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Friday, Jul 15, 2005

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An optimistic march through history

Sunil Khilnani

This bracing sweep through Indian history and culture offers a tempered analysis of highly charged disputes surrounding the nature of Hindu traditions, Indian identity, the country's huge social and economic disparities, and its current place in the world.

THE ARGUMENTATIVE INDIAN: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity: Amartya Sen; 432 pp., Allen Lane, Penguin Group U.K., £ 25 (Indian price: Rs.650)

CONTENTION OVER our history, our culture, and our identity has, over the past decade and a half, acquired a new and sometimes disturbing intensity and passion. Everyone, it seems, has a view, a theory, a solution to our predicament. In a truly open society, it is right it should be this way — a democracy needs its bloggers. But our debates also need certain touchstones, and for many Indians committed to sustaining our political heritage of pluralism, the recent writings of Professor Amartya Sen (henceforth Sen) have come to serve just this role.

Sen's own reputation was made within the discipline of economics, that technical and culturally unlocated social science, given to abstract formulations which — all things being equal, as economists like to say — leaves particular human beings out of the picture. It has been made, too, in the West. And yet his preoccupations have always been rooted in specific, India-grounded concerns. His most publicly influential work, a counter-intuitive argument about the causes of famines (he showed that they are not generally the result of a decline in absolute levels in foodstocks, but of a collapse in the buying capacities of the poor), emerged out of his childhood memories of the Great Bengal famine of 1943. Similarly, his sensitivity to taxonomies — how we classify the world, and how classifications can constrain options — is rooted in his Sanskrit education. (His grandfather was Kshiti Mohan Sen, the great scholar of India's religious and popular mystical traditions, the author of the classic Hinduism, which Sen as a young man helped to render into English, and which will shortly be reissued.) Sen has now collected his essays and writings on India's culture wars and identity crises into a handsome volume. The collection is a bracing sweep through aspects of Indian history and culture, and gives a tempered analysis of the highly charged disputes surrounding these subjects — the nature of Hindu traditions, Indian identity, the country's huge social and economic disparities, and its current place in the world.

Sen deploys his philosophical energies to examine questions of identity and choice, gender and inequality, reason and dialogue, all of which arise out of a feel for their daily presence in his own country. Yet the pieces collected here are anything but parochial. Indeed they reveal his capacity to draw out the larger and universalist implications of his Indian concerns — a deftness that has made Sen a remarkably cosmopolitan individual. Former Master of Trinity, Cambridge, holder of not just one but two professorships at Harvard, winner of the Nobel Prize and a staple of the "honorary degree" season: if ever there was a global intellectual, it is Sen. He was educated at Rabindranath Tagore's school, Shantiketan, and thereafter at Cambridge — where he studied with radical thinkers like Joan Robinson, Maurice Dobb, and Piero Sraffa.

In his later career, he engaged with his generation's best philosophical minds — Bernard Williams, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Kenneth Arrow. Yet I think his true distinctiveness becomes clear when seen against the background of two still richer historical traditions, both reaching back to the 18th century, to the Scotland of Adam Smith and the Bengal of Rammohun Roy. These are the traditions of classical political economy, and of social criticism and reform: the call and response of British liberal imperialism and Indian cosmopolitan nationalism.

The aspect of human existence that seems to fascinate Sen most is choice, both at the individual and social levels. Perhaps uniquely among all creatures, humans make reflective choices. How are we enabled to choose? What are the bases of our choices? What impediments stand in the way of making them? Above all, he is interested in the rationality of our choices — both in the sense of what kinds of reasons we give for our choices, and to what extent our individual choices could yield collectively rational outcomes.

While Sen is partial to a dry, removed style, his work conveys a strong sense of intellectual personality. The 16 essays in Sen's new volume, several of them unpublished, express his anxieties as a self-confessed `unreformed secularist' at the choice of a narrow conception of Indian identity by religious nationalists — and at how their efforts to make India a `Hindu' nation-state may affect India's future choices. In fact, India continues to be a constitutionally secular state, with one of the largest Muslim populations the world, and with millions of citizens who are Sikh, Jain, Christians, Animists, and atheists — a fact outsiders are all too wont to forget when they facilely describe India as a `Hindu nation'. This India, one chosen by its founders, is what Sen believes in, and defends.

One group of essays, "Voice and Heterodoxy," shows the range and depth of India's traditions of scepticism, dissent, and irreverent questioning. Recalling this history matters, Sen insists, because it is a living resource for social criticism: voice gives us more choice in techniques for the removal of social harms. Among the harms he is alert to are "the cultivated Western images of Indian historical traditions, which are typically taken to be pontifically serious and uncompromisingly spiritual" — not least because these images continually return to haunt Indian self-conceptions. Thus, the favourite Harvard professor of the BJP is Samuel Huntington — his `clash of civilisations' thesis a regular refrain of Lal Krishna Advani and his colleagues.

Against such views of hermetic and antagonistic cultures, Sen reminds us of India's manifold historical interconnections with the rest of the world — through such creative individuals as Tagore and the filmmaker Satyajit Ray, and through India's centuries-old relationship with China and the West. Sen wants us to notice the strong individuality of a culture such as India's, as well as its openness to other influences and ideas. But his view of India is also critical. His essays take unsparing measure of our social and economic problems: gender inequality, literacy, and poverty — areas where independent India's performance has been decidedly less impressive than its democratic achievements. In what is perhaps a self-conscious leap of hope, Sen asserts his belief in what he calls the "sovereignty of reason," and exemplifies this in his arguments. He puts great faith in public deliberation and reasoning, and when the full flare of his own mind is on display, problems do seem to burn away. Yet the arena of politics is shaped by power (a concept that figures lightly in his work), in ways that can all too often leave reason disarmed. His is an essentially optimistic march through history.

Although Sen is free with his judgments, his writing always keeps to a coolly embattled tone, as well as an unfailing, old-style courtesy. There are a few minor slips in the text (the first woman president of the Congress was Annie Besant, not Sarojini Naidu; the original language of the Ashokan edicts was Magadhi, not Sanskrit), but Sen is otherwise scrupulous with the facts and always fair to the views of those with whom he disagrees. His purpose is to show that India can find in its past history many qualities of reasoning and scepticism that often are denied in favour of exotic, spiritualist images — which, ironically, are usually recycled from the West's own view of India. Yet, in a rebuff to determinisms of either the cultural or historical kind, he points out that even if India's past did not have such reservoirs of dissent, this would not preclude it now from acquiring them. He also subjects to critical scrutiny the thicket of affirmative action policies (known as `Reservations') that have grown since independence. He argues that the choice of such policies, intended to reduce certain inequalities, may in fact cause other kinds — a policy phenomenon he terms "friendly fire."

In short, Sen is a distinguished inheritor of the Indian tradition of public philosophy and reasoning — Roy, Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru — social critics all, cosmopolitans who could hold their own anywhere, each was profoundly rooted in India. Sen's book opens by invoking Krishna Menon, a great arguer and a man of monsoon-like wordage (he holds the record for the longest speech at the UN: nine hours). In the early 1960s, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote asking Menon to identify bright young economists who might be inducted into government. Menon, in his reply, mentioned a "Mr A.K. Sen," a 29-year-old who had just been appointed to a three-year position at Cambridge. Menon considered him "by far the ablest economist." But he advised Nehru that such talents would be wasted if inducted into government as an economic advisor. Had Sen indeed been offered and taken such a position, perhaps India's economy would have been richer, or at least fairer. But the discipline of economics, and more important, the world of public argument, would certainly have been poorer.

(Sunil Khilnani is the author of The Idea of India, and teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C.)

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