Padma Lakshmi

Padma Parvati Lakshmi was born in Madras (now Chennai), India. Her mother Vijaya is a retired oncology nurse. Her parents divorced when she was two years old.

Lakshmi emigrated to the United States at age four and was raised in New York City before moving to La Puente, California with her mother and stepfather. As a teenager growing up in Los Angeles, she stated that she was bullied and endured racism and anti-Indian sentiment, which caused her to struggle to overcome "internalized self-loathing."

In 1984, when Lakshmi was 14 years old, she was hospitalized for three weeks and eventually diagnosed with Stevens–Johnson syndrome, a rare illness caused by hypersensitivity to an infection or a potentially fatal reaction to certain kinds of medications.

Two days after her discharge from the hospital, she was injured in a car accident in Malibu, California, which left her with a fractured right hip and a shattered right upper arm. The arm injury required surgery, from which she retained a seven-inch scar between her elbow and shoulder.

Lakshmi graduated from William Workman High School in City of Industry, California, in 1988.

In a 2018 essay for The New York Times, Lakshmi revealed that she was raped by her older boyfriend when she was 16, which she did not report. She stated that her decision to keep silent about the rape resulted from her stepfather's relative assaulting her when she was seven years old. After she told her mother and stepfather about his assault, they sent her to live with her grandparents for a year. She wrote, "The lesson was: If you speak up, you will be cast out." She said, "I am speaking now because I want us all to fight so that our daughters never know this fear and shame and our sons know that girls' bodies do not exist for their pleasure and that abuse has grave consequences."