Maintaining Focus: The Life and Career of Hamida Saiduzzafar, India’s First Woman Ophthalmologist

In 1947, the partition of India carved out a theoretically Muslim-majority territory out of the Indian state, sparking a bloody era of desperate migration as members of religious minorities in the new Indian and Pakistani nations left ancestral homes and sought safety within the boundaries of their co-religionists. That same year, a Muslim woman from northern India whose parents had recently passed away boarded a boat, seeking medical training in England, entirely unsure as to what her country would look like upon her return.

Her name was Hamida Saiduzzafar (1921-1988), and her upbringing had been extraordinary in every sense. At a time when most Muslim girls growing up in northern India could expect little more than a curtailed life walled in by the social and cultural expectations of purdah, Hamida belonged to a family of rogue intellectuals who also happened to have the social clout to make their unorthodox decisions accepted. Hamida’s grand uncle was General Azimuddin Khan, who served as regent of the Rampur state from 1889 to 1894, and her family were considered important members of the Rohilla community which had charge of the region’s political life. Her father, Sahibzada Saiduzzafar Khan, took his cue from the General’s adventurous life, and struck out on his own maverick path, traveling to Europe to receive a medical education against the wishes of his family. 

Hamida with her father

He returned to India long enough to get married to the woman he had been promised to since childhood, and then returned to England for three more years of medical training. In 1911 he became the first Indian appointed to a Professor position in an Indian medical college, and the first Muslim. He convinced his wife that it was acceptable to not strictly follow purdah in order that she could talk easily and socially with his various medical colleagues, and when their daughter, Hamida, was born in 1921, she was to be raised without any of the gender limitations characteristic of her era. 

To the consternation of her more traditional mother but to the delight of her father, Hamida grew up something of a tomboy, always ready for sport and adventure, and curious about her father’s medical work, though her original inclination was towards engineering rather than medicine. She was a born organizer of people - during her school years she would gather her fellow students together during their leisure time and read a chapter a day to them from some work of world literature to expose them to great writing, and there was hardly an institution that she attended where she wasn’t the driving force behind the creation of a new academic club.

Hamida was raised by a series of governesses in the family’s Dehra Dun home with its sprawling European style garden which was the envy of the neighborhood, until she was sent to a boarding school, Queen Mary’s College, in Lahore, where she learned French and Urdu. She then selected Woodstock School in Mussoorie to continue her education, because it was a co-educational institution that offered a good selection of science courses, and sports opportunities for girls. Her original intention had been to strike out on a career as an engineer, but she soon found that no engineering schools were willing to take on women as students, and so she was compelled to switch to medicine, where her father’s reputation as a doctor and social influence could aid her on her way. He was a major figure in the early years of King George’s Medical College at Lucknow, and was able to easily swing admission for Hamida at the college. 

One of the things Hamida discovered there was the paucity of good instruction in ophthalmology, an area that was of growing interest to her. To fill this gap, she apprenticed with an ophthalmologist, Dr. Sagayam, who allowed her to work with patients and taught her the specialized instruments of the trade. She took first in her class in ophthalmology as a result, and won a Gold prize for her efforts in the field, and so it was only natural that she attempted to specialize in that field at the college. She was opposed in this by most of the staff, who held to the view that, if women must be doctors, they should stick to the fields of obstetrics and gynecology, instead of straying into traditionally male specialties. Their opposition only further spurred her to make ophthalmology her specialty, and she had to ultimately pay for her own lab animals and equipment to finish her Master’s Thesis because her advisor was entirely unwilling to help her with department resources. 

As Hamida was wrapping up her studies, she was hit by the dual tragedies of the death of her mother in 1946, followed shortly by her father in 1947. Somehow, in spite of having the center blasted out of the world that she knew, she was able to collect herself and sit for her examinations in April of 1947, and pass them. By August she was on a boat bound for England, where for the next two years she would take up post-graduate work in ophthalmology, the first of several trips that would ultimately earn her a doctorate from the University of London in 1970. By 1949, she was back in India, brimming with experience and the most recent education in eye studies, but she had difficulty finding work. She sent out a myriad of applications, only to have them all rejected, until at last, after eight months of searching, her future came to her not through an application, but a personal contact that put her in the path of Dr. Mohan Lal, who ran the Gandhi Eye Hospital in Aligarh. 

Lal ran a tight ship, expecting the same round the clock commitment to patient care that he demonstrated, and Hamida found in him an example for her own remarkable career of the next three decades. She wanted to better understand the eye diseases impacting Indians, and devoted herself to research centering on glaucoma and other blindness-producing diseases, developing better diagnostics for early analysis, and researching new surgical techniques to restore sight. Her efforts soon attracted international attention, and in the last decade of her life she was a consultant to multiple global blindness prevention efforts, including the WHO’s vision project for India, Bangladesh, and Burma. 

Hamida Saiduzzafar never married. More than one colleague commented after her death that her life was her work, both in the form of the thousands of sight-restoring surgeries she performed, and in the training of new generations to replace her in the cause of improving the nation’s vision. She personally criss crossed the nation performing surgeries, and her students at the Gandhi Eye Hospital fanned out across India to create a vanguard of duty-driven specialists who formed the core of her lasting legacy. Saiduzzafar passed away suddenly in 1988 from a brain hemorrhage, and in accordance with her wishes, her eyes were donated to science for corneal grafting, thereby gifting one last person the power of vision, a typically generous act for a person whose life had been devoted to the service of others.  

FURTHER READING: 

Hamida’s memoirs, together with other reflections on her life from those who knew her personally and professionally, were collected together by Lola Chatterji and released in a single volume in 1996. It is not an easy find, particularly here in the United States, but it is decidedly your single best source for information on her unique upbringing and life trajectory.