For thirty-odd years, if a Kashmiri family had exhausted every other door, they went to Gojwara-born Dr. Ali Jan. He asked few questions, touched a wrist, watched a face, and named the illness before the patient had finished describing it. People called this a miracle. His own colleagues insisted, gently but firmly, that it was something rarer than a miracle — it was discipline, applied without interruption, for an entire working life.
A name Out of Gojwara
Ali Mohammad Jan Fazili was born on 3 September 1914 in Gojwara, in the heart of Srinagar, into the Fazili family — a lineage of scholars, mystics, and civil servants whose written history reaches back to a Hindu ancestor, Dattaretya Ganesh Koul, who converted to Islam and took the name Sheikh Ghazuddin. Ali Jan was the third of eight siblings, six brothers and two sisters, born to Ghulam Rasool Fazili, a respected scholar of Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and scripture.
It was, by any account, a household built around learning. One brother, Abdul Ghani Fazili, became a well-known poet; two others, A. A. Fazili and Umar Jan, rose through the Indian Administrative Service; the youngest, Ehsan ul Haque Fazili, retired as Chief Engineer in the Jammu and Kashmir government.
The clan's deeper roots are said, in family accounts, to trace further still — to Gamroo village in Bandipore, where an ancestor named Ghulam Rasool Sheva had settled some four centuries ago. Sheva's eldest son, Peer Hassan Shah, is remembered as one of Kashmir's most important nineteenth-century chroniclers, documenting the Valley's geography, political history, saints, and scholars across four Persian volumes — work later credited with recovering the record of thirty-five kings that Kalhana's twelfth-century Rajatarangini had failed to preserve. The celebrated Urdu poet and lyricist Nida Fazli is also said, by his own account in an interview late in life, to descend from this same Bandipore branch of the family — a family claim rather than a documented one, but repeated consistently enough within the clan to be worth recording.
Ali Jan, then, did not arrive from nowhere. He was born into a family already in the business of preserving Kashmir's memory — he simply did it with a stethoscope instead of a pen.
He completed his MBBS at King Edward Medical College, Lahore, topping the course in 1937 — his name, Ali Mohammad Fazili, is said to still stand on the college's honours board. He then went to the United Kingdom for postgraduate study, and by most accounts moved through it at extraordinary speed: a Diploma in Child Health and membership of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh (MRCP), reportedly completed within nine months. Before any of this — before Lahore, before Edinburgh — he had already spent more than a decade working in the rural areas of Jammu and Kashmir, in villages with no easy claim on a young doctor's ambition.
The Doctor Who Would Not Sit in an Office
After returning from Britain, Ali Jan joined government medical service, including a posting at the Chest and Disease Hospital in Drogjan, Srinagar. It did not hold him long. He resigned to build a private practice — an unusual choice for a man of his qualifications and connections, and one that put him, by design, closer to ordinary patients than any government office would have allowed.
He built a house at Magharmal Bagh in Srinagar after his return from the UK, with an adjoining single-storey structure that served as his clinic. Even decades later, the building remained a landmark that Kashmiris pointed to and named — though the clinic itself has stood empty since the death of his second wife, Dr. Tajwar.
Family accounts say he turned down the post of Principal of the Medical College, Srinagar — a coveted appointment he is said to have passed over because it would have pulled him away from patients and toward administration. Whether or not the offer happened exactly as told, it fits a pattern that recurs across every account of his working life: offered status, he chose proximity to the sick instead.
People travelled to him from Jammu, from villages across the Valley, from as far as northern India. Dr. Manzoor Fazili — a clansman and the author of Hassan: Kashmir Historiographer (1983) — wrote that Ali Jan's fame as a physician extended across all of northern India, and that his patients guarded their prescriptions from him as though they were talismans. This was not metaphorical devotion. It was literal, and it produced its own small legends.
Dr. K. L. Chowdhury, who later worked alongside Ali Jan, recalled his grandaunt returning from a wedding to discover her pheran pocket had been picked — the deep, cluttered pocket that a Kashmiri Pandit woman carried her whole daily world in: coins, needles, matchboxes, documents. She did not mourn the money. She mourned the one thing that could not simply be replaced by ordinary means: a prescription Ali Jan had once written her, which she had guarded for years. She would not rest until Chowdhury's father, a friend and neighbour of the doctor, walked her back to his clinic so a new one could be written.
Decades later, in Jammu, Chowdhury met a patient named Somdatt Khanna, a migraine sufferer who had seen Ali Jan once, in 1973, and still — forty-six years on — kept the original prescription and a personal letter Ali Jan had written him in reply. Chowdhury describes holding both documents, the familiar handwriting still legible in the corner of the page: a brief clinical note, the medication, and a signature.
The Reputation for Miracles
The word Kashmiris reached for was Luqman — after the wise physician of Quranic and folk tradition — and, in time, simply Hakeem Luqman or the Luqman-e-Kashmir. People believed he possessed Dast-e-Shifa, a healing touch, and told stories to prove it: that he could diagnose an illness by looking at a face and asking a few casual questions.
He is said to have told one Bandipore family, without biopsy or test, to spend three good months with their ailing patriarch, and the man died on schedule, of advanced stomach cancer no one else had named. He told a young woman with an unexplained lifelong stomach ailment to give up rice — the staple of every Kashmiri table — for wheat roti, and the advice held for the next forty years of her life.
One story, passed down through three generations of a single family and offered by its teller with open uncertainty about its accuracy, goes further still. A wealthy British family is said to have brought their daughter to Kashmir sometime in the 1950s or '60s, after doctors in England had failed for years to explain why she vomited after nearly every meal. Ali Jan, the story goes, invited them to dinner, and — instead of any test — asked the girl's father to light a cigarette and had her take a single drag before eating. She kept the meal down.
The explanation offered, folk-remembered decades later, is that she had been suffering the effects of secondhand smoke at home, and that the small deliberate dose settled what constant passive exposure had unsettled. It is a striking story and an implausible one by any modern clinical standard — worth keeping only as an example of the kind of tale that grew around him, not as a documented case.
Not everyone who knew him accepted the word "miracle," and it is worth taking their objection seriously, because it comes from people who watched him work at close range for years rather than heard about him at a distance.
"People would say Dr. Ali Jan would do miracles as he would make a diagnosis with exceptional accuracy. I don't believe in miracles as they don't happen now. How could Dr. Jan make them?" Dr. A. Wahid, former Head of Medicine, SKIMS
Dr. Manzoor Fazili offered the same conclusion in gentler language: if Ali Jan's spiritual ancestors had once performed wonders through faith, Ali Jan performed his through the scientific methods of modern medicine — and it was precisely because he stayed current with every advance in the field, and applied that knowledge with total rigor, that an accurate diagnosis could look, to an ordinary patient, indistinguishable from magic.
The Method Behind the Myth
The most detailed account of how Ali Jan actually worked comes from Dr. M. Sultan Khuroo — later one of Kashmir's most distinguished gastroenterologists, globally recognised for identifying Hepatitis E during a Tangmarg epidemic — who trained under him as a medical student and house surgeon before eventually becoming, himself, Director of SKIMS. Khuroo's account, written decades later, does something rare: it takes apart the folklore piece by piece and shows the clinical habits sitting underneath it, habits that read today as early, homegrown versions of practices modern medicine would later formalise and give names to.
Ali Jan knew his patients by first name even a decade after a single visit, and recalled their histories without a chart — functioning, in effect, as his own medical record system, decades before computerised records made that unnecessary for everyone else. He insisted on reviewing his patients' urine tests, blood counts, and blood films personally, rather than trusting reports generated far from the patient's bedside — an early, self-taught form of what hospitals now formalise as clinico-pathological correlation.
Colleagues remember him reading medical journals late into the night after a full day of clinics, often chasing down a specific answer for a specific patient still on the ward — a private, self-driven precursor to what is now organised as continuing medical education. And after a patient died unexpectedly or a procedure went wrong, he reviewed the case and its events for lessons to carry forward — the same instinct that hospitals now schedule formally as morbidity and mortality rounds.
Khuroo's verdict, stated plainly: Ali Jan was not working outside the norms of scientific medicine. He was working years ahead of when those norms would be written down and named. Dr. K. L. Chowdhury, who watched him from a different vantage — as a junior colleague sharing outpatient hours rather than as a former student — arrived independently at the same reading.
"I didn't see him performing any miracles," Chowdhury wrote, "but I saw perfection." He described Ali Jan as a keen listener, a keener observer, quick-witted and intuitive — possessed, in Chowdhury's phrase, of "that extra sense — the common sense."
He was not working outside the norms of scientific medicine. He was working years ahead of when those norms would be written down and named.
Chowdhury also preserved a detail that the folklore tends to smooth over: Ali Jan's famously terse prescriptions — a brief clinical note in the corner of the page, followed by the medication — were not laziness but necessity, shaped by a doctor-patient ratio so poor in mid-century Kashmir that a proper Western-style file was, for most physicians, simply impossible to maintain. The habit he set became, in Chowdhury's account, a quiet template that doctors across Jammu and Kashmir continued to follow long after him.
He was, by every account, a man of few words and considerable presence — short in stature, handsome, exact in his timing, always the first to arrive at a ward round and the last to leave. Khuroo, who sat through his bedside teaching as a student, remembered sessions with no "nonsense" in them: no theatrics for the benefit of an audience, a clear lesson delivered and closed, sessions that the students who actually wanted to learn medicine made a point of attending.
He kept close, working relationships with nurses, technicians, radiologists, and pathologists — not out of sociability alone, colleagues suggest, but because he understood, long before it became institutional wisdom, that no diagnosis is really made by one person working in isolation.
Building What Kashmir Did Not Have
When Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, then Chief Minister, first conceived of a tertiary-care hospital for Kashmir, Ali Jan was among the small circle of physicians who helped give the idea practical shape. He never practised as a staff physician at the resulting institution — the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, SKIMS, at Soura — but he served as vice-chairman of its governing body and personally chaired its Apical Selection Committee, sitting on the panels that chose its founding faculty.
Khuroo, who would go on to direct SKIMS himself, credits much of what the institution became at its peak in the early 1980s to the quiet, sustained attention Ali Jan gave it from the governing side: reading up on new technologies before signing off on them, watching closely how senior physicians actually practised, and using his standing to keep the institution's early culture pointed toward rigour.
His public health work extended in the same direction — toward reaching people the formal system could not easily reach. He founded and served as president of both the Rotary Club of Kashmir and the Tuberculosis Association of Kashmir, and through them ran free medical camps in remote villages, seeing patients in open courtyards with the same unhurried attention he gave them in his private clinic in Srinagar.
He also sat on the Jammu and Kashmir State Health and Family Planning Advisory Committee. In 1975, the Government of India recognised this body of work with a Padma Shri, the nation's fourth-highest civilian honour, awarded in the category of medicine.
He eventually took premature retirement from formal practice — a decision he never fully explained. Chowdhury, who was close enough to ask him directly why, remembered only that Ali Jan smiled and said little; Chowdhury later came to believe, though could not confirm, that he had felt constrained by a changed administration he had clashed with.
Whatever the cause, retirement did not remove him from Kashmir's medical life. "I am not going anywhere," he told Chowdhury. "I will be in town." And he was — available, by every account, whenever a former junior colleague needed his opinion on a difficult case.
The Man Beyond the Clinic
Weekdays belonged entirely to his patients. On the two days he kept for himself, he went fishing at Pahalgam and Kokernag, or stayed home reading — medical journals, newspapers, and the Urdu and Persian poets: Mirza Ghalib, Allama Iqbal, Hali. His brother Ehsan ul Haque, the only sibling who outlived him long enough to be interviewed about their childhood, remembered him as deeply involved in the life of the whole extended family, warm in a way that his clinical reputation for brevity did not suggest.
He had three sons and two daughters. Two of his sons — Gowhar Ali Jan, who served in the Jammu and Kashmir civil services, and Ali Akbar Jan, who worked for Air India and settled in Darjeeling — have since died. His third son, Dr. Ali Ahmad Fazili, is a physician settled in Utah, married to a fellow doctor; he addressed the Kashmir Care Foundation's 2024 tribute to his father, thirty-six years after Ali Jan's death, saying the recognition had moved the family deeply.
Of his daughters, Razia Fazili lives in Srinagar, married to a cousin, Khursheed Anwar Fazili; Dr. Aamina, married to the son of a senior physician and colleague of her father's, is settled in New York.
Death, and What Outlasted It
Ali Jan died on 31 October 1988, of pancreatic cancer, in a hospital in the United States; his body was returned to Srinagar for burial. Kashmir, by every account written since, felt the loss as something close to communal. No physician who followed him, his contemporaries insisted, matched his combination of diagnostic skill and evident compassion for the poorest patients who came to him.
Thirty-six years later, in December 2024, the Kashmir Care Foundation convened a tribute session titled "Clinical Sciences: Treatment Using Local Knowledge," gathering a panel of Kashmiri physicians who had gone on to global distinction — among them Dr. M. Sultan Khuroo, the endocrinologist Dr. Abdul Hamid Zargar, the cardiologist Dr. Upendra Kaul, and the pulmonologist Dr. Parvaiz Koul — to speak both in his memory and about the local medical problems they had each gone on to solve.
It was, in effect, an accounting of a lineage: physicians whose careers, in different ways, extended the same instinct Ali Jan had modelled decades earlier, that Kashmir's medicine had to be built by people willing to look closely at Kashmir's own patients rather than importing solutions wholesale.
A road in Srinagar, connecting Downtown to SKIMS at Soura, carries his name today — a fittingly literal route between the old city he served for decades and the institution he helped will into being.
What survives of Ali Jan now is a mixture of three different kinds of memory, and it is worth keeping them separate rather than letting them blur into one another. There is the documented record — a degree, a diploma, a medal, a governing-body seat, a death certificate, a road sign. There is the testimony of the people who trained under him or worked beside him, converging, independently and without coordination, on the same conclusion: that what looked like magic to a frightened patient was, up close, simply attention paid without interruption for forty years.
And there is the folklore — the cigarette that cured a vomiting girl, the diagnosis of cancer with no test to confirm it, the prescription guarded like a relic — stories that may or may not have happened exactly as told, but that testify, all the same, to something that plainly did happen: an entire Valley deciding, in the space of one man's working life, that here, finally, was someone who could be trusted with their fear.
He asked to be remembered, if at all, for the ordinary discipline of showing up — and Kashmir remembered him instead as a legend. Perhaps those were never two different things.
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