I think they did. And it’s also the case that Trinity had a certain level of standing in the gigantic battles that were going on in Cambridge at that time, which were between Cambridge economics and what they called neoclassical economics, which was old-fashioned economics. I was attracted not only by the fact that Newton and Bacon and many others went there but also by the fact that Maurice Dobb, who was probably the leading Marxist economist, was in Trinity. Piero Sraffa, who was a very close friend of Antonio Gramsci and represented a different type of Marxian thinking, was there. And Dennis Robertson, who was the senior economist there, was very conservative. And they all seemed to get on quite well with one another. And that attracted me.

What were your politics back then?

Left. Left of center, certainly. I was in this odd position. I was influenced by Marxian thinking without becoming a Marxist, ever. I particularly liked a few things. I liked his manuscripts of 1844. I liked “The German Ideology.” I liked “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” from 1875. And also, in terms of sympathy for the poor, I thought the communists had something really important to offer. On the other hand, I was always shocked by the absence of political theory. It is not often recognized that Marx had very little interest in political organization. This whole idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat really makes no sense whatsoever. [Laughs.] And, as John Kenneth Galbraith argued, you need opposition, what he called “countervailing power.” There is no countervailing power in their thinking.

When I was a student in Calcutta—that was where I began—I loved the fact that so much of the student body took interest in the poor and the downtrodden and the untouchables and so on. On the other hand, I was shocked by the fact that they did not seem to regard opposition to be important. Democracy, often called bourgeois democracy—I always thought that was a complete misdiagnosis of what the problem of social organization is.

So I was left, but at the same time I was very skeptical of everything. I read a lot of [Nikolai] Bukharin—and then suddenly being told that Bukharin had been trying to destroy the Soviet Union, and confessed, and American tourists like John Gunther said that he was there and it was quite clear he hadn’t been tortured. I remember telling my classmates, “If you believe that, you will believe anything.” [Bukharin, formerly a close ally of Stalin, was tortured, confessed to espionage and treason, and was executed along with other prominent Bolsheviks in 1938.] When Khrushchev gave his speech at the Twentieth Congress [in which he spoke critically of Stalin], it didn’t come as a surprise to me at all.

So I realized that I would not belong to a full-fledged political tradition. I decided that I had to combine some understandings generated by Marxian analysis with other political and intellectual lines of reasoning. I was very strongly influenced by Adam Smith—his economics as well as his philosophy. And John Stuart Mill. I had to combine all that along with my own interests. Sanskrit was, along with mathematics, my favorite subject. And I knew the Sanskrit classics, including the Lokayata, which is of the materialist school. So I was influenced by a number of things. In many ways, the old Sanskrit studies that I had, along with, for the want of a better word, left or progressive European thought, combined well with me.

Does the turn that India has taken in the past five years make you think differently about the founding of the country, and its constitution, or is that too much hindsight?

I think it is too much hindsight. The Indian constitution was pretty well based on analysis of the Constituent Assembly, which had some of the finest discussion of what the constitution should be. What it overlooked, I think, as a committed secular democracy, is that if there is a political group or party or movement that came to get a huge amount of support, which happened in India with the Hindutva movement, they can manipulate the situation pretty sharply. And here I think the Indian Supreme Court is very slow and divided, and, despite the good it has done, hasn’t been able to be as much of a guardian of pluralism as it could be.

Today, everything is dominated by a hard-nosed, hard-Hindutva thinking. And the President, Prime Minister, the leadership are all Hindu. But if you compare that to a dozen years ago, 2007, let’s say, we had a Muslim President, a Sikh Prime Minister, a Christian leader of the ruling party. The majority of the parliamentarians were Hindu, but they were not trying to impose their way of thinking over everyone. And that’s what’s happened. And now we are suddenly in a position where you can chastise a Muslim for eating beef, which is also very nonclassical. If you go to the very old Sanskrit documents, like the Vedas, there is nothing prohibiting the eating of beef. So there is a decline not only from secularism and democracy in post-independence India but also in the understanding of the heritage even of Hindu India.

We are also overlooking the fact that India was quite important in the eastern world, and Sanskrit was pretty much the lingua franca of the first millennium A.D., because of the influence of Buddhist thinking. For a thousand years, India was a Buddhist country. That is our heritage, too. When we try to revive Nalanda—which is the oldest university in the world, started in the fifth century, to which students came not only from India but from China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia—when we tried to revive that with coöperation with East Asian countries, the government, the Hindu government, made it no longer a prominent Buddhist university, and it was made to look more and more like a Hindu establishment. I am Hindu, too. [Laughs.] I have nothing against Hinduism. In fact, oddly enough, when I was young, Penguin asked my grandfather to write a book on Hinduism. His English was quite limited. So the first book I had to edit and translate was a book on Hinduism. He was always saying what’s gone wrong in Nehru’s India was talk about Hindu-Muslim tolerance, but what was important was joint work rather than tolerance between Hindus and Muslim—that was to be celebrated as part of five hundred years of Indian history.

The importance of multiple identities is something that comes up time and again in your work, I’ve noticed—

Absolutely. It is very central. And, if you think about that, Bangladesh has been, in many ways, more successful than India now. It used to have a life expectancy lower than that of India. Now it is five years longer. Women’s literacy is higher than in India. And, in terms of the kind of narrowness of Hindu thinking, it is not reflected in a similar narrowness of Muslim thinking in Bangladesh. I think multiple identities have done a lot for Bangladesh. It was doing a lot for India, too, until there was a deliberate attempt to undermine it. That had been present earlier. In the nineteen-twenties, there was a strong pro-Hindu movement. Gandhi was shot by an R.S.S. [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Fascist Hindu movement] member, which is the dominant influence on the B.J.P. today. But they were not in office. We didn’t feel threatened because they seemed like a fringe. But that fringe gradually became more dominant until the latest election, and they had a massive victory, a victory partially based on political effectiveness.

Modi doesn’t have the breadth of vision about India—multireligious, multiethnic India. He has been, from his childhood, relating to the R.S.S. and the propaganda of that perspective. On the other hand, as a political leader, he is dynamic and enormously successful. So there was the Modi factor. They also got a massive amount of money. I was quite surprised how the business community, not just two or three that are often quoted as the big donors, they got support from the bulk of the business community. They had more money and gumption at the time of the election than any other party. They won an election with a massive majority, but, again, you have to look at the issues I have written about, even in the context in America. The electoral system has its flaws. That massive majority he had was based on less than forty per cent of the vote.