Chapter Thirteen — KGMC: The Taluqdars Who Bought a College for a Prince
How the Maharaja of Vizianagaram’s three lakh was refused in 1870, how Raja Tassaduq Rasul Khan of Jahangirabad stood up at a reception committee in 1905 and proposed a medical college as a gift for the Prince of Wales, how Oudh’s landlords filled an eight-lakh hat in months, and how Swinton Jacob’s Indo-Saracenic pile rose on the Gomti where Machhi Bhawan once stood — King George’s Medical College, Lucknow, the place a province built so its sons and two daughters would not have to leave home to become doctors.
AIIMS was the republic’s Act. KGMC was the United Provinces’ subscription list. Same hunger: postgraduate dignity without a steamer ticket. Different purse: taluqdars, not New Zealand.
1870: an offer the government would not cash
The Maharaja of Vizianagaram put three lakh rupees on the table for a medical college in Lucknow. The government of the United Provinces said the treasury could not match it. The idea went back into the drawer. A small medical school flickered and died for want of the same money.
Thirty-five years later the drawer opened because a prince was coming.
21 July 1905: a sentence in a reception meeting
The Taluqdars of Awadh met to plan how to receive the Prince and Princess of Wales. Raja Sir Tassaduq Rasul Khan, taluqdar of Jahangirabad, did not talk only about arches and addresses.
He proposed a medical college to commemorate the visit.
Sir Harcourt Butler would write to him on 1 December 1905: It must ever be a source of pride to you to think that the first suggestion of such a movement came from you absolutely spontaneously.
Sir James La Touche, Lieutenant-Governor, took it to the Government of India. Sanction came with a price: the people of the province must raise eight lakh.
They almost did it before the year turned. Balrampur’s Maharaja. Ayodhya’s Maharaja. Jahangirabad again. Rana Sheoraj Singh. Nawab Yusuf Ali. Zones drawn across Agra and Oudh. Within months the hat held something like seven lakh eighty-five thousand. Interest would push the memorial fund toward thirteen lakh. The hospital and college together would be spoken of as a thirty-lakh work by the time the plaster dried.
The Prince was moved by the fact that the money was not a gazette order. On 26 December 1905 he laid the foundation stone — on land the provincial government gave on the bank of the Gomti, where the Nawabs’ Machhi Bhawan, the fish palace, had stood. Some tellings say the stone was touched first at a Bombay ceremony and then brought up the river. The building rose in Lucknow either way.
He congratulated them on the women’s provision Tassaduq had also funded — a branch so that the Lady Dufferin movement would have a proper college, not only a dispensary.
“If the medical college becomes, as I hope it will, the best in the East,” the Prince said, “a very powerful stimulus will be given to the movement.”
The Secretary to the U.P. government wrote to Allahabad University in March 1906: the subscribers wanted the best in the East; government would aim to give the best education possible.
Sir Swinton Jacob drew Indo-Saracenic arches so the new science would not look like a stranger among minarets. Colonel W. Selby became first principal and professor of surgery. Five professors. Twenty-one lecturers. Bungalows for the English staff. A block of nurses’ quarters. Wards on wings. An outpatient dispensary.
October 1911: thirty-three students, two of them women
The college opened for work in October 1911 — the year the Prince came back as King-Emperor and Queen Mary for the Coronation Durbar. Permission was given to take his name. Formal opening by Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Hewett on 25 January 1912, chiefs and gentlemen in the room.
First batch: thirty-three students. Thirty-one men. Two women. Among them an M.Sc., two B.Sc.s, seventeen who had passed Intermediate Science. They qualified as doctors in 1916, while a larger war ate Europe.
King George Hospital followed, completed around 1913–14. Queen Mary’s name on the women’s side. Later generations would walk Gandhi Ward and forget, for an afternoon, that the first bricks were a loyal address in stone.
Affiliated first to Allahabad, then from 1921 a constituent of the new University of Lucknow with Canning College and Isabella Thoburn. X-ray in 1928. Departments arriving like decades: social and preventive medicine, psychiatry, neurology, cardiology, plastic surgery, neurosurgery. Motto on the crest: Sincerity — Service — Sacrifice.
The state took the college over in 1983, gave it back, then in 2002 lifted it into a university of its own. For a few seasons politicians renamed it for Shahuji Maharaj and then for King George again, as if the stone the Prince had touched were a ballot. The students kept saying KGMC. The city kept saying Chowk. The building did not change its arches.
What the college became
From a hundred beds in the first Queen Mary and Gandhi wards to thousands in the present count — forty-four hundred in one civic telling — and a thicket of departments that treat half a province because the other government hospitals are still catching up. NAAC A++. NIRF among the country’s front medical schools. A roll of Padma awards that the alumni association recites the way other colleges recite cricket blues.
It never had Rockefeller’s cheque or a princess in the cabinet. It had landlords who decided that a royal visit should leave behind more than a pavilion.
What KGMC adds to the book
AIIMS is the Centre inventing a gold standard.
CMC Vellore is mission.
Sankara and Aravind are faith plus volume.
KGMC is provincial pride paying for its own doctors.
Before 1911 a boy from Awadh who wanted the highest qualification took a train to Calcutta, Madras, Bombay or Lahore. After 1916 he could stay by the Gomti. The two women in the first batch are the quietest founding fact: Tassaduq’s extra subscription was not a footnote. It was two seats that would not have existed if charity had only built temples.
A reconstructed evening, December 1905. Dust on the Gomti bank. A prince’s hand on a stone. A taluqdar who will not see the first graduates.
Butler’s letter is already in the post: the first suggestion came from you absolutely spontaneously.
Tassaduq, if we allow him a sentence the records only imply, might have said to the Raja of Ayodhya:
“If we only give him an address, he will forget us. If we give him a college, the province will not forget itself.”
That is how King George’s was planned: a refused gift in 1870, a reception-committee idea in 1905, an eight-lakh dare.
That is how it was executed: subscriptions in months, Jacob’s arches on a fish-palace plot, Selby’s first lecture to thirty-three students including two women.
That is how it expanded: Lucknow University, then a university of its own, wards named for a queen and a mahatma, departments for a state that still sends its hardest cases to Chowk.
The private hospitals in this book sell speed. AIIMS sells the nation’s best attempt at fairness. KGMC sells something older and more local: we will not send our children away to learn how to come home and save us.
deemagclinic
deemag and chest clinic 