Amartya Sen Archives - Lokmarg

Home In The World, Homeless In India

By Kunal Bose 20th May 2023

A senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) official who is also a member of the Lok Sabha from West Bengal remains allergic to all the accolades, including the Nobel in economics, that have come in the way of Professor Amartya Sen for his path breaking work on economics and philosophy and his championing the cause of society’s weaker sections. But this worthy Dilip Ghosh who like many other politicians in the country will not lay any claim to academics but shows his rawness whenever he talks is always looking for an opportunity to run down the global icon in the crudest fashion possible. All his charges against Sen including Sen’s running away from the country, his “theories never helped the country or West Bengal,” a “land grabber” at Santiniketan and his “multiple marriages” go well beyond human decency.

The worlds of Sen and Ghosh will never meet and the latter must not ever have read anything on economics or philosophy or the more recently published memoir Home in the World by Sen. Then why should Ghosh be behaving this unseemly way? Or for that matter why is the vice chancellor of Visva-Bharati, a central university remains unrelenting in first raking up the baseless issue of Sen remaining in unauthorised occupation of 0.13 acres over the 1.25 acres that the university originally gave on lease to his late father Professor Ashutosh Sen and then harassing him in every possible way, including an eviction notice and moves to recover “unauthorisedly occupied land?”

The answer to why all this harassment is happening instead of finding an amicable solution to the land issue, if there really is one, is not difficult to find. Sen has been critical of the policies pursued by the BJP government since it came to power in 2014. Many others too have been critical of the BJP administration to the extent of saying that there has been abridgement of democracy in many ways.

But anything coming from Sen is widely read and discussed both within and outside the country. Much to the concern of New Delhi, the major world newspapers from New York Times to Financial Times to Le Monde will seek interviews with Sen to know what he thinks of the goings on in India. And that is the reason why the powers that be in New Delhi are so sensitive about views expressed by Sen, who is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard.

Earlier this year, in an interview with Karan Thapar for The Wire, Sen opened up on major national concerns like never before. Here is an encapsulation of what he said. He described the Modi government as one of the “most appalling in the world.” The government’s treatment of the Muslims and the fact that it has no Muslim representation in either house of Parliament are “unacceptably barbaric” to the Professor. The way Muslims are treated is not only unjust and wrong… but it makes India’s culture limited.” India has always been a multi-ethnic country, but the Modi government’s “communitarian and majoritarian policies amount to reduction of India.”

The multiple pluralistic nature of the country is seriously compromised if only the Hindus are counted as Indians. All such things that Sen says leave the government in fits of anger and fury, which is using people like the vice chancellor and Ghosh and also the outfits of BJP such as its IT cell to behave with him nastily. BJP alone might have won 303 seats in 2019 parliamentary election and 353 seats with its allies in NDA. But since the party’s vote share was 37.36%, Sen would categorically maintain that it doesn’t have the support of majority of Indians.

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Modi demonetised high-value notes in November 2016 thinking that this would mark the end of unofficial transactions and therefore, generation of black money. To Sen, however, “demonetisation was a despotic action that has struck at the root of the economy based on trust. It undermines notes, it undermines bank accounts, it undermines the entire economy of trust. That is the sense in which it is despotic.” His rebuttal of many other policies of the Modi government, specially the moves that hurt the minorities is long. No wonder there is no love lost between Sen and Modi.

Democracy demands tolerance of what critics may have to say. Going further such opinions if read with consideration they deserve gives a chance to the government for course correction. Unfortunately what we are seeing instead is ministers and BJP party officials harassing the likes of Sen in every possible way. Seeing the agonising times Sen is having over a piece of land Prabhat Patnaik, Professor Emeritus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, is constrained to recall the response of President Charles de Gaulle when he was asked why no action was taken against the famous existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre for his seemingly act of treason asking soldiers of the French Foreign Legion fighting against Algerian war of Independence to abandon the campaign. de Gaulle in his characteristic haut en couleur fashion said “one does not arrest Voltaire.”

It is not that Voltaire or Sartre will get off scot free for commitment of any crime. But at the same time democracy demands that such people should have the freedom to air views even if these cause great amount of discomfort to the powers that be.

Compared to that benevolent approach of de Gaulle to critics of the kind of Sartre, what is seen in India is painful. Patnaik is giving expression to the hurt sentiment of liberal Indians as he writes: “Amartya Sen is an iconic intellectual of this country, and he deserves the nation’s respect not only for his outstanding intellectual work but also for his steadfast commitment to the values upon which modern India is founded, values that have never been officially repudiated by any regime, no matter how much the right-wing may dislike them. And yet, he is being hounded in the most unseemly manner by Visva-Bharati, an institution in whose establishment and growth his family had played a significant role.” One doesn’t have to go beyond reading the chapter ‘The Company of Grandparents’ in Sen memoir to know how determined was Rabindranath Tagore to get Amartya’s grandfather Kshiti Mohan Sen with outstanding classical scholarship, liberal ideas and deep involvement in the wellbeing of society’s poorest people to join him at Santiniketan to “to help Tagore with his work on village reform and rural reconstruction, in addition to contributing to education.”

But salaries at Tagore’s Santiniketan then “were very low” and Kshiti Mohan had a large family to support and therefore, he was reluctant to join the poet for a long time. In great need of an “ally,” which he discovered in Kshiti Moha, Tagore, however, was never “ready to abandon hope.” Sen writes: “Ultimately, Tagore did persuade Kshiti Mohan to come to Santiniketan, where he spent more than fifty contended and productive years – being both influenced by Tagore’s vision and influencing the poet’s own ideas. They also became close friends.” Sen on his part, at the insistence of his mother Amita in particular, spent “ten engaging years at Tagore’s school in Santiniketan.”

Unarguably, Sen remains the most distinguished alumnus of the school and returns to the place where the family has a house called Pratichi (in the possession of the family since 1943) more than once a year from wherever he may be. In a recent tweet the Nobel Prize Committee says: “Amartya Sen’s bicycle played a key role in his research on the differences in baby boys and girls. After his assistant got bit by the children when weighing them, Sen decided to bicycle through the countryside of West Bengal, weighing the children himself.” What is not to be forgotten is the dignity that Sen lends to Santiniketan. Unfortunately, Visva-Bharati of which the Chancellor is the prime minister has its own agenda.

Amartya Sen – A Life Without Walls

By Kunal Bose 9th March 2023

What is common between Nadin Gordimer and philosopher economist Amartya Sen, the first the winner of Nobel for a highly rich body of fiction based on apartheid abuses and repression in South Africa, more violently so following accession to power of Africanner nationalists and the second for his path-breaking contributions to welfare economics? The answer lies in the question itself. Both Gardimer and Sen delved deep into murderous violence and injustices that have riven society across the world based on divisions of people on grounds of race, religion and class.

Gordimer died at the age of 90 in July 2004, three years after receiving the Nobel. Sen’s memoir Home in the World (till 1963 coinciding with his return to India after years in England and the US for study and subsequently teaching) was first published in 2021 to rave reviews in the world Press and otherwise universal acclamations. Publisher Allen Lane, part of the Penguin Random House group, appropriately decided to use what Gordimer said in the past about the philosopher economist in the dust jacket of Home in the World. She wrote: “With his masterly prose, ease of erudition and ironic humour, Sen is one of the few great world intellectuals on whom we may rely to make sense out of our existential confusion.”

Who will believe unless Sen himself would make the admission in the memoir how much he preferred mastering Sanskrit and Bengali at the cost of the language of the Raj when he attended school first at St Gregory’s and then at Santiniketan (abode of peace in English) where Rabindranath Tagore in 1901 set up an academic entity called Visva Bharati. Sen was at the Santiniketan school for ten years from 1941 to 1951 following which he joined Presidency College in Calcutta.

Sen writes: “My great loves at Santiniketan were mathematics and Sanskrit. In the last two years at the school, I specialised in science… It is not rare to be fascinated by mathematics, but being a fan of Sanskrit at school was more unusual. I was very absorbed in the intricacies of that language, and for many years Sanskrit was close to being my second language after Bengali, partly because my progress in English was very slow. At St Gregory’s in Dhaka I had resisted education in general, but English in particular, and when I moved to Santiniketan the medium of instruction was very firmly Bengali. The language of the Raj somehow passed me by – at least for many years.” Whatever that was decades ago, Sen is now hailed as the English-speaking world’s pre-eminent public intellectual for his oeuvre besides economics on social sciences and philosophy, his quality of prose, historical sense and a strong sense of equity.

In many cases what shape life will take depends on the influence of parents and grandparents. Take Nadine. Her mother Isidore Gordimer aghast at racial discrimination and indescribable economic exploitation of the black community by the South African apartheid regime ran a crèche for the black children. While this activism of Isidore invited the wrath of the government in the form of police raiding the family home and seizing papers and diaries, such experiences in her adolescence made of Nadine an anti-apartheid activist. Her political activism went to the extent of helping Nelson Mandela prepare his celebrated speech ‘I am prepared to die.’ The government came down hard on her by banning her books. But Nadine was not the kind to cave in to pressure.

Home in the World tells us the kind of profound impact the great Sanskrit scholar Kshiti Mohan Sen had on his grandson Amartya when the latter joined the ‘school without walls’ at Santiniketan. Kshiti Mohan’s lifelong passion was to explore India’s wealth of folk literature and also the long history of interactions between Hindu and Muslim traditions. Amartya writes: “Kshiti Mohan’s understanding that… Hinduism had been significantly enriched by the influence of Muslim culture and thought… found a strong expression in his English book on Hinduism.” This heterodox thesis challenges the sectarian thoughts of a large number of Hindu theorists. There were days when Amartya would be up at 4 a.m. like his grandfather and the two would go out for a long walk. As Amartya recalls the walks turned out to be great learning for him with the grandfather making him aware of subjects unknown. The walks also gave the grandson “the wonderful opportunity to bombard” Kshiti Mohan with questions on a wide range of subjects.

Sen writes: “A walk could become a class on subjects as the dismal way India treated its pre-agricultural tribal population, usurping their land (he knew well the sad history of that process, including the failure of successive governments to build schools and hospitals for them). He told me that Ashoka, a great Buddhist emperor who ruled over much of India in the third century BC, expressed special concern about ‘forest people’ in the already urbanising India, asserting that the tribal folk had their rights too, just like those who lived in the cities and towns.”

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To tell the truth, many centuries later even today despite all the progress, adivasis continue to come in for unthinkable exploitation in the 21^st century with their forest land being taken away by hook or by crook to house industries and many promises of their rehabilitation remain mostly unfulfilled. Incidentally, Rabindranath Tagore, who after repeated pleadings got Kshiti Mohan to join him “in the building of a new kind of educational institution,” at Santiniketan would have the Sanskrit scholar as partner in the very early morning walk.

But why Tagore was in “great need of an ally” like Kshiti Mohan. The poet wrote this about the scholar: “Even though he is well versed in the scriptures and classical religion writings, his priorities are entirely liberal. He claims that he gets this liberality from reading of scriptures themselves. He may be able to influence even those who want to use their narrow reading of the scriptures to reduce – and insult – Hinduism. At least, he would be able to remove narrowness from the minds of our students.” There were interesting exchanges between the two on religion.

When at 12, the grandson told Kshiti Mohan that he was not finding interest in religion, the grandfather said: “There is no case for having religious convictions until you are able to think seriously for yourself – it will come to you in a natural way over time.” Religion, however, never came to Amartya to which the Sanskrit scholar replied: “I was not mistaken. You have addressed the religious question, and you have placed yourself, I can see in the atheistic – the Lokayata – part of the Hindu spectrum.” Religious convictions may have bypassed him, but what, among many other pursuits of Kshiti Mohan, particularly stayed with Amartya is his grandfather’s “involvement in the oral poetry of Kabir, Dadu and the Bauls.”In this pursuit, Kshiti Mohan was moved by two considerations – first, India’s wealth of folk literature must be put on right pedestal, being often neglected by our “elitist bias.” Second, the pursuit was part of his deep engagement with the “long history of interactions between Hindu and Muslim traditions in India.”

Why did Amartya name his son Kabir, though this is a Muslim name? One is his respect for the “ideas of the historical Kabir” and then his Jewish wife Eva Colorni liked the name. Eva told Amartya: “It is just right that the son of a Hindu-origin father and a Jewish-origin mother should have nice Muslim name.” How beautiful life would be if the world lives by this secular spirit. Sadly, this is today largely missing in India. Armed with a spirit of questioning and engaging in argument acquired under the tutelage of a benign grandfather, Amartya arrived in the big city Calcutta in 1951 to study at Presidency College, which presented many exciting intellectual challenges. But Amartya was like “challenge rather than accept at face value the ideas and knowledge we were being offered, and sometimes questioned what we were getting from the books and well-respected articles.” Didn’t his economics professor Tapas Majumdar say “don’t dismiss the possibility that the received argument, despite common belief, is simply incorrect”?

As Amartya says in his student days Karl Marx’s intellectual standing outshone everyone else’s. Even then, Marxian economics didn’t feature much in classes at Presidency or any other colleges. At a personal level, Amartya found “in the corpus of Marx’s writings… concepts that seemed to me to be important and nicely discussable.” Moreover, he found “arguing about Marx was fun.”

This still is. He found the distinction that Marx made “between the principle of ‘non-exploitation’ (through payment according to work, in line with the accounting established by his version of the labour theory of value) and the ‘needs principle’ (arranging for payments according to people’s needs, rather than their work and productivity) was a powerful lesson in radical thought.” At the same time, Amartya finds Marx’s “scrutiny of political organisation… oddly rudimentary. It is hard to think of a more breathless bit of theorising than the idea of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, with underspecified characterisation of what the proletariat’s demands are (or should be), and very little by way of how the actual political arrangements under such a dictatorship might work.”

Standing Up To Hindu Nationalists

By Kunal Bose 8th February 2021

Who is Amartya Sen? His global admiration is based more on his work as an economist than as a philosopher. Jean Dreze himself a celebrated economist inquiring into development issues based on Indian experiences and who is a long time collaborator of Professor Sen in many works sees in the Nobel laureate a mirror image of Adam Smith, that is, an economist, a philosopher and much more rolled into one person. In the foreword that he has penned for Lawrence Hamilton’s book How to Read Amartya Sen, Dreze says he sees in Sen “not only… a great mind but also… someone who is keen to bring about practical change in the world.” Indeed the world finds in him more than a celebrated economist and a philosopher but, as Dreze says, “a man of action, even if his preferred tool of action is not climbing barricades, or shooting petitions but public reasoning.” This argumentative Indian is a campaigner for a better and fairer world.

The world salutes the 87 year old Professor Sen whose monumental oeuvre besides leaving a profound impact on “scholarship, policy and action in a wide range of fields” has ignited human minds to ask questions and be sceptical of wisdom passed through generations. However the world may celebrate the work that is still growing of the Harvard professor of economics and philosophy, a group of saffronised people in India, not necessarily all concentrated in Bengal from where he hails, will not let an opportunity pass to ask what has this Nobel laureate given to India or say a few short visits to India leaving his comforts in the US behind are not enough to lay claims that he cares for the welfare of unprivileged here.

Fusillade of such inanities, however, originates in people who lack education to grasp what the Professor is all about. They are simply egged on by some Hindu nationalist politicians enraged by Professor Sen all the time calling a spade a spade.

The present political dispensation has been overtly critical though lacking in substance of Professor Sen for his stand on many social and economic issues but particularly for saying that using religion for the purpose of discrimination is anathema to founding principles of India. In a recent interview with PTI, he said: “Certainly I am critical of any political party that inflames communal and divisive sentiments, particularly between the Hindus and the Muslims.”

Giving the example of Bengal, which paid dearly in the past due to communal strife, he hopes the people of the state will have the good sense to reject the non-secular forces. Incidentally, BJP is all desperate to dethrone Trinamool Congress seen to be pandering to the Muslims who have nearly 30 per cent share of votes in West Bengal. Being in majority in some districts, including overwhelmingly in Murshidabad and Malda, the way the largest minority community votes in April elections to the 294 seat West Bengal Assembly could well decide the outcome in nearly 100 constituencies.

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Professor Sen continuing to give warnings to the people on dangers of communalism when elections are to be held in West Bengal in three months cannot be music to the ears of BJP. Therefore, it is only logical that the party will use every handle available to it, including the officials of central university Visva-Bharati to fire salvos, however hollow they may be at him. Professor Sen is not spared the accusation that he is in illegal occupation of some land beyond what is sanctioned in the 99 year lease. What is overlooked is that his maternal grandfather scholar extraordinaire Kshitimohan Sen came to Santiniketan at the invitation of Rabindranath Tagore and helped him in building Visva-Bharati. The house Pratichi was built by Professor Sen’s father on lease land but he also bought some parcels of freehold land.

But Hindu nationalists are not expected to be forgiving of the man when he debunks the claims that science and mathematics flourished in ancient India in splendid isolation from the rest of the world. Saffronite individuals and institutions may be in denial but through centuries the world is witness to how our “intellectual horizons expand when we learn from each other.” To consider a recent example, the vaccine to counter the Covid-19 pandemic became a reality in ten months against the usual about ten years taken to develop a new vaccine because of close collaboration among scientists from different countries, including India.

More recently Professor Sen courted displeasure of saffron brigade by pointing out that not the Vedic period but the first millennium was the “golden age” of mathematics. Science has got nothing to do with the world of fantasy. “The great mathematical revolution in India was led particularly by Aryabhata, who was born in 476 AD. What Aryabhata developed initially was the ‘golden age’ taken forward by other great mathematicians in India like Brahmagupta, Bhaskara and others. While deeply original, Aryabhata’s mathematics was substantially influenced by the mathematical revolution that had already taken place in Greece, Babylon and Rome,” he said.

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Newspapermen who speak to the economist cum philosopher know that Sen will desist from deliberating on issues on which he had not done the required study and inquiry. As he told a reporter: “I do not have the habit of passing judgement on issues about which I have at the most three and a half minutes to read in newspapers.” On another occasion asked by the then editor of Anandabazar Patrika Anirban Chattopadhyaya whether the growing emphasis on technology at the expense of humanities in the country’s higher education is not a step in the wrong direction, the answer that Professor Sen gave should be a lesson for many whose views are often sought.

“If what you are saying is happening, then it’s an important issue to ponder. But I don’t think I am competent enough to speak on the subject. I am here suddenly from abroad and I criticise the country’s education system (at college level) and then disappear like a comet. I shall never do that,” said Professor Sen.

He would be more comfortable to speak on primary education since the Pratichi Trust, set up with his Nobel honorarium, is working on the sector. This is intellectual honesty of the highest order. Professor Sen did not endear himself to the ruling establishment when though based on empirical evidences he said the “spread of education among girls in Bangladesh is far higher than both in Bengal and India. So also they have more access to health care than their counterparts here. But why should these differences exist? We are both Bengali people.” Incidentally, work of Pratichi Trust (Bangladesh) of which economist Rehaman Sobhan is chairman is focussed on primary education and health.

BJP has every reason to dislike Manmohan Singh’s friend Professor Sen who has been overtly critical of demonetisation, Citizenship (Amendment Act) and more recently the farm laws. As he maintains that the space for debate in the country is shrinking and his airing of the kind of regime he wanted ahead of 2014 and 2019 elections, it is only likely that BJP will have a strong distaste for him which is manifest in many ways. But it is not only Professor Sen, but historians such as Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib and Ramachandra Guha and economists, including Raghuram Rajan, Prabhat Patnaik and Kaushik Basu have fallen foul of saffronites for speaking their mind.