Sainthood requires a second miracle, and though Mariam Thresia's followers have produced another case — also of a clubfoot cured through similar prayer — the Church rules are inflexible: only miracles occurring after beatification can lead to sainthood. So Mariam Thresia fans will have to wait for fresh miracles. But her chances of becoming the first Indian Catholic saint — ahead of her better-known near-namesake from Calcutta — appear bright. After all, she did more than help the dying to die with dignity, as the illustrious Nobel Prize — winning nun did.
K. P. Fabian, India's kind and wise ambassador in Rome, and a practicing Catholic himself, wryly remarked to me that Kerala has had Christianity for two thousand years but has only begun producing saints in the last hundred. Clearly, the Church has only recently started to recognize the faith of its darker-hued adherents as equivalent to that of the white originators of their religion. Faith can produce miracles; Hinduism and Islam are replete with similar stories of the lame being able to walk, the blind enabled to see. It is belief that matters, not the particulars of that belief. But the beatification of Mariam Thresia (and of a Colombian alongside her) is an acknowledgment that the future of the Church lies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where it finds fertile ground in the intense devotion of ordinary people.
It is this that provides a different context to the unseemly “conversion controversy” of last year. To hear Malayalam recited in St. Peter's alongside half a dozen European languages is, in its own way, satisfying. I am not a Christian, but I rejoice in the magic an Indian woman has brought to Christianity. Perhaps one day it will not just be an Indian saint the world honors in Vatican Square, but an Indian pope. Only the most narrow-minded of our homegrown fanatics would fail to take pride in that.
34. A Polymath's Politics
WHEN PROFESSOR AMARTYA SEN RECEIVED THE NOBEL PRIZE in Economics in 1998, most Indians could barely contain their pride and satisfaction at the honor he had so deservingly earned, and at the near-universal approbation with which his selection was received around the world. By honoring him, most Indians felt, the Nobel Committee reached out to recognize “one of us”—a man steeped in the Indian culture and tradition into which he was born, a citizen of the world who has never relinquished his Indian passport, a Harvard and Cambridge eminence who has always maintained an abiding interest in the nature and future of India.
But Amartya Sen is not just one of us — his contribution to humanity is too great to confine him to that description.
I am not, I am happy to say, an economist. I have tended to keep a safe distance from that dismal science, whose practitioners were once described as people who “knew the price of everything but the value of nothing.” Economists as a group were widely seen as people obsessed with arcane theories and endless disputations; George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they would never reach a conclusion.”
The famous disconnection of most economists from everyday realities has even spawned a series of jokes. My favorite one is about the group of five men — a carpenter, a tailor, a sailor, a priest, and an economist — marooned on a desert island, who are trying to figure out a way to escape. “I could chop down the tree there,” says the carpenter, “and make a raft.” The tailor says he can stitch a few sheets into a mast; the sailor says he can navigate by the stars; the priest says he will pray for favorable winds. All they need now is to chop down the tree. “That's easy,” says the economist. “Assume an ax.”
Amartya Sen is of this tribe and yet has risen above it. His credentials as a theoretician are impeccable; from his now classic Collective Choice and Social Welfare to his extensive work on economic inequality and development, Sen has firmly established himself at the pinnacle of the academic mainstream of his discipline. (So much so that his theoretical work formed the basis for one of the few negative articles on his Nobel, a pernickety piece by Gene Epstein in the New York investment weekly Barron's which faulted Sen's “fetish for math-as-method.”) Yet, despite being an economist, Sen does reach conclusions — powerful and compelling ones, which have not merely enhanced his scholarly standing but have had direct relevance for public policy in the real world.
Most notably, his work on famine has brought insight and wisdom to the world's understanding of this recurrent tragedy. Sen never forgot his own shattering experience as a nine-year-old during the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, when three million died while precious food either rotted in hoarders’ warehouses or was diverted to the British war effort. “I would remember the harrowing scenes vividly,” he later recalled, “when more than three decades later I tried to do an economic analysis of the causal antecedents and processes of famines.” Sen's work, informed by compassion as well as solid quantitative research, has established the now widely accepted doctrine that famines are nearly always avoidable; that they result not from lack of food but lack of access to food; that distribution is therefore the key; and that democracy is the one system of government that enables food to be distributed widely and fairly. No democracy with a free press, Sen pointed out, has suffered a famine, whereas tyrannies and colonial regimes have.
All this is admirable, but it does a disservice to Sen to honor him merely as an economist. “I believe that economic analysis has something to contribute to substantive ethics in the world in which we live,” he modestly suggests. And he has demonstrated the truth of this assertion not merely by the strongly ethical content of his own economic analysis, but by going beyond it into fields that have nothing to do with economics as such. Amartya Sen's writings and lectures on Tagore and Ray, on Indian secularism, on human rights and “Asian values,” have all testified to the breadth of vision and the depth of humanity of this remarkable polymath.
One Indian, the old joke goes, is a monologue; two Indians is a debate; three Indians, two political parties. That Indians are argumentative seems beyond dispute. But it takes an economist of the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's standing to convert that proposition into a magisterial book—The Argumentative Indian—that attests to the depth and eclecticism of his intellectual range.
Amartya Sen is now clearly one of the foremost public intellectuals of our time. “I've always liked arguing with people,” he tells me from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in between trips to New York and Florence in his dizzyingly peripatetic (and just as dizzyingly prolific) life. Appropriately enough, he was born (in 1933) on a university campus, that of Vishwa-Bharati, founded by the great Nobel laureate in literature, Rabindranath Tagore, in the West Bengal village of Santiniketan. It was Tagore who prophetically chose the name Amartya (“immortal”) for the only other Bengali who has so far emulated his Nobel Prize. Sen won it in economics, though, as his work demonstrates, he could just as convincingly be described as a sociologist, a historian, a Sanskritist, a political analyst, or a moral philosopher.