The house is 105 years old. Four generations of doctors have practised medicine within its walls — grandfather, father, son, grandson — in an unbroken line that runs from the early days of organised Indian medicine to the present. When Sanjeev Chandorkar invited his classmates to his son’s wedding, they were not simply attending a celebration. They were walking into a century of medical history in a single ancestral home in Narsinghpur, Madhya Pradesh.
Four Generations, One Roof
The Chandorkars trace their name to Chandor, a village in Ratnagiri district on Maharashtra’s Konkan coast. The family has been in Narsinghpur long enough that the town has absorbed them entirely. Sanjeev’s grandfather was a barrister. His father, Shri Chandorkar senior, belonged to the first batch of Government Medical College, Nagpur — the founding cohort of the institution that his son would enter a generation later.
Sanjeev was born and schooled in Nagpur, attending Hadas High School — where Pratibha Amin, Sanjay Gadre, Maya Wanjari, and Tara Bhat were classmates. He entered GMC Nagpur in 1973, graduated, and interned at a primary health centre in Deolapar, 67 kilometres northwest of Nagpur, alongside Sanjay Gadre, Rajendra Phadke, Rajiv Biyani, Harish Motwani, Pradeep Desai, and Avinash Deshmukh.
To fund his postgraduation and add some variety to its demands, he took night duties at Nagarik Sahakari Hospital as a junior medical officer — partly for the money, he says, and partly for the company. He completed his MD in Medicine at GMC Nagpur in 1982, his thesis examining low-dose insulin infusion in diabetic ketoacidosis under Dr. Lata Patil’s supervision. Then he went home to Narsinghpur and set up practice in the ancestral house.
Medicine, Politics, and the River
Narsinghpur is a district town on the Narmada in Madhya Pradesh, neither large nor small, the kind of place where a doctor of four decades’ standing becomes the town’s institutional memory as much as its physician. Sanjeev built his practice at Radha Krishna Hospital, Civil Lines, across forty years.
In 1994, a parallel political journey began alongside his medical career. Sunderlal Patwa—then the local Member of Parliament and a Union Cabinet Minister in the government led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee—introduced him to Vajpayee. Sanjeev soon joined Bharatiya Janata Party, went on to serve as State Convener of its Doctors’ Cell, and campaigned with energy and conviction. For nearly two decades, medicine and politics moved forward in parallel, each shaping his public life in distinct ways.
Then the parallel lines diverged. From 2015, he grew disillusioned. He joined सपाक्स पार्टी (Samanya, Pichhda, Alpsankhyak Kalyan Samaj Party), a party founded on 3 October 2018, aimed at resisting what he saw as petty politics in the state. In 2019, at Kamal Nath and Digvijay Singh’s behest, he moved to the Congress, campaigning for farmer’s rights. The state assembly elections delivered a different outcome. Sanjeev took it with equanimity. “I’ve always found myself on the losing side,” he remarked, with the wry precision of a man who has considered this carefully and found it does not particularly trouble him, “regardless of the political party I’ve been a part of.”
Away from contested outcomes, his devotion to the Narmada is a different matter altogether. He has walked its banks repeatedly — in February 2017, he and his wife Swati completed the Parikrama of Maa Narmada, a 21-day journey. Four years later, they chose a vehicle to do the same. Swati, a Professor of English at Government College, Narsinghpur, and a YouTuber, has documented the experience across more than 15 videos.
The House Continues
Swati is a Professor of English who writes with equal ease and depth in Hindi. She has authored three Hindi books—Meri Narmada Parikrama: Anubhav se Anubhuti, Vaidehi Vidroh, and Chuppiyon ki Goonj—each reflecting a distinct literary voice, from reflective travel writing to evocative, socially engaged prose. Her work carries a quiet intensity, drawing readers into lived experience and inner landscapes.
All three titles are now available on major online platforms, including Amazon and Flipkart.
Sanjeev’s son Abhishek — MBBS from Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Sawangi, MD from Kasturba Medical College, Manipal — now runs a 40-bed cardiology hospital in Narsinghpur. His daughter-in-law, Dr. Iti Chandorkar, is a laparoscopic surgeon. The ancestral house continues to practise medicine. His two grandchildren Aahan and Advik keep him busy, and young.
With the fourth generation installed, Sanjeev has stepped back from the daily pace of a forty-year practice, though he has not stepped out of it. He remains the physician Narsinghpur calls when it wants experience rather than technology, judgement rather than a protocol.
His batchmates describe a specific quality: the deep, measured voice; the twinkle; the wry observation delivered at exactly the right moment. He does not suffer fools, they say — but he makes even the observation of folly sound almost kind. In a century-old house in a Madhya Pradesh district town, the fourth generation of Chandorkar doctors is now seeing patients. Sanjeev watches, practises alongside them, and keeps his own counsel.