[1][2][3][4][5] Son of Dwijendralal Ray (1863–1913), the Bengali poet, playwright, and composer, Roy and his younger sister Maya lost their mother Surabala Devi in 1903.

On his paternal grandmother's side, the family descended from Vaishnava ascetic Advaita Acharya, one of the apostles of the medieval Bengali saint Shri Chaitanya.

His passion for music stopped him from securing the highest marks in the Matriculation examination: he stood the twenty-first and, with a scholarship, joined the Presidency College of Kolkata.

Inviting Roy through the International Peace and Freedom Society, Romain Rolland arranged for him a seminar on Indian classical music in Lugano, and had his lectures translated and published in French.

From Vienna, invited by president Masaryk, Roy visited Prague, on his way to Budapest, Rome, Florence and Naples, to discover the heart of the tradition of European music.

The ancient modes like Ionian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian, and Phrygian, reminded him, respectively, of the Indian that or melakarta ("parent scales") like Bilâval, Iman, Khamâj, Kâfi, Asâvari, and Bhaïravi.

On listening to an old hymn to the goddess Kali sung by Roy, Rolland mentions: "It is simply captivating, an overflow of passion that implores, laments, reaches fever pitch, subsides, from soprano to bass notes (...) and begins again, with doubled and exacting ecstasy..." While in Europe, Roy realised "the greatness and the deficiency" of Indian classical music as practiced by his contemporaries.

Instead of mediocre word - supports to elaborate melodic and rhythmic compositions, Roy was convinced that the modern Indian languages, the daughters of Sanskrit, could provide more adequate lyrics for the classical models (as demonstrated by composers like his own father or Tagore, among others).

Back in India, he joined Bhatkhande and, following the latter's methodology, he set to travelling widely, collecting and publishing serial notes on raga-variants from regional masters, with notations of specific compositions.

Like Bhatkhande and his pupil Ratanjankar, Roy wrote and demonstrated how Indian classical music could be taught on a purely academic basis, with a syllabus, somewhat demystifying the shrouded master-to-disciple secrecy.

Composing songs in Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindi and English, keeping intact some popular or classical melodies even from Russian, German, Italian or French music, he had the rare facility of passing from one language to another, while interpreting them.

As a poet, instead of following the melodic lyrical style developed by Tagore, Roy followed the harmonic structure created by Michael Madhusudan Dutta and brought up to-date by his father Dwijendralal Ray.