The present form and structure of Samatat Sanstha (1972), evolved over time, through different phases from a modest origin. The idea of Samatat (1969) germinated in the minds of two friends, Arghya Kusum Dattagupta and Partha Sarathy Bandyopadhyay, who were joined by five others (Bhaskar Basu, Biswanath Chakraborty, Dipankar Lahiri, Pranab Kumar Ghosh and Sipra Dattagupta) soon enough. The organization owes its name, ‘Samatat’, to Bhaskar Basu, one of the seven founding members. The name happily carries a nuance of meaning. Samatat is the ancient name of a region of Bengal; at the same time, Sama (=common) + Tat (=plateau or shore) carries the promise of a common meeting ground for people belonging to different disciplines and/or ideological orientations. This reflected the yearning of Dattagupta and Bandyopadhyay (who were not pursuing any literary careers for themselves) to provide a lasting forum where people could meet across the divides of respective specializations and social-cultural backgrounds. Thus, with the founding members contributing a total of Rs. 700 to form a meagre initial monetary capital thus with an abundance of utopian zeal, was born a new interdisciplinary magazine of ideas and action.