Ashis Gupta was born and raised in India. An outstanding pupil throughout, he did his schooling in Patna, Bihar, before moving to Calcutta, West Bengal, where he studied English literature at the Presidency College and St. Xavier’s College, University of Calcutta. He earned his Bachelor of Arts with honors in English literature from the same university in 1960 and then moved to the United States to pursue a master’s in creative writing at Boston University where he completed his PhD in English literature in 1976 on “The Ambiguities of Moral Experience in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.” Thereafter, Gupta spent 2 years in Harvard University’s Post-Doctoral Individual Studies Program at the Graduate School of Business Administration. He studied social psychology, communication, and then linguistics at MIT.