“In the generation (or two generations) before mine, the leading Indian historians (judged in terms of scholarly books and papers written and read) included Irfan Habib, R. S. Sharma, Ranajit Guha, Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Amalendu Guha, Sumit Sarkar, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, all of whom were influenced to a lesser or greater degree by Marxism; and Ashin Dasgupta, Dharma Kumar, Parthasarathy Gupta, Amales Tripathi, Rajat Kanta Rai, Mushirul Hasan, and Tapan Roychowdhury, all of whom were liberals. The leading political scientists included the liberals Rajni Kothari, Basheeruddin Ahmed and Ramashray Ray; the Marxists Javed Alam and Partha Chatterjee; and Ashis Nandy, an admirer of Tagore and Gandhi who like them stoutly resists being classified in conventional terms. The pre-eminent sociologists of that generation were M. N. Srinivas and André Béteille, both of whom would own the label ‘liberal’; and T. N. Madan, who while working on classically conservative themes such as family, kinship and religion would most likely see himself as a liberal too. Even the best-known or most influential economists of the 1960s and 1970 tended to be on the left of the spectrum, as the names of K. N. Raj, Amartya Sen, V. M. Dandekar, Amit Bhaduri, Krishna Bharadwaj, Pranab Bardhan, Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik, and Ashok Rudra (among others) signify.”