Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta on 11 July 1956 in a Bengali Hindu family, to Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh, a retired officer of the pre-independence Indian Army, and was educated at The Doon School; St. Stephens College, Delhi, Delhi University, India; the Delhi School of Economics and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was awarded a D. Phil. in social anthropology under the supervision of Peter Lienhardt. His first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi.