Among the artists coming to lime light during 1960-s Sakti Burman is somewhat different in his approach towards the world of his art, both in content and form. Innocence and wonder are the words that can aptly be applied to have an idea of his expressions. Rebellion is one of the general trends of the art of the sixties. Most of the artists speak against the wide spread evil that encompasses the social world around them. Their forms are full of turbulence, excitements and fragmentations, mostly expressionist and primitivist in formal orientation. In other sense Shakti Burman is also rebellious.
Probably he believes that evil can be negated by projecting the bounteous light of innocence and beauty. Here, his philosophy is more or less parallel to that of the artists’ like Jamini Roy, Binodbehari Mukherjee, Matisse or Chagall. In his art there is an assimilation of the artistic philosophy of the East and the West. In his personal life he has gradually moved from eastern regions towards the west. He was born in Calcutta in 1935, but spent his early childhood in Bidyakoot, a village of East-Bengal, now in Bangladesh, whose nature and environment, the jubilant greenery and melodious flow of water in rivers have made permanent mark in his consciousness. In Bidyakoot itself he earned the first blow of life. He lost his mother at the age of three or four. The submerged grief of that loss has lingered in his memory throughout his life. From there his family moved to Dibrugarh in Assam in 1943, the year of devastating famine. Completing his schooling there Burman came to Calcutta in 1951 and got admitted in Government School of Art. After completing his diploma in Fine Arts he moved to Paris in 1956 for studies in École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He visited all the art centres of Europe and ultimately settled permanently in Paris, where he married his life partner artist Maite Delteil.