Somnath Chatterjee was born in Assam's Tezpur in He was educated at Presidency College in Kolkata and at Jesus College in Cambridge. He practiced law for 18 years before he took a formal plunge into politics - in 1971 , he contested the general elections for the first time, just three years after becoming a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal. In Chatterjee won the Best Parliamentarian award and eight years later, in 2004 , was unanimously elected to the Lok Sabha Speaker's post under the Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance government. He died on 13 August 2018 at Kolkata.