Born in Bengal, Roy was the younger son of a middle-class landowning family At the age of sixteen his parents sent him to study at the Government School of Art, Calcutta, where he learned to draw classical nudes and to paint in oil, according to the prevailing academic tradition of Alma-Tadema and Lord Leighton. Roy soon realized, however, that without sharing the social consciousness or the Western tradition, he could do no more than attain a certain technical facility. True creativity and the freedom to experiment could only come from drawing on his native cultural tradition. It was this realization that resulted in his unique personal idiom, with its strong outline and flat areas of bold colour. In 1955, Roy was awarded the Padma Bhusan.