Dr. Dharmendra was born on 1 February 1900 in Lahore, in what is now Pakistan. As a medical student at King Edward Medical College he interrupted his studies for two years to join the non-cooperation movement after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, answering Mahatma Gandhi’s call. He graduated MBBS in 1928 and later obtained a Diploma in Bacteriology from London.

He joined the School of Tropical Medicine in Calcutta in 1928 and devoted the rest of his long career to leprosy — a disease then surrounded by fear and social isolation. Working with limited resources, he developed a refined preparation of lepromin, later known as Dharmendra’s antigen or Dharmendra’s lepromin. This skin-test reagent helped classify the disease and revealed important immunological differences between its forms, becoming a valuable diagnostic tool worldwide.

In 1955, as he approached retirement, the Government of India asked him to head the newly launched National Leprosy Control Programme as its first director. He laid the organisational foundations for what would become one of the country’s most successful public-health campaigns. In 1957 he was appointed the first Director of the Central Leprosy Teaching and Research Institute at Chengalpattu, building it from modest beginnings into an internationally recognised centre. He trained a generation of young scientists and initiated important studies, including early work on dapsone chemoprophylaxis.

He was a founder member and repeated president of the Indian Association of Leprologists and edited the journal Leprosy in India (later the Indian Journal of Leprosy) for decades. His textbook Notes on Leprosy and the two-volume work Leprosy that he later edited became standard references for workers in the field.

Colleagues remembered a man of austere habits and deep compassion. One younger researcher, watching him examine a patient whom society had rejected, later recalled Dharmendra saying quietly:

“The bacillus does not care about caste or fear. Our duty is to treat the person, not the stigma.”

In 1966 the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri. He was the first Indian to receive the Damien-Dutton Award (1970) and later the International Gandhi Award (1986).

Dr. Dharmendra died on 10 March 1991 at the age of ninety-one. In the story of Indian doctors he stands as a quiet pioneer who combined laboratory science, public-health organisation and human sympathy to fight one of humanity’s oldest and most feared diseases, helping to transform leprosy from a sentence of isolation into a controllable condition.