Sunkara was born in the United States to parents of
Indian ancestry who had immigrated to the US from
Trinidad and Tobago a year before he was born. His father was a
Telugu migrant from
Andhra Pradesh while his mother's family had migrated to the island in the 19th century as
indentured labourers from
Punjab and
Bihar. Sunkara credits his politicization to his reading as a teenager. From
George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four and
Animal Farm, he developed an interest in
Leon Trotsky, reading
his autobiography and
Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography. He then progressed to the
New Left, including thinkers such as
Lucio Magri,
Ralph Miliband,
Perry Anderson and the journal
New Left Review. Sunkara joined the
Democratic Socialists of America at the age of 17, becoming editor of the DSA youth section's blog
The Activist. He went on to study history at
George Washington University in
Washington, D.C., where he conceived the idea of
Jacobin. After his sophomore year, he missed two semesters due to illness, during which time he read Marxist works. ==Career==