After early education at Highbury School, he attended Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied English Literature under F. R. Leavis.
It was at this time that he began to translate the works of Emile Durkheim and he also conducted fieldwork in Gujarat, as well as among the Indian diaspora in East Africa and London.
Sussex provided a more relaxed social environment and was at the time a centre of challenging intellectual ideas.
In particular, The Guardian notes, "... forgoing his long and intense association with Roman Catholicism, he looked to a deeper involvement in the mystery of human consciousness through his investigations of Buddhism".
[1] He had been awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1974.