In the industrial city of Nagpur, a boy named Muhammad Khalilullah was born on 6 June 1936. His father, Muhammad Kalimullah, worked in the government’s industrial department; his mother, Fazalunnisa Begum, kept the home. When the boy was still a toddler, his father died of a heart attack at the age of forty-one. That early loss left a lasting imprint. From then on the young Khalilullah carried a quiet determination to understand the heart and to keep it beating for others.

He completed his MBBS in 1960 and MD in Medicine in 1965 from Government Medical College, Nagpur. In February 1966 he joined the newly emerging Department of Cardiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi. While still a DM student he designed and built India’s first indigenous pacemaker—later known as the Khalilullah–Mendez pacemaker. Tested first in the animal laboratory and then used clinically, the device earned recognition from the President of India and announced that Indian cardiology could innovate, not merely import.

After completing his DM in 1969, he briefly established a cardiology unit in Pune before joining G.B. Pant Hospital in New Delhi in 1971. Over the next twenty-five years he transformed the department. When he arrived, only three cardiac catheterisation studies were performed each week; by the time he retired in 1995 the unit was handling more than twenty-five cases a day. In 1975 he introduced clinical electrophysiology. In 1984 he performed India’s first catheter ablation and helped begin arrhythmia surgery—among the earliest such efforts in Asia. On 23 March 1985 he carried out the country’s first balloon valvuloplasty, opening the era of interventional cardiology on Indian soil.

One of his young colleagues once asked him why he continued to push for new techniques when resources were scarce and resistance was strong.

Dr. Khalilullah answered simply, “A heart that can be healed without cutting open a chest is a gift we owe every patient. Technology must serve the poor, not the other way around.”

He served as Honorary Physician to the President of India, edited the first Indian textbook of cardiology, and published nearly four hundred scientific papers. In 1984 he received both the Padma Shri and the Dr. B.C. Roy National Award; in 1990 he was honoured with the Padma Bhushan. Nagpur University conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa). In later years he founded The Heart Centre in Delhi, continuing to practise and teach with the same insistence on affordable, ethical care.

Through more than six decades Dr. Mohamed Khalilullah remained a pioneer who never forgot the ordinary patient. In the history of Indian cardiology he stands as the physician who built the first Indian pacemaker, opened the door to interventional techniques, and proved that excellence and accessibility can walk the same path.