Adhar Kumar Chatterji Biography 
Adhar Kumar Chatterji was the first Indian officer of the navy to hold the rank of full Admiral. He served as the Chief of the Naval Staff of the Indian Navy since 1966 for a term of 5 years. He was one of the first cadet-entry officers to join the Royal Indian Army. Chatterji retired from the Indian Navy on February 28, 1970 and spent his last years in Delhi. He also served as an instructor of several crash courses of Indian Navy.
Adhar Kumar Chatterji was born in 1914 in Bengal. He graduated from the Presidency College, Kolkata in the year 1933. Same year when he saw a notice on the notice board of the college about the relaxation of entry criteria for the Royal Indian Navy, he applied for the entrance exams of Indian Navy, where he became the topper. He joined Royal Indian Navy in 1933 in the British India, thus becoming one of the earliest Indians to become a cadet-entry officer. He was trained at TS Dufferin, and later sent to UK. He was commissioned into the Royal Indian Navy as a sub-lieutenant on 1 September 1935. He got promoted as lieutenant three years later.
He was qualified as an anti-submarine specialist in UK in 1940. He served as a member of Royal Navy during World War Second. He was on board in Royal Navy and Royal Indian Navy ships in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean zones. After Indian Independence, he returned from UK and was appointed Director of Naval Planning at Naval Headquarters in New Delhi. He rose to the positions one by one and fibally became the first Indian Chief of the Naval Staff (CNS) in the rank of Admiral in 1967 and retired from service in 1970. He passed away on August 6, 2001 at Delhi.
Published: N/A
Updated: January 18, 2016
