Pratapaditya Pal was born on September 5, 1935 in a place called Sylhet, which is now in Bangladesh. But at that time it was part of India. His father, Gopesh Chandra Pal, with them, left Sylhet for Calcutta in 1938. He has been living in Calcutta which then became his hometown more or less. His father was a businessman mainly and he was very active in the Indian independence movement. His mother’s only brother used to live in Darjeeling so in 1949 he was taken out of Shillong and sent to a Jesuit school in Darjeeling, Saint Joseph’s College, more commonly known as North Point.

Pratapaditya Pal is an Indian scholar of Southeast Asian and Himalayan art and culture, specializing particularly in the history of art of India, Nepal and Tibet. He has served as a curator of South Asian art at several prominent US museums including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has organized more than 22 major exhibitions and helped build the museums’ collection . He has also written over 60 books and catalogs, and over 250 articles on the subject, taught at several universities, and served as the editor of the Indian art magazine, Marg. In 2009 he was awarded Padma Shri by the Government of India for his contributions to the study of Indian art.

In 1967 Pal was appointed the curator of the Indian art collection at Boston Museum, a position that had previously been held by Ananda Coomaraswamy. In 1969, he moved to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which was then beginning to develop its own collection of Indian art. Pal joined as the head of department of Indian and Islamic art, and subsequently served as the museum’s acting director (1979–80) and as the senior curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art from 1981. Los Angeles Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic described his legacy as building the museum’s collection from “a handful of items to about 4,000 pieces, giving LACMA one of the nation’s preeminent holdings of Indian and Southeast Asian art.”

In 1995, Pal was appointed visiting curator of Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian Art at The Art Institute of Chicago. He moved to Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California in 2003. During the mid-1970s Pal had advised Norton Simon on acquiring Asian art for that museum.