The Steady Hand That Opened Hearts: The Story of Dr. Ajit Kumar Basu

In 1912, in Calcutta, a boy named Ajit Kumar Basu was born into a city that pulsed with both tradition and change. He grew up walking the corridors of learning—first at Hare School, then Presidency College—before entering Calcutta Medical College. There, under the formidable guidance of surgeons like Colonel John Anderson, he discovered the precision and courage that surgery demanded.

After the Second World War, Ajit crossed the seas to England. In 1946 he earned his FRCS from the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He would later become the first Indian appointed as an examiner of that College and serve as its Hunterian Professor—a rare honour that spoke of both skill and quiet authority.

Back in India, he began as Professor and Head of Surgery at Nilratan Sircar Medical College in Calcutta from 1950 to 1955, building a reputation in general and orthopaedic surgery. Then came a turning point. In 1952, as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Boston, he encountered the new and daring field of cardiac and vascular surgery. The challenges fascinated him. The possibilities for Indian patients, many of them young and suffering from rheumatic heart disease, stirred something deeper.

“We cannot wait for perfect conditions,” he would later tell young surgeons. “We must learn, adapt, and begin.”

In 1958 he was invited to chair the newly established Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at the Postgraduate Medical Institute (Presidency General Hospital, Calcutta). There he built a dedicated unit, trained generations of surgeons, and helped introduce open-heart techniques to India at a time when equipment was scarce and infrastructure limited. He experimented carefully with early heart-lung machines and collaborated with international pioneers, always mindful of the realities of Indian hospitals.

Even as he advanced cardiovascular surgery, he never abandoned his earlier interests. As Director of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, he continued teaching and researching liver surgery and non-cirrhotic portal hypertension until his retirement in 1971. His multidisciplinary approach to liver disease earned particular praise.

In 1967 the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Medical Sciences—the nation’s highest scientific honour at the time. Three years later, in 1970, the Government of India conferred upon him the Padma Shri for his contributions to medicine.

Colleagues remembered him as an immaculate gentleman: precise in the operating theatre, demanding yet fair in the classroom, and always more interested in the next patient’s recovery than in personal acclaim. He served as President of the Association of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeons of India and held important positions in national medical bodies.

Dr. Ajit Kumar Basu passed away on 3 December 1986. In the history of Indian cardiac surgery, his name stands among the quiet pioneers—the men who built the first departments, trained the first specialised teams, and proved that complex heart surgery could be performed with skill and determination even in the constrained conditions of a young nation.

He opened not only hearts on the operating table, but pathways for an entire generation of Indian surgeons who followed.