The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  Another major Buddhist achievement – not unrelated in fact to the interest in public communication – is that nearly every attempt at early printing in the world, in particular in China, Korea and Japan, was undertaken by Buddhist technologists, with an interest in expanding public communication.* The first ever printed book (or, more exactly, the first printed book that is actually dated) was the Chinese translation of an Indian Sanskrit treatise (Vajracchedikaprajñāpāramitā), the so-called ‘Diamond Sutra’. This was translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva (a half-Indian, half-Turkish Buddhist scholar) in 402 CE and this manuscript was printed in 868.22 The introductory note that went with the volume explicitly explained that it was made for ‘universal free distribution’.23

  I should also note here that the achievements that are linked to Buddhism include not just the focus on public reasoning and printing, but also accomplishments in mathematics, astronomy, literature, painting, sculpture and even in the practice of public health care – a subject in which Buddhists were particularly involved and which greatly interested Chinese visitors to India such as Faxian in the early fifth century and Yi Jing in the seventh.† Also Ashoka, the Buddhist emperor, was a pioneer in creating hospitals for public use in the third century BCE. There is also a statement in one of the Edicts that Ashoka had established hospitals in the Hellenistic kingdoms – a claim that may sound implausible but has been plausibly defended on the basis of available evidence by Thomas McEvilley.24

  One of the sad features of a narrowly Hinduized view of India’s past is that the justifiable pride Indians can take in the achievements of non-Hindu as well as Hindu accomplishments in India is drowned in the sectarianism of seeing India as mainly a vehicle for Hindu thought and practice. That, combined with an astonishingly narrow and intolerant view of the Hindu tradition itself, amounts to denying a good deal of Indian history that Indians have reason to remember and to celebrate.

  Global Connections

  Since the 1980s there has been a gradual opening up of the Indian economy, with a big shift in 1992, under the leadership of Manmohan Singh (the present Prime Minister of India) who was then the Finance Minister in the Congress government led by Narasimha Rao.* That government gave way to others, but the reduction of the autarky of closed economic policies has continued. Significantly, when the BJP-led government came to office in 1998, and was consolidated in 1999, it did take a fairly broad view of India’s global economic connections. The focus may have been geared particularly to some specific sectors, but the overall interest in global trade was strong. The parochialism manifest in the BJP’s cultural agenda did not manage to overwhelm the BJP government’s policies on international trade. The growth rate of the Indian economy was also fairly fast over those years.

  However, even though the BJP’s cultural prejudices did not manage to overpower the outward-looking economic programme of the Indian government, the cultural agenda itself – closely linked to its sectarian politics – maintained its parochial priorities. Indeed, the rewriting of India’s past that the Hindutva movement offered is closely linked (as was discussed in Essay 3) with relating India’s civilizational accomplishments to constructive work done single-handedly at home, in splendid isolation.

  This segregationist programme runs contrary to the fact that sustained interactions across the borders can be seen throughout India’s long history. It is not so much that there was no deprecation of foreigners in Indian traditionalist thinking. Indeed, quite the contrary. But, as Alberuni, the Iranian historian of India, noted nearly a thousand years ago (in a statement with remarkable anthropological vision), ‘depreciation of foreigners not only prevails among us and the Indians, but is common to all nations towards each other’.25 Despite this scepticism of foreign people, there were interactions with outsiders throughout Indian history.

  India’s recent achievements in science and technology (including information technology), or in world literature, or in international business, have all involved a good deal of global interaction. The important point to note in the present context is that these interactions are not unprecedented in Indian history. Indeed, interactions have been part and parcel of the Indian civilization, from very early days. Consider Sanskrit – a splendid language with a rich literature – which has been one of the robust pillars of Indian civilization. Despite its quintessential ‘Indianness’, there is a general understanding that, in an early form, Sanskrit came to India from abroad in the second millennium BCE, with the migration of Indo-Europeans, and then it developed further and flourished magnificently in India. It is also interesting to note that the greatest grammarian in Sanskrit (indeed possibly in any language), namely Pāṇini, who systematized and transformed Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin (he describes his village on the banks of the river Kabul). These foreign connections have not diminished the pride of classically minded Indians in that great language, nor in the exceptional achievements of the literature, culture and science that found its expression in Sanskrit.*

  Indeed, interactions have enriched as well as spread Sanskrit beyond India’s borders over many centuries.* The seventh-century Chinese scholar Yi Jing learned his Sanskrit in Java (in the city of Shri Vijaya) on his way from China to India. The influence of interactions is well reflected in languages and vocabularies throughout Asia from Thailand and Malaya to Indo-China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea and Japan. And this applies to China too, where scholarship in Sanskrit flourished greatly in the first millennium, aside from the influences that came via other countries in the region. It is not often realized that even the word ‘Mandarin’, standing as it does for a central concept in Chinese culture, is derived from a Sanskrit word, Mantrī, which went from India to China via Malaya.

  Even though contemporary attacks on intellectual globalization tend to come not only from traditional isolationists but also from modern separatists, we have to recognize that our global civilization is a world heritage – not just a collection of disparate local cultures. The tendency of parts of the communitarian movement to push us in the direction of fragmented isolationism suffers, thus, from a serious epistemic weakness, in addition to whatever normative difficulties it might encounter vis-à-vis ethical universalism.

  The need to resist colonial dominance is, of course, important, but it has to be seen as a fight against submissive compliance, rather than as a plea for segregation and localism. The so-called ‘post-colonial critique’ can be significantly constructive when it is dialectically engaged – and thus strongly interactive – rather than defensively withdrawn and barriered.† We can find a warning against isolationism in a parable about a well-frog – the ‘kūpamaṇḍuka’ – that persistently recurs in several old Sanskrit texts, such as Ganapāṭha, Hitopadeśa, Prasannarāghava and Bhattikāvya. The kūpamaṇḍuka is a frog that lives its whole life within a well, knows nothing else, and is suspicious of everything outside it. It talks to no one, and argues with no one on anything. It merely harbours the deepest suspicion of the outside world. The scientific, cultural and economic history of the world would have been very limited indeed had we lived like well-frogs.

  Celebration of Indian civilization can go hand in hand with an affirmation of India’s active role in the global world. The existence of a large diaspora abroad is itself a part of India’s interactive presence. Ideas as well as people have moved across India’s borders over thousands of years, enriching India as well as the rest of the world. Rabindranath Tagore put the rationale well, in a letter to C. F. Andrews: ‘Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin.’*

  Indians, including the diaspora, have reason to resist external isolation as well as internal miniaturization. Indeed, the openness of the argumentative tradition militates not only against exclusionary narrowness within the country, but also against the cultivated ignorance of the well-frog. We need not agree to be incarcerated in the dinginess of a much di
minished India, no matter how hard the political advocates of smallness try to jostle us. There are serious choices to be made.

  PART TWO

  Culture and Communication

  5

  Tagore and His India*

  Rabindranath Tagore, who died in 1941 at the age of 80, is a towering figure in the millennium-old literature of Bengal. Anyone who becomes familiar with this large and flourishing tradition will be impressed by the power of Tagore’s presence in Bangladesh and in India. His poetry as well as his novels, short stories and essays are very widely read, and the songs he composed reverberate around the eastern part of India and throughout Bangladesh.

  In contrast, in the rest of the world, especially in Europe and America, the excitement that Tagore’s writings created in the early years of the twentieth century has largely vanished. The enthusiasm with which his work was once greeted was quite remarkable. Gitanjali, a selection of his poetry for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913, was published in English translation in London in March of that year and had been reprinted ten times by November, when the award was announced. But he is not much read now in the West, and already by 1937 Graham Greene was able to say: ‘As for Rabindranath Tagore, I cannot believe that anyone but Mr Yeats can still take his poems very seriously.’

  The contrast between Tagore’s commanding presence in Bengali literature and culture and his near-total eclipse in the rest of the world is perhaps less interesting than the distinction between the view of Tagore as a deeply relevant and many-sided contemporary thinker in Bangladesh and India, and his image in the West as a repetitive and remote spiritualist. Graham Greene had, in fact, gone on to explain that he associated Tagore ‘with what Chesterton calls “the bright pebbly eyes” of the Theosophists’. Certainly, an air of mysticism played some part in the ‘selling’ of Rabindranath Tagore to the West by Yeats, Pound and his other early champions. Even Anna Akhmatova, one of Tagore’s few later admirers (who translated his poems into Russian in the mid-1960s), talks of ‘that mighty flow of poetry which takes its strength from Hinduism as from the Ganges, and is called Rabindranath Tagore’.

  Rabindranath did come from a Hindu family – one of the landed gentry who owned estates mostly in what is now Bangladesh. But whatever wisdom there might be in Akhmatova’s invoking of Hinduism and the Ganges, it did not prevent the largely Muslim citizens of Bangladesh from having a deep sense of identity with Tagore and his ideas. Nor did it stop the newly independent Bangladesh from choosing one of Tagore’s songs (‘Amar Sonar Bangla’, which means ‘my golden Bengal’) as its national anthem. This must be very confusing to those who see the contemporary world as a ‘clash of civilizations’ – with ‘the Muslim civilization’, ‘the Hindu civilization’ and ‘the Western civilization’ each forcefully confronting the others.

  They would also be confused by Rabindranath Tagore’s own description of his Bengali family as the product of ‘a confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan and British’.1 Rabindranath’s grandfather, Dwarkanath, was well known for his command of Arabic and Persian, and Rabindranath grew up in a family atmosphere in which a deep knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient Hindu texts was combined with an understanding of Islamic traditions as well as Persian literature. It is not so much that Rabindranath tried to produce – or had an interest in producing – a ‘synthesis’ of the different religions (as the great Moghal emperor Akbar tried hard to achieve) as that his outlook was persistently nonsectarian, and his writings – some two hundred books – show the influence of different parts of the Indian cultural background as well as that of the rest of the world.2 Most of his work was written at Santiniketan (Abode of Peace), the small town that grew around the school he founded in Bengal in 1901. He not only conceived there an imaginative and innovative system of education – to which I shall return – but, through his writings and his influence on students and teachers, he was able to use the school as a base from which he could take a major part in India’s social, political and cultural movements.

  The profoundly original writer whose elegant prose and magical poetry Bengali readers know well is not the sermonizing spiritual guru admired – and then rejected – in London. Tagore was not only an immensely versatile poet; he was also a great short-story writer, novelist, playwright, essayist and composer of songs, as well as a talented painter whose pictures, with their whimsical mixture of representation and abstraction, are only now beginning to receive the acclaim that they have long deserved. His essays, moreover, ranged over literature, politics, culture, social change, religious beliefs, philosophical analysis, international relations, and much else. The coincidence of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence with the publication of a selection of Tagore’s letters by Cambridge University Press3 is a good occasion to examine the nature of Tagore’s ideas and reflections, and the kind of leadership in thought and understanding he provided in the subcontinent in the first half of the twentieth century.

  Gandhi and Tagore

  Since Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi were two leading Indian thinkers in the twentieth century, many commentators have tried to compare their ideas. On learning of Rabindranath’s death, Jawaharlal Nehru, then incarcerated in a British jail in India, wrote in his prison diary for 7 August 1941:

  Gandhi and Tagore. Two types entirely different from each other, and yet both of them typical of India, both in the long line of India’s great men… . It is not so much because of any single virtue but because of the tout ensemble, that I felt that among the world’s great men today Gandhi and Tagore were supreme as human beings. What good fortune for me to have come into close contact with them.

  Romain Rolland was fascinated by the contrast between them, and when he completed his book on Gandhi, he wrote to an Indian academic, in March 1923: ‘I have finished my Gandhi, in which I pay tribute to your two great river-like souls, overflowing with divine spirit, Tagore and Gandhi.’ The following month he recorded in his diary an account of some of the differences between Gandhi and Tagore written by Reverend C. F. Andrews, the English clergyman and public activist who was a close friend of both men (and whose important role in Gandhi’s life in South Africa as well as India is well portrayed in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi). Andrews described to Rolland a discussion between Tagore and Gandhi, at which he was present, on subjects that divided them:

  The first subject of discussion was idols; Gandhi defended them, believing the masses incapable of raising themselves immediately to abstract ideas. Tagore cannot bear to see the people eternally treated as a child. Gandhi quoted the great things achieved in Europe by the flag as an idol; Tagore found it easy to object, but Gandhi held his ground, contrasting European flags bearing eagles, etc., with his own, on which he has put a spinning wheel. The second point of discussion was nationalism, which Gandhi defended. He said that one must go through nationalism to reach internationalism, in the same way that one must go through war to reach peace.4

  Tagore greatly admired Gandhi but he had many disagreements with him on a variety of subjects, including nationalism, patriotism, the importance of cultural exchange, the role of rationality and of science, and the nature of economic and social development. These differences, I shall argue, have a clear and consistent pattern, with Tagore pressing for more room for reasoning, and for a less traditionalist view, a greater interest in the rest of the world, and more respect for science and for objectivity generally.

  Rabindranath knew that he could not have given India the political leadership that Gandhi provided, and he was never stingy in his praise for what Gandhi did for the nation (it was in fact Tagore who popularized the term ‘Mahatma’ – great soul – as a description of Gandhi). And yet each remained deeply critical of many things that the other stood for. That Mahatma Gandhi has received incomparably more attention outside India and also within much of India itself makes it important to understand ‘Tagore’s side’ of the Gandhi-Tagore debates.

  In his prison d
iary, Nehru wrote: ‘Perhaps it is as well that [Tagore] died now and did not see the many horrors that are likely to descend in increasing measure on the world and on India. He had seen enough and he was infinitely sad and unhappy.’ Towards the end of his life, Tagore was indeed becoming discouraged about the state of India, especially as its normal burden of problems, such as hunger and poverty, was being supplemented by politically organized incitement to ‘communal’ violence between Hindus and Muslims. This conflict would lead in 1947, six years after Tagore’s death, to the widespread killing that took place during partition; but there was much gore already during his declining days. In December 1939 he wrote to his friend Leonard Elmhirst, the English philanthropist and social reformer who had worked closely with him on rural reconstruction in India (and who had gone on to found the Dartington Hall Trust in England and a progressive school at Dartington that explicitly invoked Rabindranath’s educational ideals):5