On 31 March 1934 (some records note 1935), in the village of Sarwania in Madhya Pradesh, a boy named Chitranjan Singh Ranawat was born. He studied at The Daly College in Indore and earned his medical degree from Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College. After further orthopaedic training in India and Canada, he crossed the ocean to the United States, completing fellowships at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York and becoming board-certified in 1969.

He stayed in America and rose to become one of the world’s leading joint-replacement surgeons. At the Hospital for Special Surgery and later as Chairman of Orthopaedics at Lenox Hill Hospital, he refined the techniques that would transform millions of lives. In 1973 he introduced the Duo Condylar Knee; in 1976 the Total Condylar Knee; and together with Albert Burstein he developed the Ranawat–Burstein hip implant. These designs became foundations of modern arthroplasty.

One evening a young surgeon asked him, “Dr. Ranawat, why keep refining these implants when the current ones already work?”

He answered quietly, “Because every patient who cannot walk is waiting for a better answer. If we can give them a joint that lasts longer and moves more naturally, we give them back years of life.”

In 1983 he founded the Knee Society and served as its first president. In 1991 he helped found the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons. He trained scores of surgeons—many from India—who returned home to perform nearly half of the country’s hip and knee replacements. Through the Ranawat Orthopaedic Research Foundation, established in 1986, he supported education, research and the donation of implants to Indian hospitals.

In 2001 the Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan. Lifetime achievement awards from the Knee Society, the Hip Society and the Arthritis Foundation followed. When colleagues called him a legend he only said, “The real legacy is every patient who walks out of the hospital without pain, and every young surgeon who carries the work forward.”

On 26 September 2025, at the age of ninety, Dr. Chitranjan Singh Ranawat passed away. Yet the implants he designed, the societies he founded, the surgeons he mentored and the annual Ranawat Award continue his quiet creed:

“Study the biomechanics carefully. Design with the patient in mind. Teach without holding back. And never stop improving the joint that lets a human being stand tall again.”