The Legacy in Black and White: The Story of Dr. Sudarshan Kumar Aggarwal

In 1935, in the bustling city of Lahore in undivided Punjab, a boy named Sudarshan Kumar Aggarwal was born into a house already filled with the soft glow of X-ray plates and the quiet authority of medicine. His father, Dr. Diwan Chand Aggarwal, was one of the true pioneers of radiology in India—a man who had trained under the British and opened one of the earliest modern X-ray clinics in the region. Young Sudarshan grew up watching his father and elder brother, Dr. S.P. Aggarwal, peer into the hidden structures of the human body.

“See this shadow?” his father would say, pointing to a film. “It tells a story the patient cannot speak. Our job is to read it carefully and honestly.”

Partition in 1947 uprooted the family. They crossed into India and settled in Delhi, carrying their knowledge and their determination with them. Sudarshan studied hard, graduated in medicine from Amritsar Medical College, Punjab University, in 1957, and then sailed to London for specialised training. In 1961 he earned his Diploma in Medical Radio-Diagnosis (DMRD). Further fellowships and training took him to Middlesex Hospital in London, Glasgow, Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, and Ullevål Hospital in Oslo—places that were then the global centres of radiological excellence. Over the years he collected the FRCR from England, the FACR from the United States, and the FRSM from the United Kingdom.

In 1959 he returned and joined the family practice—the Diwan Chand Aggarwal Imaging Centre—specialising in gastrointestinal and uro-radiology. When his elder brother passed away in 1989, Sudarshan took over the reins. Under his leadership the centre grew into one of Delhi’s most respected diagnostic institutions and became a postgraduate teaching centre recognised by the National Board of Examinations. Generations of young radiologists trained under its roof.

He co-authored a three-volume textbook, Diagnostic Radiology and Imaging, and published more than fifty papers in national and international journals. He founded and edited the Asian Oceanian Journal of Radiology, sat on the editorial boards of Abdominal Imaging and the Indian Journal of Radiology and Imaging, and served as President of the Indian Radiological and Imaging Association in 1989. He organised major international congresses and became the Founder President of the SAARC Society of Radiologists, helping radiologists across South Asia share knowledge and raise standards.

Awards followed steadily: the Beclere Medal from the International Society of Radiology, the Gösta Forssell Award from the Swedish Academy of Radiology, the J.C. Bose Oration, the K.R. Gupta Lifetime Achievement Award, and finally, in 2013, the Padma Shri from the Government of India.

Even in his later years he continued to work at the Diwan Chand Satyapal Aggarwal Imaging Research Centre in New Delhi, mentoring younger colleagues and insisting on the same careful reading of every film that his father had taught him.

One afternoon a young resident, staring at a complex abdominal scan, sighed, “Sir, how do you always see what others miss?”

Dr. Sudarshan Kumar Aggarwal smiled the quiet smile of a man who had spent a lifetime looking beneath the surface.

“You look with the eyes,” he said, “but you see with experience, patience, and respect for the patient. My father taught me that every shadow has a story. Our duty is to tell it truly—so the surgeon, the physician, and the patient can write the next chapter correctly.”

And so the youngest son of a Lahore pioneer continued the family tradition: turning invisible stories into clear diagnoses, one carefully read image at a time, and leaving behind a centre, a generation of trained radiologists, and a quiet legacy of excellence that still serves the city his family once chose as home.