Dr. Nani Chandra Bordoloi
The psychiatrist who stayed at his post when the hills shook with war

In April 1920, in the green heart of Assam, Nani Chandra Bordoloi was born into a world still ruled by the British and only beginning to imagine freedom. He grew up, studied medicine, and chose the least glamorous of specialities at the time: psychiatry. In 1949, shortly after Independence, he took charge as Superintendent of the Tezpur Mental Hospital — an institution that had begun life in 1876 as the Tezpur Lunatic Asylum.

The place was old, the buildings colonial, the stigma surrounding mental illness thick as the monsoon mist. Bordoloi set about changing what he could. Treatment improved. Administration tightened. Patients received more humane care. Staff began to feel they were part of something purposeful rather than a forgotten outpost.

Then came October 1962. Chinese forces swept into the North-East. Tezpur, once quiet, suddenly found itself near the front. Panic spread. Official broadcasts carried the weight of impending disaster. Families fled. Many expected the hospital itself to be abandoned.

Bordoloi did the opposite.

He arranged for the safe evacuation of staff families and patients’ relatives to Guwahati and Shillong. Then he stayed. With the town in turmoil, he walked into the local radio station, took the microphone, and spoke calmly to the people of Assam.

“There is no sign of the enemy at our gates,” he told listeners. “Remain steady. We are still here.”

In a moment when fear threatened to become contagion, his voice became an anchor. For that quiet courage — and for years of dedicated service to the mentally ill in a neglected region — the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri in 1963. He was the first psychiatrist in the country to receive the honour.

Colleagues later remembered a man who never raised his voice yet never abandoned his post. One junior doctor recalled a night round during those tense weeks:

“Sir, should we not leave? The roads are emptying.”

Bordoloi looked at the wards, at the patients who had nowhere else to go, and answered simply, “These people are in our care. A doctor does not run from his patients.”

He continued his work long after the war ended. The hospital he led eventually grew into the Lokopriya Gopinath Bordoloi Regional Institute of Mental Health, still serving the North-East today. Nani Chandra Bordoloi died on 16 June 2002 at the age of eighty-two.

In the story of Indian doctors, he stands as a reminder that courage is not always found on the battlefield. Sometimes it is found in a mental hospital on the edge of a war zone, in a man who chose to stay, to speak calmly, and to keep caring for those the world too often forgets.