In Amritsar the name of the city’s founder is not confined to its shrines. It is on the airport, Sri Guru Ram Das Ji International Airport, so that the first sign many visitors read on arrival carries it. It is on a charitable hospital at Vallah, on the edge of the city, which its own history says came into existence in 1977. It is on a medical institute started in 1997, and on a university of health sciences that has gathered that institute, a nursing college and a cancer institute under its authority since 2016. I studied for my MBBS at that institute, Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, from 1997 to 2002.
So the subject of this essay is simple to state. I grew up in a city founded by the fourth Guru of the Sikhs, and the medical school I attended carries his name. Another essay on this site, written as a letter to the student I was, dwells on the fact that the institute and its first students began in the same year. This one asks a different question, and it is a question about names. What is the relationship between a man who founded a town around a pool in the 1570s and an institution that bears his name four centuries later? The easy answer is a story of continuity, in which the Guru’s city produces, in the fullness of time, the Guru’s hospital and the Guru’s doctors. It is an attractive story, and I distrust it. A shared name is a commemoration. It is not a line of descent, and the difference between the two turns out to matter a good deal, to institutions and to the people they train.
I should say at once what the essay will not claim. It does not describe a moment at which the connection was first noticed, or any day at the institute. It works from the public record: the city’s documented history, the institutions’ own published accounts of themselves, and a few writers who have thought harder than most about what names are.
Several Foundings #
Begin with the city, and with the surprisingly difficult question of when it was founded. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, the elected body that runs the principal gurdwaras of Punjab, publishes more than one account on its own website, and they do not agree. Its page on the city says that Guru Ram Das founded it in 1574, under instructions from Guru Amar Das, on land bought for seven hundred rupees from the owners of the village of Tung; that the settlement was first known as Guru da Chakk and later as Chakk Ram Das; and that the excavation of the pool began in 1577 and was finished by 1581. Its page on the Harmandir Sahib says instead that work on the pool and on the town began together in 1570 and was completed in 1577, on land acquired from the landowners of neighbouring villages “on payment or free of cost.” The 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, writing from the other side of the empire, says that Ram Das laid the foundations of the city on a site granted by the emperor Akbar. Standard modern summaries record both the purchase from Tung, which they trace to a district gazetteer, and the Sikh tradition that the site was first chosen by Guru Amar Das. Another essay on this site sets out the chronology of the pool itself, and I will not repeat it.
These are not simply errors to be corrected. They are different answers to a question that has no single answer. A city may be said to begin when its land is acquired, when digging starts, when its founder moves his household there, when its central work is finished, or when it takes the name it will keep. Amritsar has had several names: Guru da Chakk, Chakk Ram Das, Ramdaspur, and finally the name of its pool, the pool of amrit. It also has a name in the mouth that differs from the one on the signboards. In rural speech it has long been Ambarsar, and that name has become an affectionate colloquial form in its own right. Each of these names marks a stage, and each foundation date picks one stage and calls it the beginning. The same SGPC page adds a detail that unsettles the very idea of a founder’s work. Before the pool that gave the city its name, Guru Ram Das had begun another, Santokhsar, near the village of Sultanwind, in 1564 by one account and 1570 by another. It was not completed until 1588, seven years after his death. The first pool he began was finished by his successors, and the city’s founding, on any of its dates, outran the life of the man who founded it.
Physicians know this problem well, because illnesses have it too. A patient asked when his illness began will give the day he first noticed a symptom. The disease may have begun years earlier, silently, and the diagnosis may have been made months later. The onset written in the chart is a date chosen afterwards for a process that had no single first day. A founding date is an onset in that sense. It is true, useful and somewhat arbitrary, and it tells you as much about the person choosing it as about the thing it dates.
Anniversaries make the choice harder to see. Once a community has celebrated a hundredth or a four-hundredth year, the date it counted from acquires a solidity it did not have before; the celebration becomes evidence for the date it assumed. An institution in Amritsar, as we shall see, laid a foundation stone to mark the city’s four-hundredth year, which means that someone, at some point, chose one of the several beginnings available in the 1570s and counted from it. Nobody was wrong to do so. But it is worth remembering that a founding is partly made by the people who later commemorate it, and that every commemoration is also a decision about what to remember.
The Boy Who Sold Boiled Grams #
The founder himself is better attested than his city’s first day, and his life, as the tradition and standard histories tell it, is not the life one would invent for the patron of airports and universities. He was born in 1534 in the Chuna Mandi quarter of Lahore and named Jetha, the eldest. He lost both parents at about the age of seven and went to live with his maternal grandmother in her village, Basarke, where, still a child, he sold boiled grams in the market to help keep the household. The tradition remembers him giving them away to wandering holy men and being scolded for it.
As a boy he came to Khadur, where Guru Angad, the second Guru, kept his congregation, and he is remembered there attending the sangat, eating in the langar and selling boiled corn to support himself. I note the place with interest, since my own family’s roots are in Khadur Sahib, and I note just as firmly that the coincidence proves nothing. Much of the early history of the Sikhs passed through the towns of the Majha, and a family’s connection to a place does not make it a participant in the place’s history. Later, at Goindval, where Guru Amar Das settled, Jetha is remembered cleaning the utensils of the langar, carrying drinking water to those who ate there, and helping to dig the stepped well, the baoli, that still stands in the town. He married Bibi Bhani, the Guru’s younger daughter, in 1553. The tradition tells a story of how he was chosen, and it is a story about building. Guru Amar Das asked his two sons-in-law to raise a platform fit for the Guru’s seat. The other gave up after four attempts were rejected. Jetha built seven, saw each one found wanting, and offered to go on building for as long as it took. Whatever its history, the story is a parable of founding as revision: the fit successor is the one who will keep rebuilding without resentment. In 1574 he was chosen to succeed his father-in-law, and took the name by which the city knows him. Ram Das means the servant of God. He held the office for seven years and died in 1581.
Two things in that life seem to me to bear on the question of names. The first is the order of events. The man who founded a city around a pool had dug a well with his own hands before anyone called him Guru. He had washed pots before he held authority, and the authority, when it came, came with a name that described the posture of the pot-washer. The second is what happened after him. The first three Gurus were not succeeded by their sons; each passed the office to a disciple judged fit for it. Guru Ram Das appointed his own youngest son, Arjan, and from then on the office passed within his family, until in 1708 the tenth Guru vested it in the scripture and the community rather than in any person. The tradition, in other words, has known both kinds of succession, by fitness and by descent, and it ended by placing authority where no family could inherit it. A tradition that drew that distinction so carefully is a poor basis for a modern story in which institutions inherit a Guru’s mantle by sharing his name.
A Signature Not His Own #
There is a further fact about Guru Ram Das that I find more striking every time I consider it. He was a poet and a musician of great range. Standard accounts credit him with some six hundred and thirty-eight hymns in the Guru Granth Sahib, about a tenth of the whole, composed in thirty of its ragas. Among them is the composition by which most Sikh marriages are still solemnised: the four stanzas of the Lavan, in Raag Suhi, on Ang 773, during each of which the couple walk around the scripture. The man who founded the city also wrote the hymn that founds its households.
The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism reads the four stanzas as four stages: an undertaking that joins the spiritual and the social, guidance under the Guru, a growing love and the company of the good, and finally union. I am interested in the form more than in a doctrine I am not qualified to expound. A marriage, in this ceremony, is not made by a single vow. It is made by four rounds, each completed before the next begins, with the scripture at the centre and the couple walking around it. It is a founding in stages, around a centre, and it is hard not to notice that the city its author founded took the same shape: a settlement that grew in rounds around a pool.
And yet in none of those hymns does his own name appear. In the Guru Granth Sahib the Gurus who succeeded Guru Nanak composed under Guru Nanak’s name. Their compositions are signed Nanak, and are distinguished from one another only by a heading, Mahala, with a number: the hymns of Guru Ram Das are marked Mahala 4. The founder whose name is now on an airport, a hospital and a university chose, in the one place where a poet’s name is most naturally his own, to write under the name of the first Guru.
The city made a similar choice about itself. For a time it carried its founder’s name: it was Chakk Ram Das, then Ramdaspur, the town of Ram Das. By the SGPC’s account it came to be called Amritsar after Guru Arjan renovated the pool in 1586, and the name that stuck was the name of the water, not of the man who had it dug. A city named for the work rather than the worker is not a small thing in a culture that names so much for persons. The older name survives in history books and in the founder’s own titles. The living name is the pool’s. It is the later institutions, four hundred years on, that have gone back and written the founder’s name over their doors.
I am wary of turning that into a moral for modern institutions; it belongs first to a theology of the Guru’s office that is not mine to summarise in a sentence. But as a fact about names it is eloquent. In the scripture, the personal name gives way to the name of the teaching. The individual is identified by a number, as one in a succession, and the signature belongs to the source.
Montaigne, who thought about names with his usual mixture of irony and seriousness, put the general point in his essay “Of Glory.” In Charles Cotton’s seventeenth-century translation: “the name is no part of the thing, nor of the substance; ‘tis a foreign piece joined to the thing, and outside it.” Montaigne was writing about the vanity of seeking fame, and he applied the thought, reverently, even to God, whose being cannot be increased by praise, though his name can be. The name, he says, is “the part out of Him that is nearest to us.” I find both halves of that true of the name over a hospital gate. It is no part of the thing: an institution does not become what it is named for. And it is the part nearest to us: the place where most people meet the founder, if they meet him at all, is in the name.
A Market Around the Water #
A city founded around a sacred pool is easily imagined as a shrine with houses attached. The record suggests something busier from the beginning. Standard accounts of the founding say that Guru Ram Das invited merchants and craftsmen from other places to settle in the new town, and a bazaar beside the shrine is still called Guru Bazaar, the Guru’s market. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism ties the custom of dasvandh, the tithe, to the same years: when work on the pool and the shrine began and the costs mounted, every Sikh was enjoined to give a tenth of his income to the common fund. A pool needs diggers, diggers need food, pilgrims need lodging and markets, and a market needs a reason for people to come. The sacred centre and the commercial town were founded together because each needed the other.
The historian Lewis Mumford argued, in The City in History, that many of the earliest cities seem to have begun as places people returned to before they were places people stayed: a shrine or a meeting ground that drew visitors periodically, and only afterwards held them. He described the city as both a magnet and a container. Amritsar fits that account with unusual neatness. The pool was the magnet. The town was the container that grew up to hold those whom the magnet drew, and what it held was soon much more than pilgrims.
By the nineteenth century the container had walls. Maharaja Ranjit Singh fortified the city from 1822, and its neighbourhoods were organised into walled wards, the katras, many named for the chiefs who built or held them. Gates followed, twelve of them by the end of Sikh rule. One of them was called Deori Hakiman, the gate of the hakims, a name that records at least that physicians of the Unani tradition were part of the city’s ordinary furniture, familiar enough to give their name to a way in and out of it. Long before Amritsar named a medical school for its founder, it had named a gate for its doctors. Several of those gates have since been renamed, and some are gone; names in a living city are less permanent than they look. The British, after annexing the Punjab in 1849, added a thirteenth in 1866, the Hall Gate, beyond which a new city grew. A Municipal Committee was set up in 1858, and in 1862 the railway linked Amritsar to Lahore. In 1871 and 1872 the city counted about 136,000 people, more than Lahore’s 99,000. The Britannica of 1911, giving the population of 1901 as 162,429, describes a city that the encyclopaedist plainly knew only in summary: notable “as the centre of the Sikh religion,” famous for carpet-weaving, the first mission station of the Church of England in the province, possessed of a town hall and a hospital.
That summary is a fair specimen of a way of seeing. The encyclopaedist’s city is chiefly one thing, a religious centre, with a few civic facts appended, and its great building is described as a visitor would describe it, from outside and by comparison with other architectures. The resident’s city is a market, a railway junction, a set of schools and colleges, a textile trade, a place of hospitals, a neighbourhood of a particular katra. It is also, still, a place where the founder is remembered as someone who lived there. The SGPC’s list of the city’s shrines includes the house where Guru Ram Das and his successors lived, a platform by the pool associated with him, and a gurdwara marking a shisham tree under which, tradition says, he used to rest. A founder remembered by his house and his favourite tree is a founder remembered as a resident, and the city keeps his ordinary life alongside his office.
The Older College #
Amritsar’s medicine did not begin with the Guru’s name either. The city’s older medical school, now the Government Medical College, was established in Lahore in 1864 and moved to Amritsar in 1920. For a time it was called Glancy Medical College, after a colonial-era governor of the Punjab, and it took its present name after independence. Its line of descent, if one wants to speak of descent, runs back through Lahore and the medical schools of British India. It has nothing to do with Guru Ram Das, and it has trained physicians in his city for more than a century.
The two colleges thus have opposite naming histories. One shed its name after independence, when the order that name belonged to had ended. The other chose a name in order to commemorate a founder. Between them they show that an institution’s name is never merely a label. It is a statement about whom the institution wishes to be associated with, and it can be withdrawn when the association becomes intolerable.
Medicine knows this from its own vocabulary. For most of the twentieth century a form of vasculitis was called Wegener’s granulomatosis, after the German pathologist Friedrich Wegener, who described it in the 1930s. In 2011 the American College of Rheumatology, the American Society of Nephrology and the European League Against Rheumatism resolved to rename it granulomatosis with polyangiitis, because of Wegener’s association with the Nazi Party. Physicians who had used the eponym for decades were asked to learn a new and clumsier name, and to accept the inconvenience, because a disease’s name is a small public honour and the profession decided this man should no longer have it. An eponym is a tribute that medicine pays to a person. When the person proves unworthy of it, the tribute can be withdrawn.
With an institution named for a Guru, the risk runs the other way. Nobody expects the name to fail the institution. The question is always whether the institution will fail the name.
I should not overstate the contrast between the two colleges, because the habit of naming runs through the whole city and is not confined to institutions associated with the shrines. The government college’s own teaching hospitals carry Sikh names: one is the Guru Nanak Dev Hospital, another is named for Guru Tegh Bahadur, and a mother and child centre attached to the college in 2012 is named for Bebe Nanaki, Guru Nanak’s elder sister, whom the tradition remembers as the first to recognise her brother’s calling. A maternity hospital named for the first person to see who a child would become is a happy piece of civic naming. And the city’s state university, Guru Nanak Dev University, was established in November 1969, the year of the five-hundredth anniversary of Guru Nanak’s birth.
The pattern is worth stating plainly, because it explains the medical institute better than any story of descent. Punjab has commemorated its anniversaries by founding things. The quincentenary of the first Guru’s birth produced a university; the quatercentenary of the city founded by the fourth Guru is, as the next section shows, the occasion the medical institute names for its own foundation stone. These are acts of remembrance in brick, and they are honourable. They are not continuations of the Gurus’ own work in any sense that would let the institutions borrow the Gurus’ authority.
Four Hundred Years and a Stone #
The institute’s own published account of its founding is worth reading closely, because it reproduces in miniature everything I have said about the city. Its page on the founding philosophy states that the foundation stone was laid on 17 October by Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, “then President of India,” to commemorate the four hundredth year of the foundation of the city by the fourth Guru, and it gives the year as 1997. Sanjiva Reddy’s presidency ran from 1977 to 1982. The university’s history says that the charitable hospital came into existence in 1977, and four hundred years after the 1570s falls in the 1970s. Read side by side, these published sources do not agree about the year of the stone, and an essay is not the place to settle which is right; the institution’s own records are. What interests me is what the disagreement reveals: an institution whose founding, like the city’s, was not one event but several.
Set out in order, the sequence runs as follows. A charitable hospital in 1977, by the university’s account, and a foundation stone laid, by the institute’s, to mark the city’s quatercentenary. A medical institute beginning in 1997. A four-storey institute building completed in March 2000, so that its first students had begun before their building was finished. The first batch passing out, as Indian English says, in December 2002. Recognition of the degree by the Medical Council of India at the end of that month and by the central government in January 2003. Affiliation to Baba Farid University of Health Sciences at Faridkot for students admitted up to 2016, and from 2017 to a new Sri Guru Ram Das University of Health Sciences, declared a state private university in August 2016. The institute’s own page describes its growth from fifty undergraduate places to a hundred and then a hundred and fifty, under the Sri Guru Ram Das Charitable Hospital Trust, registered under the Societies Registration Act of 1860. When was it founded? In 1977, in 1997, in 2002, in 2016, depending on what one means by the word.
The founding stone also settles the question of the name. The institution was conceived as a commemoration: its stone was laid to mark four hundred years of the city. That is an honourable thing for an institution to be, and it is a different thing from an inheritance. The pool at Amritsar was dug under the Guru’s direction by people who had heard him. The hospital at Vallah was founded four centuries later by a trust that chose to remember him. Its relation to him is the relation of a reader to an author, not of a son to a father.
What a Name Asks #
Montaigne has a second essay that bears on this, and it is funnier than the first. In “Of Names” he mocks the habit, among the French gentry of his day, of acquiring illustrious ancestors by a convenient resemblance of names. A man raised by fortune, he says, soon has genealogical titles “new and unknown to his father,” and is “inoculated into some illustrious stem by good luck,” and “the obscurest families are the most apt for falsification.” He tells of a gathering of gentlemen, each claiming royal descent on the strength of a similar name or a coat of arms or “an old worm-eaten patent,” until one of them bows low, apologises for having treated such princes as equals, and then delivers the moral: “Let us, in God’s name, satisfy ourselves with what our fathers were contented with, with what we are.”
That is the right warning for anyone educated under a great name. No graduate of the Guru’s institute is the Guru’s heir, and no institution acquires his qualities by printing his name on its gate. The temptation to inoculate oneself into an illustrious stem is strong precisely where the stem is most revered, and it should be refused there most firmly.
What, then, may a student fairly ask of an institution named for a revered figure? I think the honest answer is modest. Not that the institution embody him, which it cannot do, and not that its practice be presumed to follow from its name, which would be a way of excusing it from scrutiny. Only that it consent to be measured against him. The institute’s own statement of its founding philosophy speaks of serving needy patients without regard to caste, creed, religion or faith, and of almost free services for patients from the villages around it. Those are the institution’s words, and I make no claim here about how fully any period of its history has lived up to them. What the name does is give anyone, a patient, a student, a former student writing an essay, a standard against which to ask.
A sensible reader may object that I am making too much of a sign. Institutions are named for founders, saints and benefactors everywhere; nobody supposes that a hospital called after a saint is staffed by saints, and the name does its work if it raises funds, inspires loyalty and reminds the staff of an ideal. All of that is true, and I do not want to deny institutions their aspirations. But a name also does something to the people who are not staff. A patient from a nearby village who chooses a hospital because it bears the Guru’s name has extended a particular kind of trust before anyone has examined her. A family that sends a child to study there has done the same. That trust is borrowed from the founder, and it is lent to the institution on his account. Borrowed trust is the kind that most needs repaying.
The same caution applies in the other direction. A sacred name is not evidence about the quality of a modern medical education, for better or worse. Whether a college teaches anatomy well, supervises its students closely, treats its patients safely, is a question for inspection, accreditation and outcomes, and its answer is the same whatever is carved over the gate. To praise an institution because of its name is a category mistake, and so is to excuse it. The name sets a standard. It does not certify that the standard has been met.
And the standard the founder’s life supplies is specific. It is not genius or eminence. It is a boy who sold boiled grams and gave them away, a young man who washed the pots in a free kitchen and carried water to strangers, a poet who signed his hymns with the first Guru’s name, and a founder whose chosen name meant servant. An institution that carries that name has taken on, whether it meant to or not, a question about service that a merely descriptive name would never have raised.
History Is Not a Prophecy #
There is one more temptation, and it is personal. It would be easy, and in a memoir almost expected, to write that a boy who grew up in the city of the fourth Guru was always going to study medicine at the institute that bears his name. The sentence has the shape of a destiny. It is also, I think, a kind of trick. Statisticians call one version of it the Texas sharpshooter’s fallacy: a man fires at the side of a barn and then paints the target around the bullet holes. A life looked at backwards is full of holes around which targets can be painted.
Psychologists have measured how strongly knowing an outcome makes the path to it look probable, and medicine has found the same bias in its own reviews of care; another essay on this site, about a year at Khalsa College, sets out that evidence, and I will not repeat it. A memoir is a review of a life by someone who already knows how it turned out. The outcome makes the path look inevitable, and the inevitability flatters the outcome.
The more prosaic account is the truer one, as far as any account of a choice can be. A medical institute opened in the city in the year its first students were ready to enter it. Admissions were decided by the ordinary machinery that decides such things. The coincidence of the name belongs to the city, which has named so much for its founder that almost any path through it will pass under his name, and not to the student. I prefer the prosaic account for a reason beyond accuracy. It leaves room for choice. A life presented as the fulfilment of a sacred geography is a life in which nobody decided anything, and medicine, of all professions, is made of decisions for which someone must answer.
None of this makes the name meaningless. It makes it a question rather than an explanation. A destiny would excuse the student from asking what the name required of him. A question does not.
Living Inside a Name #
I have argued against the easy story of continuity, and I want to end without replacing it with an easy story of discontinuity, as if the name over the gate were a mere coincidence of civic branding. It is more than that. The city has chosen, again and again, to put its founder’s name on the places where people arrive, are healed and are taught. That repetition is itself a form of memory, and like every form of memory it keeps something and loses something. It keeps the name. It risks losing the life, the grams sold and given away, the pots, the water, the well, the hymns signed with the first Guru’s name.
There is a small linguistic fact that sharpens the danger. In daily speech a long name does not survive intact. Students, patients and rickshaw drivers alike shorten an institution’s name to whatever can be said quickly, and Sri Guru Ram Das becomes four initials, SGRD, which is how the place is named in ordinary conversation and even in this site’s own catalogue. Initials are efficient, and they are also a kind of forgetting. SGRD does not say servant. It does not say anything at all, except to those who already know what the letters stand for. Every institution named for a person is subject to this erosion, in which the name survives as a sound and the meaning drains out of it, and Montaigne had a sentence for that too: what is a name, he asks, but “a sound,” or “three or four dashes with a pen.”
The two sentences from “Of Glory” hold the matter better than any formula of my own. The name is no part of the thing; an institution is what its people do, and it is not made holy by its sign. And the name is the part nearest to us: for most of the people who pass under it, the name is the whole of their acquaintance with the man. That places a peculiar responsibility on the institution that carries it. It is the place where many people will first meet the founder, and they will meet him in the form of a hospital, a lecture hall, a ward at night.
Ram Das means the servant of God. Whatever else a medical school bearing that name teaches, the name itself teaches one thing every time it is read, to anyone who knows what it means. It describes a posture rather than a privilege, and a graduate who has carried the name for more than two decades is entitled, and perhaps obliged, to keep asking whether the posture has been kept.
Evidence and Editorial Note #
Documented findings. The essay relies on the author’s public biography: upbringing in Amritsar; family roots in Khadur Sahib; MBBS at Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, 1997–2002; family physician. Sri Guru Ram Das Ji International Airport, Government Medical College Amritsar (established in Lahore 1864, moved to Amritsar 1920, formerly Glancy Medical College, renamed after independence), the colloquial name Ambarsar, the two versions of the founding land (gazetteer purchase from Tung; site chosen by Guru Amar Das), Guru Ram Das’s invitation to merchants and artisans, the 1871–72 populations of Amritsar (136,000) and Lahore (99,000), Ranjit Singh’s fortification from 1822, the katras, the twelve gates, Hall Gate (1866): standard reference summaries (Wikipedia, “Amritsar” and “Government Medical College, Amritsar”). The biography of Guru Ram Das (born 1534 in Chuna Mandi, Lahore; named Jetha; orphaned about seven; Basarke; selling boiled grams; at Khadur from 1546; service in the Goindval langar and the baoli; marriage to Bibi Bhani 1553; guruship 1574 to 1581; the name meaning servant of God; appointment of his son; 638 hymns in thirty ragas): standard reference summary (Wikipedia, “Guru Ram Das”), presented as tradition where the sources are hagiographical. The Lavan as a four-stanza composition of Guru Ram Das in Raag Suhi (p. 773) used in the marriage ceremony, and dasvandh connected to the expense of the pool and shrine under Guru Ram Das: Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Punjabi University), “Lāvāṅ” and “Dasvandh.” The Gurus’ composition under the name Nanak, with the Mahala heading: standard reference knowledge; no Gurbani is quoted. The vesting of the guruship in scripture and community in 1708: standard reference knowledge. The founding accounts (1574; land bought for 700 rupees from Tung; Guru da Chakk and Chakk Ram Das; excavation 1577–1581) and (work on pool and town 1570–1577; land acquired “on payment or free of cost”), the 1858 Municipal Committee, the 1862 railway, the shrines of Guru de Mahal, Thara Sahib and Tahli Sahib, Santokhsar begun in 1564 (or 1570) and completed in 1588, and the name Amritsar adopted after Guru Arjan’s renovation of the pool in 1586: Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, “The City – Amritsar” and “Sri Harmandir Sahib” (sgpc.net). The site granted by Akbar, the 1901 population of 162,429, carpet-weaving, the Church of England mission, town hall and hospital, and the quoted phrase: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), “Amritsar,” Wikisource text. The foundation stone laid by Neelam Sanjiva Reddy “then President of India” on 17 October to commemorate the city’s four hundredth year, printed as 1997, and the statement on serving patients irrespective of caste, creed, religion or faith: Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, “Foundation Philosophy” (sgrdimsr.in). The start in 1997, first batch passing out in December 2002, recognition letters of 31 December 2002 and 23 January 2003, building completed March 2000, affiliation history, growth from 50 to 150 places, and the trust’s registration under the Societies Registration Act 1860: the institute’s “Profile” and home pages. The charitable hospital’s existence from 1977 and the university’s declaration in August 2016 under Punjab Act 43 of 2016: Sri Guru Ram Das University of Health Sciences, “History” (sgrduhs.in). Neelam Sanjiva Reddy’s presidency, 1977–1982: standard reference summary. The renaming of Wegener’s granulomatosis as granulomatosis with polyangiitis in 2011 by the ACR, ASN and EULAR because of Wegener’s Nazi Party association: standard reference summary. Montaigne, “Of Glory” and “Of Names,” in Charles Cotton’s translation: Project Gutenberg text. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (1961), on the city as magnet and container: paraphrased from standard reference knowledge. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy: standard reference knowledge. The evidence on hindsight is set out in the linked essay on Khalsa College. The gate called Deori Hakiman, the renaming and loss of several gates, the teaching hospitals of Government Medical College named for Guru Nanak Dev and Guru Tegh Bahadur and the Bebe Nanaki Mother and Child Care Centre (2012), Guru Nanak Dev University’s establishment on 24 November 1969, and Bebe Nanaki as Guru Nanak’s elder sister and first follower: standard reference summaries. The connection of the university’s founding to the five-hundredth anniversary of Guru Nanak’s birth (1469): standard reference knowledge. Guru Bazaar beside the shrine: SGPC, “The City – Amritsar.” The tradition of the platforms built by Jetha before his selection: standard reference summary of Sikh tradition. The abbreviation SGRD: the site’s own catalogue. Vendor representations. None.
Recollection and tradition. The author’s upbringing in Amritsar, his roots in Khadur Sahib and his MBBS dates are biography. No moment of noticing the connection between the city’s founder and the institute’s name, no day at the institute, no teacher, classmate or patient is described. The life of Guru Ram Das is given as Sikh tradition and standard history; the stories of his childhood and service are traditional. Nothing is asserted about how fully the institute has met its stated aims in any period.
Analysis and forecast. The comparison of founding dates with the clinical onset of an illness, the reading of the Gurus’ signature under the name Nanak as a fact about names, the contrast between the two medical colleges’ naming histories, the observation that published sources disagree about the year of the foundation stone, the distinction between commemoration and descent, and the rejection of a destiny reading of the author’s career are the author’s interpretation as of November 2026. Independence. This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer.
About the Author #
Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD, traces his family roots to Khadur Sahib in Punjab’s Majha region and grew up in Amritsar. He attended Spring Dale School and completed pre-medical studies at Khalsa College in 1994–1996. He earned his MBBS from Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar in 2002.
He completed PGY-1 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in 2007–2008, and PGY-2 and PGY-3 with UCSF Fresno at Community Regional Medical Center from 2008 through 2010. He has practiced medicine in California since 2010.
His career has crossed four distinct information eras: predominantly paper-based medicine, early and fragmented electronic records, the integrated-EHR era, and the emerging age of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.