Dr. Govinda Chandra Dev, popularly known as Dr. G.C. Dev, was born on 1 February 1907 in the village Lauta under Biani Bazar Police Station of Pancakhanda in the district of Sylhet. His full name was Govinda Chandra Dev Purokayastha. His father’s name was Iswara Chandra Purokayastha and mother’s name was Sarat Sundari Devi. He was a bachelor in life. Dr. Dev received his primary education in Lauta Boys’ School and secondary education in Pancakhanda Hargovinda High School. He appeared at the Matriculation examination in 1925 and obtained First Division with distinction in Sanskrit and Mathematics. In 1927 he completed his I. A. from Ripon College (Sir Surendranath College) obtaining First Division with distinction in Logic. In 1929 he obtained B.A. Honours in Philosophy from Calcutta Sanskrit College and in 1931 he completed his M.A. degree in Philosophy from Calcutta University obtaining first position in First Class. For his outstanding results, he was awarded ‘Calcutta University Gold Medal’ and ‘Hemachandra Silver Medal’. Immediately after the completion of his M.A., he joined Ripon College as a Lecturer in Logic and Philosophy. During his university life he came to a very close contact with many distinguished philosophers of the subcontinent like Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, Dr. Hiralal Halder, Dr. Krisna Chandra Bhattacarya, Dr. Mahendranath Sarkar and Deviprasad Chattopadhya.
In 1934 he went to the famous Centre of Philosophy in Amalnar of Maharastra to join as a Ph D research scholar. There he studied under the direct guidance of Dr. Krishna Chandra Bhattacarya (popularly known as K C Bhattacharya), a great dialectician of India. In 1944 he was awarded PhD degree from Calcutta University for his thesis titled ‘Reason, Intuition and Reality’.
In 1946 Dr. Dev established Surendranath College in Dinajpur and joined as its founder Principal. In 1953 he joined the Department of Philosophy, University of Dhaka as a Lecturer. Within three years he was appointed as the Provost of Jagannath Hall. In 1962 he was promoted to the position of Reader and was appointed as the Head of the Department of Philosophy. In the same year he was appointed by the East Pakistan Government as a member of the Education Reform Commision and Secretary of East Pakistan Pali and Sanskrit Board. In 1965 he was promoted to the position of Professor of Philosophy of the University of Dhaka.
On the dreadful night of 25 March 1971, he was brutally bayonetted by the Pakistan occupation army and was also hit by their bullets inside his residence in the campus leading him to succumb to death. He was awarded in posthumous the prestigeous Ekushey Padak (1986) and Swadhinata Padak (2008) by the Governmnt of Bangladesh.
In 1966 he went to Wilkis Baaree of Pensylvania, USA as a Visiting Fulbright Scholar. Again, in 1970 he went there as a Fulbright Professor. His major works include: Idealism and Progress(1958), Idealism : A New Defence and New Application , Aspirations of the Common Man (1963), Swami Vivekananda and the Future of Man (1963), Amar Jivan Darshan (My Philosophy of Life) (1965), Tattvavidya Saar (Essence of Philosophy) (1966), Buddha the Humanist, The Parables of the East (1984) and My American Experience (1993).