| Summary: | Dr. Ajitha Chakraborty, popularly called Ajithadi by her students and juniors who remember her as outspoken, nonconformist, and perfectionist, was born in preindependent India on October 31, 1926. She graduated in medicine from Medical College, Bengal, then went on to get her DPM and MRCP, FRCP from England, and came back to India in 1960 after almost a decade. She was the first qualified and practicing female psychiatrist in India. She was the first lady president of IPS. She was a pioneer in the social and cultural psychiatry research, admired, and appreciated by the first-line researchers of the world in cultural psychiatry like H B M Murphy, Raymond Prince, etc. At the 5th World Congress of Psychiatry in Mexico City in 1971, she voiced her concerns that there were no sessions chaired by women and received widespread support. The Lancet requested her to write an invited article on “Culture, Colonialism and Psychiatry” in 1991. She also wrote an autobiography named, “My Life As A Psychiatrist: Memoirs And Essays”.
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