He was educated at Chigwell School,[1] and later at St John's College, Cambridge, where he read classics and geography, graduating in 1940 with an ordinary degree.
[2][3] He learnt Urdu while serving in India on attachment to the Indian Army during World War II, achieving "considerable fluency at the level of everyday communication with my sepoys.
[4] Although he remained at SOAS for the rest of his career, he continued to lecture and conduct research at universities in both India and Pakistan.
He wrote articles and essays in Urdu and English, and attended literary seminars and workshops on the subject of his specialization.
"[4] The historian Eric Hobsbawm, a fellow communist who attended Cambridge at the same time as Russell, remembered him as a "working-class classics student of steely bolshevik demeanour" who had been nicknamed 'Georgi' after the then Secretary of the Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov.