Ayesha Jalal was born in Lahore in Pakistan to Hamid Jalal, a senior Pakistani civil servant, and is the grandniece of the renowned Urdu fiction writer Saadat Hasan Manto.
She obtained her BA, majoring in History and Political Science, from Wellesley College, USA, and her doctorate in history from Trinity College at University of Cambridge, where she wrote her Ph.D. dissertation: 'Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan'.