Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay was born in 1894 in Muratipur, a small village out hundred miles north of Calcutta . Bandopadhyay attended a local village school, his education would have ended there but for the assistance of a local benefactor whose generosity made it possible for him to attend high school. In 1914 he passed the Matriculation Examination and was admitted to Ripon College , Calcutta , graduating in 1918. He took up teaching as a profession and continued as a teacher for the greater part of his life, except for short intervals as a cattle inspector and a clerk. He died in November 1950 His first publication was a short story which appeared in a Calcutta journal in 1922. From then on he wrote regularly. He has fifty published works to his credit, of which seventeen are novels and twenty are collections of short stories .Pather Panchali. was his greatest work , one which brought him fame. It appeared first serially in the journal Vichitra, but was published in book form in 1929.
Pather Panchali is a vivid, moving and authentic portrayal of the life of a Brahmin household seen through the eyes of the two young children of the family, Opu and his elder sister Durga. Few authors in any literature can rival Bandhopadhyaya's understanding of the child mind. He writes of Opu and Bruga and their friends, at home or out at play with a natural realism unmarred by adult condescension. The social environment is all-embracing: qork and holidays, religious festivals, daily worship and the grim rites of death. The reader senses the reality of family ties, the power of the supernatural in ordinary things, the relations between the castes and between rich and poor. In creating this picture of rural Bengal, Bandopadhyay has introduced us to an area of life which so far has been a closed book to foreign visitors to India, and which scholars know little about. The translation which faithfully reflects the changing moods of the original as well as its many variations of style, is the work of T.W. Clark and Tarapada Mukherji, both teachers of Bengali at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London.
