[3] He was born to a middle-class family in Kolkata, India, his father Satindra Nath being an engineer in the Indian Railways.
[1] Although he specialized in human genetics, he took lessons in statistics from Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, founder of the ISI.
He began his career as a Professor at the Institute of Indian Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany from 1953 to 1957.
With his work the theme of agrarian social structure and change was to re-appear in Indian Sociology only after a gap of nearly two decades in the late 1960s and 1970s.
[9] His research interests included genetics, studies in classification of families, rural society, historical sociology, problems of acculturation[10] and Social Indicators Research[7] besides which he contributed over subjects like family, caste and class, agrarian relations in West Bengal, nationalism in Bangladesh, urbanization and social change and colonial exploitation by the East India Company and in Uganda, and also contributed towards designing of National Sample Surveys.