Sushila Nayyar

Punjab and medical training

Sushila Nayyar was a physician, public-health advocate and former Indian health minister. A historical review by Helan Rajan and colleagues records her birth in undivided Punjab in 1914.[3][1]

Bucknell’s Living with Gandhi Archive identifies Kunjah, now in Pakistan, as her birthplace. It follows her medical study at Lady Hardinge in Delhi and visits to Gandhi’s communities during college breaks. Her brother Pyarelal provided an early connection. At Sevagram, medical work served both community residents and neighbouring villagers. Her involvement also included anticolonial activity: the archive records imprisonment during the Quit India campaign from 1942 to 1944. These activities placed a trained medical practitioner within anticolonial politics, with responsibilities to residents and villagers as well as the ashram community.[2]

A hospital and a medical college

MGIMS’s own founder history dates her Sevagram dispensary to 1944 and the fifteen-bed Kasturba Hospital to 1945. It describes the hospital as the nucleus of the medical institute established in 1969. The intervening ministerial career mattered to that account: during her tenure as Union health minister from 1962 to 1967, Lal Bahadur Shastri suggested a rural medical college that would prepare doctors for village work. The institution presents Nayyar as taking that proposal forward through the hospital she had developed. Its history describes a sequence of practical and administrative steps, involving medical provision, government discussion and an educational institution.[1]

Training, service and writing

The same account records her response when graduates neglected rural service: two years in villages became a condition for postgraduate study at their alma mater. The requirement expressed an educational priority; the page does not demonstrate its complete uptake.[1]

After Gandhi’s death, she pursued further public-health study at Johns Hopkins. Bucknell also records her writing with Pyarelal. Medical education and preserving an account of Gandhi’s life became different forms of continuing public work.[2]