Chapter Fourteen — BHU: The Temple of Learning That Grew a Hospital

How Madan Mohan Malaviya, Annie Besant and the Maharaja of Darbhanga got a Viceroy to lay a stone on Basant Panchami 1916, how Gandhi gave his first public speech in India on that campus, how Kashi Naresh founded a 96-bed hospital in 1924 named for the first Vice-Chancellor, and how K.N. Udupa turned an Ayurvedic college into the Institute of Medical Sciences — Sir Sunderlal Hospital, the referral house of eastern Uttar Pradesh, still answering to a motto older than the republic: no virtue greater than treatment.

KGMC was taluqdars buying a college for a prince. AIIMS was a princess buying autonomy from Parliament. BHU is a nationalist who wanted Sanskrit and surgery on the same soil — and a hospital that began as ninety-six beds for students of Ayurveda.

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1904–1916: a prospectus, a college already standing, a Bill

Malaviya put the idea of a Hindu university on paper in 1904 at Mint House, under the Kashi Naresh’s chair. He wanted shastra and science in one residential city of learning — vidyayā’mṛtamaśnute, knowledge imparts immortality. Annie Besant already had Central Hindu College (1898). In 1911 they joined forces. Maharaja Rameshwar Singh of Darbhanga presided over the society, signed the letters, gave five lakh, walked the princely houses. Prabhu Narayan Singh of Banaras gave land at Nagwa, south of the city, across from Ramnagar Fort.

The Benares Hindu University Act passed the Imperial Legislative Council on 1 October 1915. Harcourt Butler spoke for it. Lord Hardinge laid the foundation on 4 February 1916. Under the marble, a copper plate in Sanskrit. Governors and princes in the pavilion. On the 6th, a man just back from South Africa — invited by Malaviya — spoke to the assembly. It was Gandhi’s first public address on Indian soil. Besant, J.C. Bose, P.C. Ray, C.V. Raman lectured in the same week. The Act came into force on 1 April 1916. Sir Sunder Lal, the first Vice-Chancellor.

Malaviya would himself sit in that chair for nearly twenty years. The campus became a small universe: agriculture, engineering, the Vishwanath temple at the centre, a flying club, a press. Medicine was not an afterthought. Varanasi had already given the country Sushruta and Charaka. Malaviya wanted that lineage taught, not only remembered.

1924: ninety-six beds for a city of pilgrims

Ayurveda entered as a department under Oriental Learning about 1920–22. Seth Mathuradas Vissanji Khimji of Bombay put one and a half lakh toward an Ayurvedic college. On 19 January 1924 the Kashi Naresh, Sir Prabhu Narayan Singh, laid the foundation of the university hospital. It opened in 1926 and took the name of the first VC: Sir Sunderlal Hospital.

Ninety-six indoor beds. Two hundred outpatients a day. Two operations a month in the early count. A botanical garden for raw drugs. The work was training rural and backward students to serve, Malaviya said, and treating whoever walked in from the ghats.

For three decades that was the medical heart: Indian medicine on a modern campus, a hospital small enough to know every name.

1959–1971: Udupa and the second founding

In June 1959 the university borrowed the energy of Dr K.N. Udupa. The official memory still uses words that sound like a saint’s CV: indefatigable, humble, flexible, devoted. He found a nuclear setup and refused to leave it nuclear.

1960: the government and the UGC approved a full College of Medical Sciences for modern undergraduate medicine. It opened in September. Nine departments of modern medicine, Ayurveda retained and then reorganised as postgraduate. Undergraduate Ayurveda paused; D.Ay.M. began. MBBS recognised by the Medical Council of India and, in 1963, by the General Medical Council of the United Kingdom. First MBBS batch out in 1965. Udupa started a library with books off his own shelf.

1971: the President of India, as Visitor, upgraded the college to the Institute of Medical Sciences. Faculties of Medicine and Ayurveda later stood side by side so neither would smother the other. Super-specialties, dentistry, nursing. Sir Sunderlal grew from ninety-six beds toward a thousand and more. Trauma centre. Cancer centre in Malaviya’s name. In 2018 the Government of India gave IMS-BHU the status of an AIIMS-like institution — the eastern UP sentence for “you need not take the train to Delhi if the case is hard.”

Motto of the institute: Chikitsitat punyatmam na kinchita. No virtue greater than treatment.

What the hospital is for

Patients come from eastern Uttar Pradesh, western Bihar, pockets of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Nepal. The OPD hall is a census. The campus around it is still a university: hostels, temple bells, a quiet residential grid behind the crowded wards. Ayurveda and allopathy share a directorate and an argument that Malaviya would have enjoyed — that a civilisation which produced Sushruta should not have to choose between a sutra and a steel suture.

What BHU adds to the book

KGMC is a province’s subscription.

AIIMS is the Union’s gold standard.

Ganga Ram is charity that crossed a border.

BHU is a civilisation building a university, then discovering it needed a hospital the way a temple needs a kitchen.

The founding was not a doctor’s rebellion. It was a teacher’s city. The hospital is what happens when that city takes Sushruta seriously in the century of the operating lamp. Udupa is this chapter’s Trehan or Badrinath: the second founder who turned a commemorative ward into a referral machine without erasing the first language of the place.

A reconstructed morning, January 1924. The Kashi Naresh’s hand on a stone. Malaviya watching. A clerk asking whether ninety-six beds can matter in a city of pilgrims.

“They will matter,” someone from the new university says, “if the students who make the beds also make the country.”

That is how BHU’s hospital was planned: after a Viceroy’s stone and a Mahatma’s first speech, a maharaja’s foundation for Ayurveda and the poor.

That is how it was executed: 1926, Sunder Lal’s name, two operations a month, a garden of herbs.

That is how it expanded: Udupa in 1959, MBBS in 1960, an Institute in 1971, trauma and cancer in the same campus logic, AIIMS-like status for a hinterland that still says BHU hospital the way Delhi says AIIMS.

The private chains in this book sell a room with a number. Banaras sells a campus in which the patient, the student, and the temple share a gate. Knowledge, the motto says, imparts immortality. The hospital’s motto is humbler and sharper: treat. Nothing is more meritorious than that.