“I wanted to be a physicist,” Sen says, “but my political interests led me to economics.” Two things moved him the most as a child: the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, which killed thousands while plentiful harvests ripened in the fields, and the religious violence that preceded the Partition of India in 1947. The teenage Amartya saw a bleeding Muslim laborer, Kader Mia, stumble into his Hindu family's home after being knifed in a communal riot; the man had only ventured into the “wrong” neighborhood because he needed work to feed his family. Kader Mia was rushed to hospital by Amartya's father, but died. Economics, politics, and morality intersected in those episodes, indelibly marking Amartya Sen's growing mind.
Initially, like virtually every Calcutta collegian, Sen's politics were leftist, but leavened by an abiding faith in freedom and an early interest in philosophy. His pioneering work as a “technical economist” in welfare economics and social choice theory (how the wishes of a society can be aggregated from the diverse views of its members) was cited by the Nobel Committee. But he has become better known to a wider audience for his work on famines (in particular the proposition that there has never been a famine in a functioning democracy) and on “development as freedom,” which argues compellingly that it is more important to be free than to be rich, and that different kinds of freedom — political, economic, and social — enrich and reinforce each other.
His fame is growing. “I opened the New York Times last Sunday,” Sen recounts, “and found a full-page ad featuring Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, with a headline quoting me! It was on the importance of women's education. When I first started working on gender issues in development, it was treated as an eccentricity.” Sen's concern for the impoverished, undernourished, and marginalized, especially women, comes through strongly in his essays. His Nobel Prize money has largely gone to two trusts he founded, in India and Bangladesh, focusing particularly on education and health care for the poor. The Nobel citation also lauded his restoration of “an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems.” Though he says he is not interested in the philosophy of economics, a profound moral sense is never absent from his prose.
The Argumentative Indian is not, however, about economics, except tangentially (there's one essay about class in India). It is instead a powerfully constructed case for India's political and cultural heterogeneity, and of the “reach of reason” in India's intellectual traditions. “It's something which has been in my mind for a while,” Sen says. He is particularly critical of the Western overemphasis on India's religiosity at the expense of any recognition of the country's equally impressive rationalist, scientific, mathematical, and secular heritage. The son of a professor of soil chemistry, he vividly recalls going to the lab with his father, “testing hypotheses, seeing whether experiments worked out or not.” That “scientific spirit of inquiry,” he says, has its roots in ancient India. He likes to cite 3,500-year-old verses from the Vedas that speculate skeptically about creation, and details India's contributions to the world of science, rationality, and plural discourse, fields treated by Orientalists as “Western spheres of success.”
But debunking Western orientalists who have seen India as an exotic land of delirious worshipers is not Sen's only concern. His targets are homegrown as well. “My view of India is of a very broad civilization, which I've seen being miniaturized by sectarians,” he says, alluding to the Hindutva (Hinduness) movement, which has sought to promote a narrowly Hindu identity for India. Sen's book attacks such a “narrow and bellicose” interpretation, while reaffirming his own “capacious idea of India” as an authentically plural and tolerant civilization with a long tradition of intellectual heterodoxy.
Indeed, Hinduism is the only major religion with an explicit tradition of agnosticism within it. Equally important is the tradition of secular tolerance practiced by such rulers as the Buddhist emperor Ashoka and the Muslim emperor Akbar 1,800 years apart. Sen points out that Ashoka's edicts promoted the human rights of all in the third century before Christ, a time when Aristotle's writings on freedom explicitly excluded women and slaves, an exception the Indian monarch did not make. At the time of the Inquisition, when the Catholics of Europe were persecuting Jews and heretics, the Mughal emperor Akbar was proclaiming in Delhi that “no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.” Unlike in the West, Indian secularism has tended not to be about the separation of church from state, but rather about tolerance of a multitude of religions, none of which is favored by the state. To Sen, “The Hindutva movement has entered into a confrontation with the idea of India itself.”
Sen has argued that “the need for an intellectual challenge to the sectarians is also important politically.” That sense of passionate engagement with India informs much of his writing. On Indian democracy, he is both reasoned and critical. While hailing India's success in preventing the famines that occurred with depressing regularity under British colonial rule, he stresses that this does not mean the problem of chronic and endemic hunger (“a much more complex task”) has been solved.
Back at Harvard after serving six years as the first non-English Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Sen — film and theater buff, cricket fan, and voracious reader — embodies the yearning for eclectic learning. “Teaching is very important for me,” Sen says (his official Nobel biography lists, with pride, the accomplishments of many of his students over the years). As a young man he translated a number of George Bernard Shaw's plays into Bengali, but mislaid the manuscripts; perhaps they will turn up, he imagines, in his recently deceased mother's trunkfuls of papers. His most recent book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, rests on the seemingly simple proposition that ascribing “singular identities” to people (for example, calling someone a “Muslim” while overlooking other aspects of his individual makeup) leads to the “miniaturization of human beings” and the “belittling of human identity.” Sen argues passionately against reducing individuals to a “choiceless singularity” (few people, after all, have a choice about the religion they are born into) when all of us have so much more complexity to our identities. As he rather wittily explains: “The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theater lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).”
Sen's book is concerned not only with the multiplicity of our identities, but also with the way the illusion of a solitary identity, increasingly defined in terms only of religion, has been used to cultivate violence in the world, not least by Islamic terrorists. He inveighs strongly against the Huntingtonian thesis of a “clash of civilizations,” pointing out that the argument for the primacy of an individual's religious identity, to the exclusion of other affiliations and associations, ignores the demands of other (explicitly nonreligious) commitments. The separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan, after all, occurred despite their common religious identity, because an ethnic and cultural identity (Bengali) came to mean more than the purely religious label (Muslim). But there is a bigger issue at stake here than intellectual argument. Sen's rejection of Huntington's categorization of humanity in terms of artificially (and religiously) segmented “civilizations” is based on his fear of the political consequences of such an analysis. He sees an implicit alliance between Western parochialism and Islamic extremism in ignoring, or at least undervaluing, the broader history of secular tolerance in Islamic civilization. Too many Westerners, he says, fall into the trap of seeing science and “a sense of individualism and a tradition of individual rights and liberties” as quintessentially and uniquely Western. Instead, Sen argues, they should be celebrating the fact that ideas on mathematics, science, literature, architecture, or tolerance have repeatedly crossed the boundaries of distinct “civilizations.”