Western medicine was introduced in India as early as 1600 CE and was mandated to exclusively serve the troops of the British army. In 1833, Lord Bentinck formed a committee to study the indigenous systems of medicine like Ayurveda and Unani. The report claimed that the native medical systems were extremely poor and recommended termination of official patronage to indigenous systems of medicine. The Ayurveda classes held at the Sanskrit College in then Calcutta, were discontinued in 1835. This tale is about the defiance of a doctor against the westerners which led to the establishment of the first private medical college through the herculean efforts of a single person – Dr Radha Gobinda Kar (23 August 1852 – 19 December 1918).
RG Kar Medical College & Hospital in Kolkata
Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
RG Kar was born into a family with a medical background. His father, Durgadas Kar wrote the first Bengali book on medical substances called Materia Medica. In fact, Durgadas Kar was one of the first to write medical textbooks in Bengali. The family made a substantial fortune by writing and publishing medical textbooks in Bengali. They initially settled in South Bengal’s Howrah district, Santragachi, and sent RG Kar to Hare School in North Kolkata in a horse cart. Later, the family shifted to Shyambazar which was much closer to his school. In 1869, RG Kar took admission at the Bengal Medical College, Asia’s oldest medical college, and later came to be known as the famous Calcutta Medical College.
THEATRE OVER MEDICINE
But RG Kar was equally if not more interested in theatre and gymnastics. Within a year, he dropped out of the medical college and started performing plays in theatres. For the next 10 years, he formed troupes of professional
gymnasts who would perform at various events. As a theatre artiste, he was highly successful. His roles as female
characters in plays like Lilavati were highly acclaimed. One must realise that Bengal was passing through a social, cultural and educational renaissance during that time. The writer of Lilavati was Dinabandhu Mitra, who in his other play Neel Darpan, had exposed the massive exploitation of native farmers of Bharat by the officials of the East India company through forced indigo farming. Coming in contact with the greatest nationalists and intellectuals like Dinabandhu Mitra, Girish Ghosh and Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa, made the resolve for national upliftment clear in his mind. For about a decade, he was actively involved in various social organizations and Swadeshi groups and therefore, was kept under police surveillance. Around Diwali in 1879, police arrested him on the flimsy pretext of noise pollution due to bursting of crackers. As a cumulative effect of all these activities, his medical studies suffered.
In 1880, RG Kar realised that as a doctor, he could serve the poor and destitute people more and therefore, he resumed his medical classes. He left for Scotland in 1883 and completed his formal medical degree in 1886. Instead
of starting practice in foreign land and earning more, he decided to come back and serve the motherland. As per authentic records available on Researchgate, he ‘realised that the prevailing colonial culture was a great hindrance for the people at large, to get the benefit of the existing medical schools — both, as students and as patients’.
REVOLUTIONISING MEDICAL ECOSYSTEM
RG Kar’s struggle to revolutionise the medical system was resisted by several learned intellectuals of that time. The
great scholar, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar who had himself started the Metropolitan Institution to teach Sanskrit to the general public, opposed it saying that medical science was too difficult a task to teach in Indian languages. The
colonial repressive mindset of the British was most evident in the area of medical education. His father had observed that European medical education was introduced to deliberately demean Swadeshi medical practices. Kar countered this in 1868, when he published Bhasajya Ratnavali, where he detailed the medicinal properties of herbs and plants.
Thus started the great effort of RG Kar towards opening a new medical college. In this context, one must realise that the existing Medical College Calcutta where both RG Kar and his father had previously enrolled, was an elite medical organisation and the primary mandate was to serve the European origin patients and in particular, the army men. Very little avenues existed for the native patients to get modern, effective and affordable medical treatment. The young RG Kar immediately realised the lacunae in the existing system. Therefore, in 1897, just a year after his return
from Scotland, he conceived the foundation of the Calcutta School of Medicine, which today is named after him as the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital (RGKMCH).
How was RGKMCH different from the more anglicised Medical College Calcutta? At the outset, Kar decided that the medium of instruction would be entirely Bengali. Upon returning from abroad, Kar began private medical practice where he treated poor patients for free. His reputation grew, and soon people from far-flung districts sought his opinion. However, he noticed that most Indian medicine students fared poorly due to the heavy usage of Latin
and other foreign languages in medical education. This was 123 years before Bharat decided to implement the National Education Policy (NEP), wherein the importance of mother language for science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM) has been finally realised. It won’t be, therefore, an overstatement that RG Kar was one of the pioneers of NEP as we realise it today.
Secondly, it was a private educational institution and completely free from the interference of British administration.
This is just a decade after the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) was formed, again by a medical doctor, Dr Mahendra Lal Sircar, entirely from private funds to demonstrate the resilience and strength
of Bharatiya scholars.
Radha Gobindo Kar (left), the founder of RG Kar Medical College and Hospital; Kar took admission in Calcutta Medical College in 1869, which was established by Lord William Bentinck (centre) in 1835; Kar, a theatre enthusiast, performed on stage for plays such as Lilavati, written by famous playwright Dinabandhu Mitra (right), who also wrote Neel Darpan
All Images Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE MEDICAL COLLEGE
The Calcutta School of Medicine started from a modest rented Baithak Khana Road building. It first moved to Bowbazar Street. However, the students had difficulty in practical training and had to travel to Howrah for training. The funding for a new hospital was collected by RG Kar through publishing medical textbooks in Bengali. He wrote and translated medical books in Bengali, making medical knowledge more accessible to the broader population. His first book, Bhishabandhu, was published in 1871, and he went on to author several notable works, including Concise Physiology, Rogi Paricharchyya, Illustration and Brief Theory of Gynecology, and Brief Physiology.
In fact, the Kar press that he established published several medical textbooks and magazines. The readers should appreciate that it was an effort to find correct and logically consistent words and terms for English medicine.
Whenever there was a wedding ceremony at the house of the big zamindars or royals of Calcutta, Dr Kar would stand in front of the gate and seek help and support for the noble cause. In 1898, around four acres of land was purchased in Belgachia to construct the college building. In the same year, when plague outbreak occurred, he made a fundamental correlation. He concluded that poverty induced lack of hygiene was the origin of plague.
Four years later, in 1902, then Governor Lord Woodburn inaugurated a 30-bed, single-storey hospital building, which was named after the UK royal, Prince Albert Victor who donated Rs 18,000 during a hospital visit.
The Calcutta School of Medicine eventually became the ‘Belgachhia Medical College’ in 1916, with the then Governor General Lord Carmichael formally inaugurating it. A year after Kar’s death, in 1919, Calcutta University granted affiliation to the college for the award of medical graduation degree. Initially named as the Carmichael Medical College it was formally renamed after the great RG Kar in 1948.
The longest serving head of Carmichael College was Dr Nil Ratan Sircar who was another medical luminary. When Acharya PC Ray established Bengal Chemicals to produce affordable medicines for Indians, the famous foreign trained doctors of that time refused to prescribe them stating that these Bharatiya medicines were inferior, forcing the poor to buy expensive imported medicines. Dr RG Kar and Dr Nil Ratan Sarkar came forward and asked people to buy swadeshi medicines which were in fact of better quality than the imported ones. His resolve was to provide affordable access to medicine for all, contributing significantly to the development of indigenous pharmaceutical practices in India, as noted by Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray in his book, Life and Experience of a Bengali Chemist, published in 1932.
Dr Kar died of influenza on 19 December 1918. It is ironic that Bengal did not pay him the due respect even a century after his demise. One must admit today that high quality medical education and medical services have become unaffordable to a very large population. This has been due to rampant commercialisation of health services. While public schemes like the Ayushman Bharat provide support to common people, there needs to be a serious rethink on the extent to which medical education can be commoditised. When Dr Kar established the first private medical college and hospital in India, it was financially self-sustained, giving it freedom to work without British biases. Today, it is our responsibility as citizens of a free country that we remember the mammoth dedication of Dr RG Kar. We must ensure that the highest standards of education, security and transparency exist for the patients and doctors alike in this great temple.
*The writer is currently a Professor of Chemistry in the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS). His research interests include computational materials and exotic molecular and materials properties at the mesoscopic and nanoscale dimensions. He was awarded the BM Birla Science Prize in 2017 and the distinguished investigator award in 2019 by SERB. He was an Editorial Advisory Board member of the Journal of Physical Chemistry, American Chemical Society and currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Chemical Sciences, Indian Academy of Science. He is an elected fellow of the West Bengal Academy of Science and Technology.
