Roy Bhaskar (1944-2014) had an Indian father and an English mother who had largely grown up in South Africa. It was assumed that Roy would follow in the footsteps of his father and become a doctor. However, he resisted his family's expectations and managed to gain a scholarship to study at Balliol College, Oxford. There, in 1966, he obtained a first-class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. His PhD thesis, supervised by Rom Harré, eventually became the well-received and highly influential book "A Realist Theory of Science", published in 1975.

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Early on, Roy was strongly influenced by indigenous movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. When he married Hilary Wainwright (1949-), they travelled to the Portuguese territories of Mozambique and Angola as guests of the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola [Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola]). Bhaskar joined the Labour Party for a short period. He knew Tony Benn, a prominent member of the Labour Party, and most of his friends were Bennites. Bhaskar ascribed his general interest in questions of social justice to, amongst other things, his severe experience of racism in the English school system.

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Bhaskar lectured at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Sussex. He was Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Centre for Peace Studies at the University of Tromsø, Norway, and Guest Professor in Philosophy and Social Science, Department of Caring Sciences, Örebro University, Sweden. From 2007, Bhaskar was employed at the Institute of Education in London as World Scholar.

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