ABSTRACT
I was about fourteen years old in 1947 when India became independent. The communal riots that followed, particularly the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, were widely blamed on “religious elements.” The wind of socialism blew hard. Some of my friends made a study circle to read the book on dialectical materialism by Marx and Engels, which had been recently translated into Hindi under the title Dwandwa-aatmak-Bhautik-vaad by Rahul Saankratayan, an Indian ambassador in Moscow. I soon learned that “religion is the opium of mankind.” Thus, even though born into a religious family, by the age of sixteen I had developed an atheistic outlook.
