His father Sunit Kumar Banerjee did his PhD on Elizabethan lyrics under Sir H. J. C. Grierson, the discoverer of the metaphysical poets, at University of Edinburgh in the 1930s, and subsequently became a professor of English literature.
Bandyopadhyay entered college in 1955, graduated from the University of Calcutta in 1961, and subsequently earned a Master of Arts degree in English literature.
For instance, in 1986, he opines that in Vijay Tendulkar's play Ghashiram Kotwal, 'power is defined 'horizontally' (in the sense in which Maurice Duverger uses it in his The Idea of Politics, London, 1966)'.
In his 2003 introduction to a collection of Tendulkar's plays (including Ghashiram Kotwal'), however, he sees them evolving around the hub of 'strong ethical concern exploring and critiquing the relations of power in all their complex ramifications' where power is 'what Michel Foucault defines as 'the relationship in which one wishes to direct the behaviour of another'.
The emblemized angry young man of Kolkata could relate to his rural other only on the platform of Marxian theory; rest of the commonality is mere wrath.
The urban youth is portrayed not as directly participating in revolutionary activities: he is either hiding, or attacked or living a dual-life.