India, Nov. 14 -- There are two DD Kosambis in modern Indian history. Dharmanand Damodar Kosambi, the Buddhist scholar who taught himself Pali and Sanskrit and became the first Indian to hold an academic position at Harvard. And his more famous - and almost unclassifiable - son, Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi: the mathematician, historian, numismatist, Sanskritist and Marxist thinker whose scholarship traversed disciplines with a casual ease.

In his biography of the son, DD Kosambi: One Life, Many Worlds, the distinguished scholar and physicist Ram Ramaswamy begins with the father's life and travels, tracing the inheritance that shaped the younger Kosambi.

The father took his son with him to America, a land that exposed the young boy to the...