother, Smt. Krishna Chowdhry, kept the home with the quiet warmth that Swaraj would later recognise as the most reliable kind of love. She was the youngest in the family — pampered, protected, and encouraged in equal measure.

Her schooling was at Government Senior Model School in Chandigarh; her BSc at Government College for Women. It was her father who pushed the idea of MGIMS. He was drawn to Gandhian values, had read about the college, and believed it was the right place for her. She trusted him, as she had always trusted him, without knowing precisely why.

The journey from Chandigarh to Wardha involved a change at Delhi. On the train, somewhere in the long overnight stretch, she and her father met Mr. Kuljeet, an MGIMS staff member who helped them find accommodation in the boys’ hostel on arrival. His small kindness — a stranger’s practical assistance at the start of a long journey — is what she remembers most from that day.

The Interview

The interview was held in the Dean’s old office. Dr. Sushila Nayar sat at the centre — composed, graceful, dressed in a pristine khadi sari, the particular stillness around her that students invariably noticed before anything else. She saw the anxiety in the girl from Chandigarh and broke the ice by asking about her family.

Then: “Do you know anyone who received a Nobel Prize from Punjab University?”

Swaraj smiled. “Dr. Har Gobind Khorana — for his work on genetics.”

A pause.

“If selected, will you stay here?”

“Yes.”

That one word — offered without hesitation, without calculation — settled something in the room. She was selected.

Sevagram

The orientation camp at Gandhi Ashram began the next day. Yoga at sunrise. Morning prayers. Shramdan in the afternoon. Sessions on values, ethics, and service led by teachers who spoke about Gandhi not as a historical figure but as a living obligation. The girls moved into the hostel. Ragging from seniors was minimal — most were kind. Swaraj had, in any case, a handwriting neat enough to make her useful for journal-writing duties, which tended to improve one’s standing with seniors considerably.

The academic life was another matter. The glamour of being a medical student evaporated quickly once the books opened. Anatomy, biochemistry, physiology — dense and demanding. She was slow to settle, as most students were. Then the mark sheets came back from the anatomy examination, and her name appeared at the top.

She had topped in anatomy. It surprised everyone, including her. She credits it entirely to the late Dr. Krishan Kumar Agrawal, whose passion for the subject — the way he taught, the stories he told to anchor difficult facts — left an impression that translated into examination results.

The Study Partner

She passed all her MBBS examinations with Dr. Danny Naik as her study partner. The friendship formed on that first morning near the khadi shop had deepened through years of shared classes, shared anxieties, and shared village postings. For her internship, she was posted to Duttapur Leprosy Centre with Dr. Suchitra Pandit — a posting that was, by its nature, not the one students competed for. The stigma around leprosy, the suffering of patients, the resource constraints of a small centre — these taught her, in a compressed and vivid way, more than the well-equipped wards of the main hospital could have.

In their free time, she and Suchitra cycled to Wardha or Sevagram, bought tea from the railway station canteen, and talked. Simple pleasures, she says now, but the kind that weave people together permanently.

The Speciality Chosen

She chose obstetrics and gynaecology for post-graduation, training initially under Dr. Mridula Trivedi at MGIMS. When Trivedi left, Swaraj became the first postgraduate student of Dr. S. Chhabra — a teacher whose reputation for strictness preceded her and did not disappoint. Chhabra was demanding, exacting, and entirely fair. Swaraj did not always appreciate it in the moment. She appreciates it now, in the way that students eventually come to understand the teachers who were hardest on them.

She married Dr. Danny Naik. They returned to Jabalpur, where he built Naik Multispeciality Hospital. She brought her obstetrics into the same institution, working alongside her husband in the hospital his parents had started, creating something that spanned generations.

Her daughter, Dr. Trisha, chose the same speciality. Swaraj watches her work and recognises, in her daughter’s hands and her daughter’s patience with anxious patients, something of what her own teachers gave her.

The Thread

MGIMS, she says, does not merely produce doctors. It nurtures human beings who happen to be doctors — people shaped by the daily discipline of simplicity, by village postings that stripped away clinical remove, by teachers who believed that empathy was not a supplement to medicine but its foundation.

She remembers Dr. Sushila Nayar. She remembers the khadi shop. She remembers a seventeen-year-old girl from Chandigarh arriving in a place she did not know, saying yes to a question she had not anticipated, and having that single syllable determine everything.

Dr. Swaraj Naik (née Chowdhry) completed her MBBS and postgraduate training in obstetrics and gynaecology at MGIMS Sevagram. She practises in Jabalpur at Naik Multispeciality Hospital, which she and her husband Dr. Danny Naik (Roll No. 9, MGIMS 1977) built together over four decades. Her daughter, Dr. Trisha, is an obstetrician and gynaecologist who now works alongside her.