Hospitals with a past

The hospital at Kingsway Camp is not the only medical centre in the city that has a heritage to safeguard. A few kilometres away is the Bara Hindu Rao hospital with a history that is both medieval and modern. If the baoli at one end of the hospital — opposite to the CCU and next to the doctors’ parking — looks very 14th Century with its Tughlaq-style double pillars and conical arches,inside the hospital complex is an early 19th Century house that had witnessed political intrigue and rapid changes in power.

First,the baoli: the stepwell was mentioned in a 1916 Archaeological Survey of India report that highlighted an opening that led to a tunnel with as many as eight shafts. The tunnel turned out to be a ‘mystery’,as it seemed to lead to nowhere. There’s a board outside mentioning that the monument is ‘protected’. The house or bara of Hindu Rao,a Maratha nobleman,originally belonged to Colebrooke,the Resident of Delhi who was sacked for being corrupt in 1827. The house was then bought by British officer William Fraser who stayed here till his murder in 1835. It was then that Hindu Rao,an influential aristocrat who was the brother-in-law of Maratha ruler Daulat Rao Scindia,bought the house. It was after 1857 that the building started functioning as a hospital.

War and long-drawn battles led to the establishment of hospitals during the British Raj. Like the Safdarjung Hospital,which started as an American base hospital during the Second World War.

Last year,as Lok Nayak Jai Prakash (LNJP) Hospital decided to go in for a complete makeover,historians were worried that it would lead to the wiping out of its colonial past,when the building served as a prison.

Maulana Azad Medical College on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg is located at a site which was once a jail where 14 freedom fighters were hanged between 1915 and 1945. A martyrs’ memorial mentioning the names of all the freedom fighters was later constructed next to the pathology department. From Master Amir Chand,Basant Kumar Biswas,Bhai Bal Mukund and Master Avadh Behari—all of whom were hanged for hurling a bomb at Viceroy Hardinge at Chandni Chowk — Mansa Singh of the Hindustan Socialist Party,who was hanged in 1931,to seven members of the Indian National Army who went to gallows in 1944-45,the place was a witness to revolutionaries attaining martyrdom.