Premendra Mitra was an Indian poet, writer and film director in the Bengali language. He was also a practitioner of Bengali science fiction. His critique of humanity led him to believe that for it to survive, human beings had to "forget their differences and be united". Premendra Mitra was born in Varanasi, India where his father Gyanendranath Mitra was an employee of the Indian Railways and because of that he had the opportunity to travel to many places in India. Having lost his mother, who died during his childhood, he was brought up by his grandparents in Uttar Pradesh and spent his later life in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Dhaka. He was a student of South Suburban School (Main) and enrolled for a BA at the Scottish Church College in Calcutta which he left prematurely to study agriculture in Santiniketan with a friend of Rabindranath Tagore, Leonard Elmhirst. Because it did not hold his interest, he returned to education first on an undergraduate course in Dhaka and in 1925 at Asutosh College in Calcutta where he assisted the research of Dinesh Chandra Sen. In particular, his creation of the character of GhanaDa (meaning: 'Elder brother Ghana' in Bengali) won him public recognition.