The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  The issue of cultural disharmony is very much alive in many cultural and political investigations, which often sound as if they are reports from battle fronts, written by war correspondents with divergent loyalties: we hear of the ‘clash of civilizations’, the need to ‘fight’ Western cultural imperialism, the irresistible victory of ‘Asian values’, the challenge to Western civilization posed by the militancy of other cultures, and so on. The global confrontations have their reflections within the national frontiers as well, since most societies now have diverse cultures, which can appear to some to be very threatening. ‘The preservation of the United States and the West requires’, Samuel Huntington argues, ‘the renewal of Western identity.’14

  Walls in Theory

  The subject of ‘the reach of reason’ is related to another theme, which has been important in the anthropological literature. I refer to what Clifford Geertz has called ‘culture war’, well illustrated by the much-discussed differences over the interpretation of Captain Cook’s sad death in 1779 at the hands of club-wielding and knife-brandishing Hawaiians.15 In his article, Geertz contrasts the theories of two leading anthropologists: Marshall Sahlins, he writes, is ‘a thoroughgoing advocate of the view that there are distinct cultures, each with a “total cultural system of human action”, and they are to be understood along structuralist lines’. The other anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere, is ‘a thoroughgoing advocate of the view that people’s actions and beliefs have particular, practical functions in their lives and that those functions and beliefs should be understood along psychological lines’.

  Whatever view we find persuasive, however, the question still should be asked whether the people involved must remain inescapably confined to their traditional modes of thought and behaviour (as cultural determinists argue). Neither Sahlins’s nor Obeyesekere’s approach rules out communication between cultures, even though this may be a more arduous task if we follow Sahlins’s interpretation. But we have to ask what kind of reasoning the members of each culture can use to arrive at better understanding and perhaps even sympathy and respect. Indeed, this is one of the questions Glover poses when he advocates moral imagination as a solution to the brutality and ruthlessness with which groups treat one another. Moral imagination, he hopes, can be cultivated through mutual respect, tolerance and sympathy.

  The central issue here is not how dissimilar distinct societies may be from one another, but what ability and opportunity the members of one society have – or can develop – to appreciate and understand how others function. This may not, of course, be an immediate way of resolving such conflicts. The killers of Captain Cook could not instantly revise their culture-bound view of him, nor could Cook acquire at once the comprehension or acumen needed to hold his pistol rather than fire it. Rather, the hope is that the reasoned cultivation of understanding and knowledge would eventually overcome such impulsive action.

  The question that has to be faced here is whether such exercises of reasoning may require values that are not available in some cultures. This is where the ‘cultural boundary’ becomes a central issue. There have, for example, been frequent declarations that non-Western civilizations typically lack a tradition of analytical and sceptical reasoning, and are thus distant from what is sometimes called ‘Western rationality’. Similar comments have been made about ‘Western liberalism’, ‘Western ideas of right and justice’ and generally about ‘Western values’. Indeed, there are many supporters of the claim (articulated by Gertrude Himmelfarb with admirable explicitness) that ideas of ‘justice’, ‘right’, ‘reason’ and ‘love of humanity’ are ‘predominantly, perhaps even uniquely, Western values’.16

  This and similar beliefs figure implicitly in many discussions, even when the exponents shy away from stating them with such clarity. If the reasoning and values that can help in the cultivation of imagination, respect and sympathy needed for better understanding and appreciation of other people and other societies are fundamentally ‘Western’, then there would indeed be ground enough for pessimism. But are they?

  It is, in fact, very difficult to investigate such questions without seeing the dominance of contemporary Western culture over our perceptions and readings. The force of that dominance is well illustrated by the recent millennial celebrations. The entire globe was transfixed by the end of the Gregorian millennium as if that were the only authentic calendar in the world, even though there are many flourishing calendars in the non-Western world (in China, India, Iran, Egypt and elsewhere) that are considerably older than the Gregorian calendar.* It is, of course, extremely useful for the technical, commercial and even cultural interrelations in the world that we can share a common calendar. But if that visible dominance reflects a tacit assumption that the Gregorian is the only ‘internationally usable’ calendar, then that dominance becomes the source of a significant misunderstanding, since several of the other calendars could be used in much the same way if they were jointly adopted in the way the Gregorian has been.

  Western dominance has similar effects also on the understanding of other aspects of non-Western civilizations. Consider, for example, the idea of ‘individual liberty’, which is often seen as an integral part of ‘Western liberalism’. Modern Europe and America, including the European Enlightenment, have certainly had a decisive part in the evolution of the concept of liberty and the many forms it has taken. These ideas have disseminated from one country to another within the West and also to countries elsewhere, in ways that are somewhat similar to the spread of industrial organization and modern technology. To see libertarian ideas as ‘Western’ in this limited and proximate sense does not, of course, threaten their being adopted in other regions. For example, to recognize that the form of Indian democracy is based on the British model does not undermine it in any way. In contrast, to take the view that there is something quintessentially ‘Western’ about these ideas and values, related specifically to the history of Europe, can have a dampening effect on their use elsewhere.

  But is the historical claim correct? Is it indeed true (as claimed, for example, by Samuel Huntington) that ‘the West was the West long before it was modern’?17 The evidence for such claims is far from clear. When civilizations are categorized today, individual liberty is often used as a classificatory device and is seen as a part of the ancient heritage of the Western world, not to be found elsewhere. It is, of course, easy to find the advocacy of particular aspects of individual liberty in Western classical writings. For example, freedom and tolerance both get support from Aristotle (even though only for free men – not women and slaves). However, we can find championing of tolerance and freedom in non-Western authors as well. A good example is the emperor Ashoka in India, who during the third century BCE covered the country with inscriptions on stone tablets about good behaviour and wise governance, including a demand for basic freedoms for all – indeed, he did not exclude women and slaves as Aristotle did; he even insisted that these rights must be enjoyed also by ‘the forest people’ living in pre-agricultural communities distant from Indian cities.18 Ashoka’s championing of tolerance and freedom may not be at all well known in the contemporary world, but that is not dissimilar to the global unfamiliarity with calendars other than the Gregorian.

  There are, to be sure, other Indian classical authors who emphasized discipline and order rather than tolerance and liberty, for example Kauṭilya in the fourth century BCE (in his book Arthaśāstra – translatable as ‘Economics’). But Western classical writers such as Plato and St Augustine also gave priority to social discipline. In view of the diversity within each country, it may be sensible, when it comes to liberty and tolerance, to classify Aristotle and Ashoka on one side, and, on the other, Plato, Augustine and Kauṭilya. Such classifications based on the substance of ideas are, of course, radically different from those based on culture or region.

  Even when beliefs and attitudes that are seen as ‘Western’ are largely a reflection of present-day circumstances in Europe and North Ameri
ca, there is a tendency – often implicit – to interpret them as age-old features of the ‘Western tradition’ or of ‘Western civilization’. One consequence of Western dominance of the world today is that other cultures and traditions are often identified and defined by their contrasts with contemporary Western culture.

  Different cultures are thus interpreted in ways that reinforce the political conviction that Western civilization is somehow the main, perhaps the only, source of rationalistic and liberal ideas – among them analytical scrutiny, open debate, political tolerance and agreement to differ. The West is seen, in effect, as having exclusive access to the values that lie at the foundation of rationality and reasoning, science and evidence, liberty and tolerance, and of course rights and justice.

  Once established, this view of the West, seen in confrontation with the rest, tends to vindicate itself. Since each civilization contains diverse elements, a non-Western civilization can then be characterized by referring to those tendencies that are most distant from the identified ‘Western’ traditions and values. These selected elements are then taken to be more ‘authentic’ or more ‘genuinely indigenous’ than the elements that are relatively similar to what can be found also in the West.

  For example, Indian religious literature such as the Bhagavad Gītā or the Tantric texts, which are identified as differing from secular writings seen as ‘Western’, elicits much greater interest in the West than do other Indian writing, including India’s long history of heterodoxy. Sanskrit and Pāli have a larger atheistic and agnostic literature than exists in any other classical tradition. There is a similar neglect of Indian writing on non-religious subjects, from mathematics, epistemology and natural science to economics and linguistics. (The exception, I suppose, is the Kāmasūtra, in which Western readers have managed to cultivate an interest.) Through selective emphases that point up differences with the West, other civilizations can, in this way, be redefined in alien terms, which can be exotic and charming, or else bizarre and terrifying, or simply strange and engaging. When identity is thus ‘defined by contrast’, divergence with the West becomes central.

  Take, for example, the case of ‘Asian values’, often contrasted with ‘Western values’. Since many different value systems and many different styles of reasoning have flourished in Asia, it is possible to characterize ‘Asian values’ in many different ways, each with plentiful citations. By selective citations of Confucius, and by selective neglect of many other Asian authors, the view that Asian values emphasize discipline and order – rather than liberty and autonomy, as in the West – has been given apparent plausibility. This contrast, as I have discussed elsewhere,19 is hard to sustain when one actually compares the respective literatures.

  There is an interesting dialectic here. By concentrating on the authoritarian parts of Asia’s multitude of traditions, many Western writers have been able to construct a seemingly neat picture of an Asian contrast with ‘Western liberalism’. In response, rather than dispute the West’s unique claim to liberal values, some Asians have responded with a pride in distance: ‘Yes, we are very different – and a good thing too!’ The practice of conferring identity by contrast has thus flourished, driven both by Western attempts to establish its exclusiveness and also by the Asian counter-attempt to establish its own contrary exclusiveness. Showing how other parts of the world differ from the West can be very effective and can shore up artificial distinctions. We may be left wondering why Gautama Buddha, or Laozi or Ashoka – or Gandhi or Sun Yat-sen – was not really an Asian.

  Similarly, under this identity by contrast, the Western detractors of Islam as well as the new champions of Islamic heritage have little to say about Islam’s tradition of tolerance, which has been at least as important historically as its record of intolerance. We are left wondering what could have led Maimonides, as he fled the persecution of Jews in Spain in the twelfth century, to seek shelter in Emperor Saladin’s Egypt. And why did Maimonides, in fact, get support as well as an honoured position at the court of the Muslim emperor who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades?

  Despite recent outbursts of intolerance in Africa, we can recall that in 1526, in an exchange of discourtesies between the kings of Congo and Portugal, it was the former not the latter, who argued that slavery was intolerable. King Nzinga Mbemba wrote to the Portuguese king that the slave trade must stop, ‘because it is our will that in these kingdoms of Kongo there should not be any trade in slaves nor any market for slaves’.20

  Of course, it is not being claimed here that all the different ideas relevant to the use of reasoning for social harmony and humanity have flourished equally in all civilizations of the world. That would not only be untrue; it would also be a stupid claim of mechanical uniformity. But once we recognize that many ideas that are taken to be quintessentially Western have also flourished in other civilizations, we also see that these ideas are not as culture-specific as is sometimes claimed. We need not begin with pessimism, at least on this ground, about the prospects of reasoned humanism in the world.

  Tolerance and Reason

  It is worth recalling that in Akbar’s pronouncements of four hundred years ago on the need for religious neutrality on the part of the state, we can identify the foundations of a non-denominational, secular state which was yet to be born in India or for that matter anywhere else. Thus, Akbar’s reasoned conclusions, codified during 1591 and 1592, had universal implications. Europe had just as much reason to listen to that message as India had. The Inquisition was still in force, and just when Akbar was writing on religious tolerance in Agra in 1592, Giordano Bruno was arrested for heresy, and ultimately, in 1600, burnt at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome.

  For India in particular, the tradition of secularism can be traced to the trend of tolerant and pluralist thinking that had begun to take root well before Akbar, for example, in the writings of Amir Khusrau in the fourteenth century as well as in the non-sectarian devotional poetry of Kabir, Nanak, Chaitanya and others. But that tradition got its firmest official backing from Emperor Akbar himself. He also practised as he preached – abolishing discriminatory taxes imposed earlier on non-Muslims, inviting many Hindu intellectuals and artists into his court (including the great musician Tansen), and even trusting a Hindu general, Man Singh, to command his armed forces.

  In some ways, Akbar was precisely codifying and consolidating the need for religious neutrality of the state that had been enunciated, in a general form, nearly two millennia before him by the Indian emperor Ashoka, whose ideas I have referred to earlier. While Ashoka ruled a long time ago, in the case of Akbar there is a continuity of legal scholarship and public memory linking his ideas and codifications with present-day India.

  Indian secularism, which was strongly championed in the twentieth century by Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and others, is often taken to be something of a reflection of Western ideas (despite the fact that Britain is a somewhat unlikely choice as a spearhead of secularism). In contrast, there are good reasons to link this aspect of modern India, including its constitutional secularism and judicially guaranteed multiculturalism (in contrast with, say, the privileged status of Islam in the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan), to earlier Indian writings and particularly to the ideas of this Muslim emperor of four hundred years ago.

  Perhaps the most important point that Akbar made in his defence of a tolerant multiculturalism concerns the role of reasoning. Reason had to be supreme, since even in disputing the validity of reason we have to give reasons. Attacked by traditionalists who argued in favour of instinctive faith in the Islamic tradition, Akbar told his friend and trusted lieutenant Abul Fazl (a formidable scholar in Sanskrit as well as Arabic and Persian):

  The pursuit of reason and rejection of traditionalism are so brilliantly patent as to be above the need of argument. If traditionalism were proper, the prophets would merely have followed their own elders (and not come with new messages).21

  Convinced that he had to take a serious
interest in the religions and cultures of non-Muslims in India, Akbar arranged for discussions to take place involving not only mainstream Hindu and Muslim philosophers (Shia and Sunni as well as Sufi), but also involving Christians, Jews, Parsees, Jains and, according to Abul Fazl, even the followers of Cārvāka – one of the Indian schools of atheistic thinking the roots of which can be traced to around the sixth century BCE.22 Instead of taking an all-or-nothing view of a faith, Ashoka liked to reason about particular components of each multifaceted religion. For example, arguing with Jains, Akbar would remain sceptical of their rituals, and yet become convinced by their argument for vegetarianism and end up deploring the eating of all flesh.

  All this caused irritation among those who preferred to base religious belief on faith rather than reasoning. There were several revolts against Akbar by orthodox Muslims, on one occasion joined by his eldest son, Prince Salim, with whom he later reconciled. But he stuck to what he called ‘the path of reason’ (rahi aql), and insisted on the need for open dialogue and free choice. At one stage, Akbar even tried, not very successfully, to launch a new religion, Din-ilahi (God’s religion), combining what he took to be the good qualities of different faiths. When he died in 1605, the Islamic theologian Abdul Haq concluded with some satisfaction that, despite his ‘innovations’, Akbar had remained a good Muslim.23 This was indeed so, but Akbar would have also added that his religious beliefs came from his own reason and choice, not from ‘blind faith’, or from ‘the marshy land of tradition’.