A man of remedies and letters, upholder of rational values and cultural prime mover, Dr Rajaram Amrut Bhalerao (1933-2020) passed away on Friday, February 21. He was 87. An esteemed figure in the world of medicine, Dr Bhalerao had a long association with the King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital and the P.D. Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai, specialising in gastroenterology and liver diseases. In a distinguished career spanning more than five decades, Dr Bhalerao doubled up as physician and professor, consultant and controller, published more than sixty papers, and received innumerable awards and honours from both peers and establishment.
Dedicated to Marathi theatre
Perhaps equally significant was his parallel life as indefatigable patron of the arts. He was known as Bal Bhalerao to friends and close associates, and served as the most recent Chief Secretary of the Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh, a cultural organisation whose existence has been closely aligned to his own. It was founded under the leadership of his father — doctor and cultural trailblazer Anna Bhalerao — in 1935, just a couple of years after he was born. It was dedicated to the revival of Marathi theatre, seeking to earn back audiences lost to the medium of cinema, through initiatives like open-air outdoor theatre festivals that became widely popular.
In 1964, a modern auditorium (still extant and thriving) designed along the lines of London’s Old Vic, and named for Dr Bhalerao’s father (who had passed on in 1955), was established in Kelewadi, Girgaon. A year later, Dr Bhalerao began his surgical practice at the KEM Hospital. His lifelong association with his family’s cultural legacy had begun in the 1940s itself, as a youngster in the non-hierarchical Seva Dal-like ethos of the Sahitya Sangha, rubbing shoulders with the illustrious likes of Durga Khote, Nanasaheb Phatak, Keshavrao Date and Snehprabha Pradhan.
Creative partnerships
It must be said that, from its very inception, the Sahitya Sangh was run by a governing body populated with enterprising stalwarts. So Dr. Bhalerao was being apprenticed into not so much a family concern as a collective of like-minded peers. One of his personal accomplishments was the stewardship of the Mumbai troupe that staged a Marathi adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle in 1973. Adapted by C T Khanolkar as Ajab Nyay Vartulacha , and directed by Vijaya Mehta in collaboration with Fritz Bennewitz, it earned the distinction of being, according to academic Hemangi Bhagwat, the first play in an Indian language to be staged abroad when it was performed in 1974 at the Festspiele in East Berlin, in a number of other East German cities, and in Zurich. The play also marked the beginning of a fruitful creative partnership of almost two decades between Mehta and Bennewitz.
A video interview with Dr. Bhalerao, taken circa 2016 and uploaded online by a channel dedicated to medical humanities, reveals a man very much in his element even in his sunset years. Erudite and self-effacing, Dr. Bhalerao describes himself as someone very alert to the possibilities and potential of original thinking. “I’ve learnt from a lot of thinkers. Any discovery will be nothing without the power of marketing,” he said, describing how the songs of Tukaram or Dnyaneshwar wouldn’t have endured if Lata Mangeshkar hadn’t brought them into every Maharashtrian home.
In the interview, Dr. Bhalerao’s words come laced with pragmatism, and he passes along nuggets of wisdom like they were easy home truths. He speaks of setbacks and triumphs with equal felicity. He describes how the Sahitya Sangh worked their way to a gold medal in state-level drama despite limited resources, how his polio-afflicted teacher taught his cohorts and him to study in spite of his personal adversity, how he bought a tea set for his mother with his first scholarship of ₹50, and how his stint at the Royal Conservatory in London taught him to look at human anatomy in functional terms. He was a man who never stopped learning, “The basic philosophy of learning from the young is very ingrained in the Indian ethos. If you lose it, God help us.”
Unstinting support
Theatrewallahs from across the language divide attended his funeral at Dadar. This was in part because the Sahitya Sangh has been home, for some seven years now, to the Drama School Mumbai, a concern Dr. Bhalerao did not think twice before extending infrastructural support. Of the many big names who’d worked with the Sahitya Sangh over the years for virtually nothing, he said, “In a world where everyone is chasing money, we have come to realise the value of these people who contributed their talent and time for the upkeep of a tradition.” It is a statement that could very well be true of Dr Bhalerao himself, whose involvement with the arts was much more than just a charitable sideline.
