Lahiri Choudhury was born to Dhirendrakanta and Renuka Debi in 1931 in village of Kalipur in the
Mymensingh district. After the
partition of Bengal his family shifted to
Kolkata. He passed M.A. in
English literature from
Presidency College and completed Ph.D. from the
University of Leeds. He served as a professor of
Rabindra Bharati University. Lahiri Choudhury travelled over seventy years in the forests of
Assam,
Barak Valley,
West Bengal,
Meghalaya,
Arunachal Pradesh and
Orissa as well as
Uttaranchal,
Bandipur and
Periyar. He gathered huge experiences with
elephants and surveyed the status and distribution of elephants, studied man-elephant conflicts and analysed the problems of elephants in India. His books
The Great Indian Elephant Book and
A Trunk Full of Tales: Seventy Years with the Indian Elephant are considered guidebooks on managing elephants. Lahiri Choudhury wrote two
Bengali books
Hatir Boi and
Jiboner Indradhanu. He also researched Architecture of Calcutta. In 1977 he became a member of the
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) specialist group on elephants and of the advisory committee of
Project Elephant under the
Government of India in 2004. Lahiri Choudhury received
Ananda Purashakar in 2007 for
Hatir Boi. Lahiri Choudhury died on 1 March 2019 at the age of 87. ==References==