 Kapany was born to a Sikh Khatri family in Moga, Punjab, and studied at Agra University.He served briefly as an Indian Ordnance Factories Service officer, before going to Imperial College London in 1952 to work on a Ph.D. degree in optics, which he obtained in 1955.At Imperial College, Kapany worked with Harold Hopkins on transmission through fibers, achieving good image transmission through a large bundle of optical fibers for the first time in 1953.