Background
He was born in Mymensingh District (currently in Bangladesh) in 1926. He was the eldest son of Maharaja Bhupendra Chandra Sinha, the Maharaja of Susang, who was a well known artist and who had studied in Presidency College, Calcutta. Sinha's mother belonged to the zamindari family of Sithlai in Pabna district. Sinha's youngest sister is Purba Dam, the eminent exponent of Rabindrasangeet. He was married to Dr. Purnima Sinha, a physicist, author and music scholar, who was the daughter of the eminent legal scholar and Bengali novelist, Dr. Nares Chandra Sen-Gupta.
Susang was a zamindari which traces its origins to the reign of Emperor Jahangir. In the British period, it was ranked third in protocol in the Government House of Calcutta after Coochbehar, a princely state and Burdwan, the premier zamindari of Bengal. The Maharajas of Susang, a hill estate, were the most influential zamindars of Mymensingh. The other major zamindari family of the same district were the Maharajas of Muktagacha, who in spite of being the richest zamindars in the district, considered the Susanga Maharajas to be their chiefs. The Maharaja of Susanga was the chief of all the other zamindars of Mymensingh, which emerged out of the Muktagacha family, the predecessor estate.
A close paternal uncle, Maharajkumar Mani Singh was a well-known communist leader and the author of Jiban Sangram. Moni Singh was an elected head of the CP in East Pakistan. In his youth Sinha followed in the footsteps of this paternal uncle. Sinha's maternal uncle was Kumar Jyotirindra Moitra, an eminent exponent of Rabindrasangeet, who was a son of thezamindar of Sithlai. Moitra, who was popularly called Botukda, was a lifelong member of the CPI and wrote the school song for Patha Bhavan, a school founded in Calcutta in the 1960s.
Even though Sinha was brought up and worked in Calcutta for most part of his life, he spent several years, especially the last few years in Santiniketan, where his parents owned a house from the beginning of the twentieth century. The Sinhas of Susanga can be considered to be one of the founding families of Santiniketan.
Read more about this topic: Surajit Chandra Sinha
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