Surendranath Dasgupta was born to a Vaidya family in Kushtia, Bengal (now in Bangladesh), on Sunday, 18 October 1885, corresponding to Dashami Shukla (i.e., the tenth day) of the month of Āśvin[1][2] and coinciding with the festivals of Dussehra and Durga Visarjan.

Prof. Dasgupta married Himani Devi, the younger sister of Himanshu Rai, India's pioneer film director and founder of the Bombay Talkies movie studios.

One of his granddaughters (daughter of Chitrita Devi) Prof. Lali Chatterjee, is a noted astro physicist based in United States.

Maharaja Sir Manindra Chandra Nandy now urged him to go to Europe to study European philosophy at its sources, and generously bore all the expenses of his research tour (1920–22).

In 1935, 1936 and 1939 he was invited as visiting professor to Rome, Milan, Breslau, Königsberg, Berlin, Bonn, Cologne, Zurich, Paris, Warsaw and England.

In the same way he challenged Louis de La Vallée-Poussin, the great Buddhist scholar, before a little assembly presided over by J. M. E. McTaggart.

When Lord Ronaldshay, the Governor of Bengal, came to visit Chittagong College, he had a long talk with Professor Dasgupta in his classroom, and was so much impressed by it that he expressed the desire that the first volume of the History of Indian Philosophy might be dedicated to him.

But as he went on collecting materials from all parts of India, a huge mass of published and unpublished texts came to light, and the plan of the work enlarged more and more as he tried to utilise them.

This was the first and only attempt to write out in a systematic manner a history of Indian thought directly from the original sources in Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit.

In a work of the fourteenth century A.D., the Sarva-darsana-samgraha of Madhavacarya, we find a minor attempt to give a survey of the different philosophical schools of India.

In the present series the author traced, in a historical and critical manner, the development of Indian thought in its different branches from various sources, a considerable portion of which lies in unpublished manuscripts.

He spared no pains and underwent a tremendous amount of drudgery in order to unearth the sacred, buried treasures of Indian thought.

In 1942 he retired from Sanskrit College and was appointed King George V Professor of Mental and Moral Science in the University of Calcutta.

In 1945 he retired from the Calcutta University and was offered the Professorship of Sanskrit at Edinburgh which had fallen vacant after the death of Professor Keith.

In 1951, through friendly help given by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, he started writing the fifth and final volume of the History of Indian Philosophy.