He is of biethnic heritage, classed as Sri Lankan Tamil due to paternal descent.
[1] Raghavan joined the University of Kent's School of Political and International Relations in 2005 on a scholarship from the James Madison Trust and received a Master of Arts degree after producing a dissertation on federalism in Sri Lanka.
[2][3] In 2012 he received a doctorate politics and government from the University of Kent after producing a thesis titled Multimational Federaiism and Sinhala Buddhism.
[3][5] Raghavan was a visiting professor at Saint Paul University, research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies and a visiting research scholar at the University of Colombo's Department of History.
[7] Raghavan was appointed adviser to President Maithripala Sirisena and director of the Presidential Media Unit in November 2018.