The Doctor Who Fell in Love with the Wilds of Assam: The Story of Dr. Robin Banerjee

On 12 August 1908, in Baharampur (Berhampore) in the Murshidabad district of West Bengal, a boy named Robin Banerjee was born. He lost his mother early and received his first schooling at Santiniketan, where the atmosphere of nature, art and learning left a lasting mark. He went on to study medicine at Calcutta Medical College and later trained further in Liverpool (1934) and Edinburgh (1936).

In 1937 he joined the British Royal Navy as a doctor and saw active service during the Second World War. The horrors he witnessed—especially the destruction and human suffering—left him deeply shaken. After the war he returned to India seeking a quieter life.

In 1952 he arrived in Assam as a locum for a Scottish doctor at the Chabua Tea Estate and soon became Chief Medical Officer. A visit to Kaziranga in 1953 changed everything. From the back of an elephant, looking out over the lush grasslands, the distant blue hills and the mighty Brahmaputra, he felt an instant and profound connection. “This is where I belong,” he decided. In 1954 he took a permanent post with the Dhansiri Medical Association at Bokakhat, right beside the great wilderness.

He continued to practise medicine with dedication, but Kaziranga claimed more and more of his heart. Gifted an 8 mm movie camera by an English resident, he began filming the park’s wildlife. His first major documentary, Kaziranga, took years to complete and was broadcast on Berlin Television in 1961—one of the earliest films to introduce the Indian one-horned rhinoceros and the park itself to Western audiences. Over the following decades he made more than thirty documentaries on Indian wildlife, winning fourteen national and international awards. He founded the Kaziranga Wildlife Society to protect the park’s interests and became a tireless advocate for conservation long before it was fashionable.

The people of Golaghat, where he eventually settled, affectionately called him “Uncle Robin.” He remained a lifelong bachelor after the tragic wartime death of his fiancée, a New Zealand nurse. He donated land for schools and health camps, kept injured animals at his home, and turned his bungalow into a treasure-house of photographs, paintings, curios and natural-history specimens—today known as Uncle Robin’s Natural History Museum for Children.

In 1971 the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri. Assam Agricultural University and Dibrugarh University later conferred honorary doctorates upon him. He continued to live simply among the people and the forests he loved until his death on 6 August 2003 at the age of ninety-four.

Dr. Robin Banerjee’s life bridged two worlds: the disciplined calling of a physician and the free, passionate calling of a naturalist. Through his camera and his quiet persistence he helped the world discover Kaziranga and its rhinos, and he showed that a doctor’s healing touch could extend beyond human patients to an entire landscape and its wild inhabitants. In Assam he remains a beloved figure—Uncle Robin, the gentle doctor who chose the forests as his lifelong home.