Tupa Snyder's early life and education was in India. She grew up a child of the remnants of the Raj—the British Empire in India—in the isolated compound of a power plant in Calcutta, thirty years after India's independence. The material of her poetry comes from a strong leaning toward European Romantic Poetry and Philosophy, and an interest in delineating a fragmented, lyric self through metonymy and inversion. Tupa has a lifelong interest in metaphorical writing and thinks of poetry as a dwelling space.

Her love of poetry has led to two career changes, from mathematics to English literature during her BA (University of Poona), and to creative writing as a second MA (Illinois State University). She read for a PhD in creative writing at the University of Exeter until 2007 and is now once again living in her native India.