Jahar Dasgupta spent his childhood in Jamshedpur, where he began drawing elephants, dogs, and trees on the floor at a young age.

At the age of 9, Dasgupta drew the faces of Joseph Stalin and Ma Sarada Devi on a wall.

At Kala Bhavana, he received lessons from mentors such as Nand Lal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij, and Benode Behari Mukherjee.

The period of political turmoil from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, including the rise of the leftist movement in the fold of CPI(ML) and the Bangladesh liberation war of 1971, affected creative persons.

In this early phase, his paintings often revealed reality in its crudest form, such as an acrylic canvas of 1994 titled 'Scrap' which shows clusters of dilapidated human bodies tied together on a crate being pulled up by a crane.

His paintings at that time explored the duality between ideal and real, good and evil, and light and dark.

Sandip Ray, who filmed Himghar in 1996, met Dasgupta and expressed interest in a documentary about the artist.

Dasgupta's recent work includes the 'Jesus Christ' series and a mural on MADHABI daughter of yayati from Mahabharata.

In the 1970s, like many in the art and cultural field in West Bengal, Dasgupta was attracted to leftist ideologies and attached to Gananatya Sangha.