The Light Restorer of Mumbai’s Shadows: The Story of Dr. Sundaram Natarajan

On 4 September 1957, in Madurai, a boy named Sundaram Natarajan was born into a family where the language of light and vision had been spoken for generations. His grandfather, Dr. Nataraja Pillai, and his father, Dr. N.S. Sundaram, were respected ophthalmologists in Chennai. Young Sundaram grew up watching them peer into eyes and restore sight.

“The eye is the window to the soul,” his father would say, “and sometimes the only window a person has left to the world. Guard it carefully.”

He studied at Madras Medical College, graduating MBBS in 1980. He completed his Diploma in Ophthalmology in 1984 and then trained in the highly demanding field of vitreoretinal surgery at Sankara Nethralaya under the legendary Padma Bhushan Dr. S.S. Badrinath, finishing his fellowship in 1985. There he mastered the delicate art of operating on the retina and vitreous—the thin, light-sensitive layer at the back of the eye.

After working at Sankara Nethralaya and later at the Taparia Institute of Ophthalmology in Bombay Hospital, he took a bold step in the early 1990s. He founded Aditya Jyot Eye Hospital in Dadar, Mumbai—one of India’s first centres dedicated exclusively to advanced vitreoretinal care. In 2004 the hospital expanded to Wadala with a modern facility and an eye bank. Over the decades he has performed more than 60,000 vitreoretinal surgeries and trained more than 68 specialists from India and abroad.

Yet the operating theatre was never enough for him. In 2002 he opened a free clinic in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, treating more than 8,000 people who could not afford care. He organised camps in Mankhurd, Govandi and other poor suburbs of Mumbai. In 2016 he travelled to Kashmir to operate on victims of pellet-gun injuries, restoring vision where trauma had taken it away. He founded the Aditya Jyot Foundation for Twinkling Little Eyes (later the Kamala Sundaram Foundation) and the Sundaram Natarajan Blind-Free India Foundation, with a clear goal: to eliminate preventable diabetic blindness from India.

One day in Dharavi his team screened 649 diabetic patients in just eight hours—earning a Guinness World Record for the most diabetic eye screenings in that time.

In 2013 the Government of India conferred upon him the Padma Shri. He has also been inducted into the Retina Hall of Fame, awarded the FRCS (Glasgow), and received numerous other national and international honours.

Today, as Chairman and Managing Director of Aditya Jyot Eye Hospital, he continues to operate, teach, and campaign. Colleagues and patients still see the same quiet intensity he had as a young trainee.

One evening, after a long day of surgeries and a free camp, a young doctor asked him, “Sir, after sixty thousand operations and so many free camps, what still drives you?”

Dr. Sundaram Natarajan looked out towards the lights of Mumbai and smiled.

“Every time a patient opens their eyes after surgery and sees their child’s face clearly for the first time in years,” he said, “I hear my father’s voice again. The eye is a window. My job is to keep that window open—for the rich, for the poor, for everyone. As long as there is one person in the dark, the work is not finished.”

And so the boy from Madurai who inherited a legacy of light continues to restore it—one delicate retina, one free camp, one reopened window at a time.