 Sankaran Nair was born on 20 December 1919 at Ottapalam, in Palakkad district of the south Indian state of Kerala and did his graduate studies at Loyola College, Chennai.Subsequently, he pursued studies in Law but abandoned it midway when he was inducted into the Indian Imperial Police.After the Indian independence, he continued at the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and, in 1959, went to Ghana to successfully complete the IB assignment of establishing Ghana Intelligence Agency, returning to India after two years.