Nihar Ranjan Choudhury was born in Noakhali, Lamchor village (now in Bangladesh) in 1908. In 1928, he enrolled in the BA course at St. Columbius College, Hazaribag, Kolkata. Soon after, the Non-Cooperation Movement gained momentum, and in 1932, owing to his active involvement, he was imprisoned for six months. His academic journey resumed at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, under the guidance of Professor Nandalal Bose, where he studied between 1932 and 1937. During this period, he studied alongside other known modernists such as Shrimati Renuka, Selima Vikram Ratna (Singhal), Kanai Samanta, and Jaya Appaswami, among others.
After completing his education, Choudhury taught at Kala Bhavana between 1937 and 1939. In 1939, he became associated with the Wardha Teachers’ Training Programme. Later, under the guidance of Nandalal Bose, he joined the Hindustani Talimi Sangh led by Gandhi, where he worked as the chief artist from 1939 to 1940. In 1940, he joined the Shri Gandhi Ashram Polytechnic at Raniban, Faizabad, where he was responsible for art education and research. In 1941, Choudhury was appointed Head of the Arts Department at Delhi Polytechnic (Delhi College of Art), a position he held until 1946.
In 1947, Choudhury became the first Indian artist to be sent to China on a scholarship from the Chinese Government. He received training in ink and wash painting at the reputed Peiping Academy, Beijing, with particular emphasis on the Chinese traditional painting form known as Guo Huar. Later in life he began struggling with mental health issues, which led to an abrupt halt in his artistic production. In 1977, he passed away at the Mankundu Mental Hospital in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, leaving behind a substantial corpus of work. This prematurely concluded practice lends his works a heightened historical value, marking them as rare documents of a critical artistic trajectory.