People · Gulbarga · Industry & Education
Gulbarga, Hyderabad–Karnataka · Industrialist and benefactor
He paid for a college and then asked that it carry someone else’s name. Sixty-five years later the oldest law college in the Hyderabad–Karnataka region still bears his father’s — and a medical research centre in the same city bears his.
1960
Rameshchandra belonged to the Gulbarga branch of the family, whose commercial life in the Deccan ran through banking, cotton trading and industry. He was a noted industrialist of the town at a moment when the town badly needed one.
The reorganisation of states in 1956 had left the Hyderabad–Karnataka region conspicuously short of higher education. In 1960 the newly formed Hyderabad Karnataka Education Society set out to establish a law college at Gulbarga. Mohammad Mahboob Yakub Maniyar gave the land. Rameshchandra Lahoti gave the money.
He attached one request. That the college should carry the name of his late father, Seth Shankarlal Lahoti.
He could have built a memorial. He built a college instead, and put his father’s name on the gate rather than on a stone.
The difference is not sentimental. A memorial commemorates; a college keeps working. Every year since, students who never knew either man have walked in under that name on their way to becoming advocates — which is a form of remembrance that renews itself rather than weathering away.
He also gave it away. Having funded it, the family did not run it. The college has been governed by the HKE Society from the beginning, and remains so — the pattern the Lahotis followed almost everywhere: endow, name, and step back.
Law, and Afterwards Medicine
In 1960 he put his father’s name on a law college and kept his own off it. Decades later other people made the decision for him.
The Ramesh Chandra Lahoti Medical Research Centre was inaugurated in Gulbarga in 2006, alongside the Dhanvantri multi-speciality hospital. He did not name it. It was named for him — which is a different and better kind of tribute, because it was other people’s judgement rather than his own.
Two institutions in one city, one carrying the father’s name and one the son’s, forty-six years apart.
Between them they cover the two fields this family has returned to for a century and a half: education and medicine. It is the same pairing Rai Saheb Pannalal Hiralal Lahoti wrote into his will in 1956 — hospitals and schools, in those words, in perpetuity.
1960 · Education
The oldest law college in the Hyderabad–Karnataka region, and the first degree college of the HKE Society. Named for his father.
The college →2006 · Medicine
Inaugurated at Gulbarga with the Dhanvantri multi-speciality hospital, carrying his own name into a second field.
1956 · The Instrument
The charitable will that set the family’s two fields, four years before the college was founded.
The trusts →Continue
The Gulbarga Branch
Seth Shankarlal Lahoti, Seth Pusharam Lahoti and the line that made Gulbarga the family’s first foothold in the Deccan.
The people →Twenty Institutions
Four in Gulbarga alone, and twenty across five regions of the former Hyderabad State.
The institutions →1960
Where the founding of the law college sits in the family’s hundred and sixty-five years in the Deccan.
The timeline →