(20 January 1921, Kolkata – 26 February 2008, Shantiniketan)

Professor Sibnarayan Ray was a very close associate of M.N. Roy from 1946 to 1954, and co-editor of the Radical Humanist weekly with Ellen Roy from 1954-60.  He edited the first four volumes of the Selected Works of M.N. Roy published by Oxford University Press from 1987 -1997. Chairman  of  the Department of the Indian Studies at the University of Melbourne (1963-81), he was also Professor at the University of Bombay  and California (Santa Barbara), Research Fellow at the Universities of London and Chicago, Director of International Seminar on the Role of the Intelligentsia in Asian and African Societies at the University of Mexico, Chairman of the first International Conference on Modernization in Asia at the Korea University, Seoul, presenter of the Keynote Address at the World Congress of Humanists at the University of Oslo, Director of Rabindra Bhavan (Archives and Museum), Visva Bharti University, Santiniketan, Chairman, Raja Rammohan Roy Library Foundation, and Founder-editor of Jijnasa, a Bengali quarterly of Ideas and Inquiry.  He has been a visiting lecturer at various universities, among them Oxford, Cambridge and London, Heidelberg Cologne, Humboldt (Berlin) and Frankfurt, Wisconsin, Michigan, Columbia and South Carolina, Malaysia, Dhaka, Rajshahi and Chittagong.  He has published and edited over fifty books in English and Bengali, and many of his writings have been translated and published in French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Hindi, Marathi and Telugu.  He was honoured with an Emeritus Fellowship in Literature and was a Senior Research Fellow of the Indian Council of Historical Research.  He was acclaimed by the late Bertrand Russell as an important thinker of our time, and was a member of the Board of Directors of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, Utrecht, from 1962 to 1968.