Dr. Prakash Narain Tandon
(Padma Shri, 1973 – Medicine)

In the early 1960s, when neurosurgery in India was still a fragile, almost experimental field, a young surgeon returned from the operating theatres of Oslo and Montreal with a quiet determination. Prakash Narain Tandon had seen what modern neurosurgery could achieve. He also knew how little of it existed back home. Born on 13 August 1928, he completed his MBBS in 1950 and MS in 1952 at King George’s Medical College, Lucknow. After earning his FRCS in England and specialised training in Norway and Canada, he declined attractive offers abroad and came back to build something lasting.

In 1965 he arrived at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, to found its Department of Neurosurgery. The facilities were basic. The first time he prepared for a major case, he later admitted feeling a moment of hesitation—aware that the theatre was far from the well-equipped rooms he had left behind. A senior colleague noticed and asked, “Are you sure about this, Tandon?”
He answered simply, “If we wait for perfect conditions, Indian patients will keep waiting forever. We begin with what we have.”

That attitude defined his career. He built the department from the ground up, trained generations of neurosurgeons—more than fifty who went on to practise across India—and insisted that the specialty address the real pattern of neurological disease in the country: tuberculomas of the brain, epilepsy, head injuries, and the unique presentations that textbooks written elsewhere often missed. Students remembered long teaching sessions where he would stop mid-lecture, point to an X-ray, and say, “Look carefully. The disease does not always follow the book. The patient does.”

One young resident, exhausted after a difficult emergency, once asked him why he still operated late into the night.
Tandon replied, “Because the brain does not keep office hours. And neither should we when a life hangs in the balance.”

His research produced monographs that became standard references in India—on tuberculosis of the central nervous system, epilepsy, subarachnoid haemorrhage, and the epidemiology of head injury. He served as Honorary Surgeon to the President of India and later as President of the Indian National Science Academy. Long after he formally stepped away from active surgery in 1990, he continued as Emeritus Professor and poured his energy into creating the National Brain Research Centre at Manesar, determined that India should have a dedicated institution for understanding the brain.

When the Padma Shri was conferred in 1973, followed later by the Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan, colleagues said the awards recognised not only technical skill but the quieter achievement of making neurosurgery a sustainable, Indian discipline. In the corridors of AIIMS, younger surgeons still speak of the man who arrived when the specialty barely existed and left behind a department, a research centre, and a tradition of careful, courageous care.

Years later, reflecting on those early days, he would tell visitors, “We did not inherit a ready-made specialty. We built it, one patient, one student, one sleepless night at a time.”

That was the life of Professor Prakash Narain Tandon—neurosurgeon, teacher, and architect of modern Indian neurosciences.