Surendranath Dasgupta was born on October 18, 1885, to a Vaidya family in Kushtia, Bengal (now in Bangladesh), and died on December 18, 1952, in Lucknow, India. Dasgupta received master’s degrees in Sanskrit and philosophy from Sanskrit College in Calcutta. During the early 1920s, he traveled to England, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Cambridge. He was an Indian philosopher noted for his authoritative A History of Indian Philosophy, 5 vol. (1922–55). His other major works include Yoga as Philosophy and Religion (1924) and Indian Idealism (1933). His philosophical system combined elements of Vedic literature, Indian Jainism (particularly mysticism), the British and American new realism schools, and the theory of emergent evolution.