Western understanding of Arab history ignores Arabic math and science, including algorithmic reasoning, derived from the name of the ninth-century Arab mathematician Al-Khwarizmi (from whose book Al-Jabr wa al-Muqabalah the term algebra is derived). “If the political leadership of the Arab Muslim world has been shifting toward a greater hold of narrow Islamism, in place of the more old-fashioned pride in the broad achievements of Arab countries,” Sen recently argued in an online exchange with the American scholar Robert Kagan, “parochialism in the West has been a substantial contributor to the process.”
Similarly, “The Western world has no proprietary right over democratic ideas,” he writes in his book. “While modern institutional forms of democracy are relatively new everywhere, the history of democracy in the form of public participation and reasoning is spread across the world.” Though Sen writes knowingly of the long traditions of tolerance in Islam, from Saladin to Akbar, he does try to come to grips with the obvious counterargument: the violence of Islamist terror. He argues first that Muslims who pursue peaceful and constructive lives vastly outnumber the rest, and second, that to interpret such violence (which is deliberately cultivated by the terrorists as a political tool) as evidence of an inescapable clash of civilizations would be like claiming from the evidence of twentieth-century history that Germans are doomed to be Nazis. Religion, he avers, is not destiny, and Huntington's civilizational “partitioning” fails to capture the complexity of the world and indeed of each civilization.
I agree with all this — and yet when Amartya Sen asks whether a “religion-centered analysis of the people of the world is a helpful way of understanding humanity,” it is fair to say that ignoring religion as a factor in identity is not wise either, especially when so many — from the jihadists of West Asia to the Hindutva chauvinists of Gujarat — continue to harp on it as the basis for their appeal to people's sense of community. We need to understand why so many today, in privileging one among the many identities they could lay claim to, have fallen back on religion. Why are so many political grievances, real or imagined, articulated in religious terms? The answer surely lies in the primordial nature of religious identity. When other avenues of identity mobilization are either restricted (in autocratic states) or difficult (in societies where political patterns are entrenched and admit few interlopers), ordinary people tend to fall back on the one identity that seems basic to them. Secular intellectuals like Amartya Sen may give equal weight to the tag of being a cricket fan or an Oxbridge don to being born in a Hindu family. But we are a minority in today's world, and there remains a great danger to our value system from the larger numbers of passionate sectarians who will never read his humane and enlightened arguments.
Yet a conversation with Amartya Sen underscores the extent to which his Indianness and his cosmopolitanism coexist. He traces his convictions to sources as far-flung as Condorcet and Chakravarti, enjoys a variety of cuisines, and says he cannot think of any one place as home. “I feel very at home in Santiniketan, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Cambridge, England, in Italy. If I were told I had to choose one of them and live there only, that I would regard as a very serious loss.” Yet he would never contemplate giving up his Indian passport, because it is what entitles him to express political opinions about his own country. He has “never been out of India for more than six months at a stretch” and manages a visit there several times a year. “In our heterogeneity and in our openness lies our pride, not our disgrace,” Sen writes. “Satyajit Ray taught us this, and that lesson is profoundly important for India. And for Asia, and for the world.”
Amartya Sen has spoken out with courage and conviction about the issues that matter in our country and the world — and he has done so with grace, style, and sharp intelligence. This is what non-economists like myself would have honored him for, whether or not his principal vocation had attracted the attention of the Nobel Committee.
When Amartya Sen was to receive what is officially known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, with a check of $960,000, I wrote in a national newspaper that there should also be a simpler, unbankable prize in the name of the country he has remained so passionately committed to. He has honored our land with his intellect and his heart; he is truly a “jewel of India.” Should the country not recognize this, I asked, with the Bharat Ratna? I cannot presume to trace cause and effect, but within three weeks of the appearance of my column, the announcement came from New Delhi that Sen would be so honored. Of course, such decisions take longer to gestate, and columnists should not give themselves airs. But just suppose — perhaps somebody high up in the government of India actually reads the newspapers…?
35. Art from the Heart
IT IS NOT ALWAYS THAT I FIND MYSELF TRULY REGRETTING an event I have had to miss because of pressing official commitments elsewhere, but recently my “regrets” at turning down an invitation were not just genuine, they were heartfelt. The event in question was the inauguration of an exhibition in the Peabody Museum in the small Massachusetts town of Salem — an exhibition of M. F. Husain's Mahabharata paintings. The irony of this celebration in America, at a time when Husain has been hounded from his own country by the threats of Hindutva chauvinists, did not escape me. So I was all the more sorry to miss this opportunity to pay him tribute, and show him solidarity.
The only time I properly met the incomparable Husain (discounting, that is, the occasional fleeting handshakes in crowded gatherings) was in New York in 1993, over dinner at the home of the Indian then ambassador, Hamid Ansari. Sitting before the book-laden coffee table in the ambassador's Park Avenue living room, I recounted to the master the famous story of what the immortal Pablo Picasso used to say to aspiring artists of the avant-garde. Disregarding their slapdash cubes and squiggles, Picasso would demand: “Draw me a horse.” Get the basics right, in other words, before you break free of them. Husain loved the story; he promptly opened the book in front of him, a volume of his own work from Ambassador Ansari's collection, and proceeded to sketch, with astonishing fluidity, a posse of horses on the frontispiece. I have never forgotten the moment: watching the artist's long brown fingers glide over the page, the horses’ heads rearing, their manes flying, hooves and tails in the air as Husain left, in a few bold strokes, the indelible imprint of his genius.
So to collaborate on a book with Husain, as I have once done, was an extraordinary privilege. And to do so on the subject of my home state, Kerala, on which Husain has just completed a series of astonishing paintings, made it a special pleasure as well. For horses, in our volume, read elephants. They are everywhere in Husain's extraordinary evocation of Kerala: crashing through the dense foliage, embracing supple maidens with their trunks, and, in miniature, held aloft by triumphant womanhood. The elephants cavort by the waterside, drink, play, gambol, lurk. They are the animal form of the grandeur and gaiety of “God's Own Country.” Elephants are indispensable to every Kerala celebration, from weddings to religious festivals; there is nothing in the world like the Thrissur Pooram, when hundreds emerge, bedecked with ornaments and flowers, to receive the homage of the Malayali people. Elephants infuse the Kerala consciousness; they feature in the state's literature, dance, music, films, and art. It is said that the true Keralite can tell one elephant apart from another just by looking at it. In their myriad shapes, sizes, and colors, Husain's elephants embody the magic of Kerala: the extraordinary natural beauty of the state, its lagoons, its forests, its beaches, and above all the startling, many-hued green of the countryside, with its emerald paddy fields and banana groves, and coconut and areca trees swaying in the gentle breeze that whispers its secrets across the land. And in their strength the elephants capture, too, the resilience of Kerala, its defiance of the Indian stereotype, its resolute determination to progress, and above all, its empowerment of women.