The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  Perhaps I should comment briefly on the role of three distinct issues that are involved in the approach I am trying to defend. First, identity is not a matter of discovery – of history any more than of the present – and has to be chosen with reasoning. Even if it were the case (as it certainly is not) that Indian history were largely Hindu history, we would still have to determine how a pluralist and multi-religious population can share an Indian identity without sharing the same religion. This, of course, is the basis of secularism in India, and our reasoning about priorities in dealing with competing conceptions of Indian identity need not be parasitic on history. The makers of the Indian constitution recognized that fully, as did the United States in adopting a largely secular constitution for a mostly Christian population. The need to reason and choose cannot be given over to the mere observation of history, and this point relates to the more general claim, which I have defended elsewhere, that while we cannot live without history, we need not live within it either.†

  The second point is more historical. As was discussed in Essays 1–4, India has been a multi-religious country for a very long time, with Jews, Christians, Parsees and Muslim traders arriving and settling in India over the first millennium. Sikhism was born in India, in the same way that Buddhism and Jainism originated in the country. Even pre-Muslim India was not, as is sometimes claimed, mainly a Hindu country, since Buddhism was the dominant religion in India for many hundreds of years and Jainism has had an equally long history and in fact a large continuing presence today. Since there is so much politically generated antagonism these days against Hindus converting to any other religion, it is perhaps worth remembering that Ashoka (arguably the greatest emperor of India) did convert to Buddhism from what would have been the then form of Hinduism and sent emissaries propagating Buddhism to many other countries.*

  Indeed, even in terms of Vedic and Upanisadic contributions, Buddhism and Jainism are as much the inheritors of that tradition as are later forms of Hinduism. The one university for which India was outstandingly famous, namely Nālandā, which attracted scholars from China and elsewhere, and which came to an end after many hundred years of existence just around the time when the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were being founded (in the thirteenth century), happened to be a Buddhist university.

  I come now to the third reason against making the Indian identity dependent on the Hindu identity. Hindus are defined in two quite distinct ways. When the number of Hindus is counted, and it is established that the vast majority of Indians are in fact Hindu, this is not a counting of religious beliefs, but essentially of ethnic background. But when generalizations are made about, say, the divinity of Rama, or the sacred status of the Rāmāyaṇa, beliefs are invoked. By using the two approaches together, a numerical picture is constructed in which it is supposed that a vast majority of Indians believe in the divinity of Rama and the sacred status of the Rāmāyaṇa. For a large proportion of the Hindus, however, that attribution would be a mistake, since hundreds of millions of people who are defined as Hindu in the first sense do not actually share the beliefs which would be central to the second approach.

  Indeed, by making this attribution, the champions of Hindu politics undermine the rich tradition of heterodoxy that has been so central to the history of the Hindu culture. As was discussed earlier, Sanskrit (including its variants, Pāli and Prākrit) has a larger literature in the atheistic and agnostic tradition than exists in any other classical language (Greek, Roman, Hebrew or Arabic). In the fourteenth century, Mādhava Acārya’s remarkable book called Sarvadarsanasamgraha (‘The Collection of All Philosophies’), which has one chapter each on the major schools of Hindu belief, devoted the entire first chapter to arguments in favour of the atheistic position. The history of that tradition goes back at least two millennia and a half, to the sixth century BCE, when the Lokāyata and Cārvāka schools had their origin, in a climate of heterodoxy in which Buddhism and Jainism were also born.*

  Something similar can be said about alleged cultural attitudes of the Hindus. I do not doubt that some Hindus do indeed find, as reported recently in the newspapers, that even Valentine’s Day cards are offensive as being allegedly sexually explicit – a point made with much force by some politically activist Hindus. But Hindus vary in their attitude to issues of this kind, as the sculptors of the temples in Khajuraho could readily explain. I take the liberty of speculating that the greatest Sanskrit poet, Kālidāsa, with his eloquence on the beauty of female forms bathing in the river Śipra in his native Ujjayinī, would have found Valentine’s Day cards to be deeply disappointing. The term Hindu can be sensibly used in either of two alternative forms, reflecting respectively membership of a community, or the holding of particular religious views and cultural attitudes, but the numerical force of the Hindus that is marshalled in favour of censorial uses is obtained through a conceptual confounding of two distinct notions.

  A Concluding Remark

  I want to make one last point on a different issue related to the role of religion and community in general (not Hinduism in particular) as a route to the Indian identity. Should the Indian identity be seen as something of a ‘federal’ concept that draws on the different religious communities, perhaps even including non-religious beliefs within the list of the constituents of a ‘federation of cultures’? A question of a very similar type was raised in Britain in an important document produced by the Runnymede Trust, called the Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-ethnic Britain. The report gives partial and qualified backing to a federal view of contemporary Britain, as ‘a looser federation of cultures held together by common bonds of interest and affection and a collective sense of being’.16

  This is a well-articulated position, and the Commission provides plausible arguments for it (without ruling out other interpretations). I would, nevertheless, argue that such a ‘federal’ view would be a great mistake for Britain as well as for India. The issue relates directly to the plurality of identities I have already discussed, and to the scope for choice in the determination of identity. People’s relation to Britain, or to India, need not be mediated through the ‘culture’ of the family in which they may have been born, nor through its religion. People may choose to seek identity with more than one of these predefined cultures, or, just as plausibly, with none. People are also free to decide that their cultural or religious identity is less important to them than, say, their political convictions, or their literary persuasions, or their professional commitments. It is a choice for them to make, no matter how they are placed in the ‘federation of cultures’.

  To conclude, the inclusionary view of Indian identity, which we have inherited and which I have tried to defend, is not only not parasitic on, or partial to, a Hindu identity, it can hardly be a federation of the different religious communities in India: Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jain, Parsee and others. Indian identity need not be mediated through other group identities in a federal way. Indeed, India is not, in this view, sensibly seen even as a federal combination of different communities.

  I quoted earlier a statement of Jamsetji Tata of an affirmatively nationalist kind, when – commenting on the excellence that young Indians can achieve through education – he said that Indian students ‘can not only hold their own against the best rivals in Europe on the latter’s ground, but can beat them hollow’. That expression of pride – even perhaps of arrogance – is not the pride of a Parsee who happened to be an Indian, but of an Indian who happened to be a Parsee. There is a distinction here, and it is, I would argue, both important and in need of some understanding right now.

  Notes

  ESSAY 1. THE ARGUMENTATIVE INDIAN

  1. Arjuna is supposed to have ended with abject surrender: ‘I stand firm with my doubts dispelled. I shall act according to Thy word’ (Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The Bhagavadgita, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1993, p. 381).

  2. In collaboration with Swami Prabhavananda (Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1989).

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p; 3. Jawaharlal Nehru, who quotes Humboldt, does however point out that ‘every school of thought and philosophy … interprets [the Gītā] in its own way’ (The Discovery of India, Calcutta: The Signet Press, 1946; repr. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981, pp. 108–9).

  4. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, in Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), pp. 29–31.

  5. For a good discussion of some other interesting arguments in the Mahābhārata, see Bimal Matilal, Moral Dilemmas in the Mahabharata (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, and Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1989). See also his collection of papers, edited by Jonardan Ganeri, The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal, vol. ii: Ethics and Epics (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Shashi Tharoor conveys well the excitements offered by the stories and substories in the Mahābhārata, in his adapted tale, The Great Indian Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990).

  6. See Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision to Drop the Bomb (London: Methuen, 1957).

  7. See In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: USAEC Transcript of the Hearing before Personnel Security Board (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 1954). See also the play, based on these hearings, by Heinar Kipphardt, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, trans. Ruth Speirs (London: Methuen, 1967).

  8. This extract and the others that follow, on the Gārgī-Yājñavalkya debate, are taken from Brihadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, sections 3. 8. 1 to 3. 8. 12. They correspond to the English translations of this Upanisad published by Sri Ramkrishna Math (Madras, 1951), pp. 242–53, and by Advaita Ashrama (Calcutta, 1965), pp. 512–29, but the English versions given here include my slight emendations of these earlier translations, based on the original Sanskrit text.

  9. See Antonia Fraser, Boadicea’s Chariot: The Warrior Queens (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988). For other biographies of the Rani, who – widowed at an early age – rose to be a major leader in the growing resistance to British rule and died valiantly on the battlefield, see Joyce Lebra-Chapman, The Rani of Jhansi: A Study of Female Heroism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), and Mahasweta Devi, The Queen of Jhansi, translated from Bengali by Mandira and Sagaree Sengupta (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000).

  10. Brihadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, sections 2. 4. 2 and 2. 4. 3; in the Advaita Ashrama translation, pp. 352–4.

  11. Draupadī was in fact married to all five Pāṇḍava brothers, of whom Yudhisthira was the eldest: this is one of the rare cases of polyandry in the epics.

  12. Trans. Indira Viswanathan Peterson, Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 191–4.

  13. On these references and the discussion that follows, see Kshiti Mohan Sen, Hinduism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961, 2005), pp. 27–31.

  14. The proposal to dilute democracy came from no less a statesman than Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India. The firmness with which one of the poorest electorates in the world rejected the proposed move to authoritarianism had a salutary effect in discouraging other temptations in that direction. After being voted out of office, Indira Gandhi changed tack, strongly reasserted her earlier commitment to democracy, and regained the Prime Ministership in the general elections of 1980.

  15. For a discussion of this general connection as well as illustrations from the histories of various parts of Asia and Africa, in addition to Europe, see my ‘Democracy and Its Global Roots’, New Republic, Nov. 2003.

  16. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). Indeed, Rawls saw ‘the exercise of public reason’ as the central feature of democracy: see his Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,2001), p. 50. See also Juergen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), and The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).

  17. James M. Buchanan, ‘Social Choice, Democracy, and Free Markets’, Journal of Political Economy, 62 (1954), p. 120.

  18. See my ‘Democracy and Its Global Roots’.

  19. As explained in the Preface, I have taken the liberty of spelling Aśoka as Ashoka, since that name is more familiar to people outside India in that spelling.

  20. Robert’s Rules of Order: Simplified and Applied, Webster’s New World (New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1999).

  21. See Irfan Habib (ed.), Akbar and His India (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), for a set of fine essays investigating the beliefs and policies of Akbar as well as the intellectual influences that led him to his heterodox position. Two of the essays in this volume (‘Secularism and Its Discontents’ and ‘India through Its Calendars’) include discussions of the intellectual significance of the interreligious interchanges in Akbar’s time. Shirin Moosvi’s book Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994), gives a vividly informative account of how Akbar arrived at social decisions through the use of reasoning.

  22. Akbar was, obviously, not obliged, as the emperor, to follow what emerged in the discussions he arranged (they had only an advisory role), and he could have stopped the deliberations that occurred at his invitation whenever he chose. Since the freedom to present their respective viewpoints that the participants enjoyed in practice would have been conditional on Akbar’s acceptance, it would not count as ‘genuine freedom’ when assessed in the ‘republican’ perspective (as advanced by Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), or in terms of the ‘neo-Roman’ theory of freedom (as developed by Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  23. On different concepts of secularism, see the collection of essays in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and Its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  24. On the histories involved, see Shalva Weil (ed.), India’s Jewish Heritage (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2002), and the literature cited there.

  25. There were also pre-Christian Greek settlements in north-west India from the second century BCE. On the early relations between India, Greece and Rome, see the lucidly illuminating essay by John Mitchener, ‘India, Greece and Rome: East-West Contacts in Classical Times’ (mimeographed, 2003), and also the large literature cited there.

  26. These statements of Ashoka occur in Edict XII (on ‘toleration’) at Erragudi; I am using here the translation presented by Vincent A. Smith in Asoka: The Buddhist Emperor of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), pp. 170–71, except for some very minor emendations based on the original Sanskrit text.

  27. Translation in Vincent A. Smith, Akbar: The Great Mogul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), p. 257.

  28. See Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Akbar’s Personality Traits and World Outlook: A Critical Reappraisal’, in Habib (ed.), Akbar and His India, p. 78.

  29. Akbar’s principal adviser, Abul Fazl, was a great scholar in Sanskrit as well as Arabic and Persian. One of the generals in Akbar’s forces, Rahim (or Abdurrahim Khankhana), himself a Muslim, wrote rather beautiful poems that draw, inter alia, on Sanskrit literature and Hindu philosophy.

  30. See Kshiti Mohan Sen, Medieval Mysticism of India, with a Foreword by Rabindranath Tagore (1930), and Hinduism (1961, 2005).

  31. Edict XII, in Smith, Asoka, p. 171; italics added.

  32. A. C. Bouquet, Comparative Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 5th edn., 1956), p. 112. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the great commentator on Indian philosophy, went even further, and argued that ‘the chief mark of Indian philosophy in general is its concentration upon the spiritual’ (S. Radhakrishnan and S. A. Moore, in the introduction to their collection, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, p. xxiii). That point of view is disputed, with textual evidence, by Bimal Matilal (who was, as it happens, a successor of Radhakrishnan as Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford): Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledg
e (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

  33. See Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Lokayata: A Study of Ancient Indian Materialism (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1959), and Indian Atheism (Calcutta: Manisha, 1959).

  34. In a series of recent studies on ancient India in Bengali (including one on ‘doubt and atheism in the Vedic literature’, 2000), Sukumari Bhattacharji has substantially enriched our understanding of the nature and reach of this heterodoxy. Even Yājñavalkya, who was referred to earlier as being identified by the woman interlocutor, Gārgī, as the best-informed scholar on God, gives some evidence of entertaining serious doubts about the existence and role of God. Among Sukumari Bhattacharji’s earlier contributions, those in English include: The Indian Theogony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; London: Penguin, 2000); Literature in the Vedic Age, 2 vols. (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1984, 1986); and Classical Sanskrit Literature (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1990).

  35. D. N. Jha, Ancient India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1977, rev. edn. 1998), pp. 69–70.

  36. The Sarva-Darsana-Samgraha or Review of Different Systems of Hindu Philosophy by Madhava Acharya, trans. E. B. Cowell and A. E. Gough (London: Trübner, 1882; repr. New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1976).

  37. Ibid., p. 2.

  38. Ibid., pp. 2–3.

  39. Ibid., p. 10.

  40. Arthaśāstra can be literally translated as: ‘the discipline of material prosperity’. For an English translation, see R. P. Kangle, Kautilya’s Arthasastra (Bombay: University of Bombay, 1970). Kauṭilya’s approach to politics as well as economics is governed by an overarchingly consequential priority. This is discussed, inter alia, in my Money and Value: On the Ethics and Economics of Finance, The First Baffi Lecture (Rome: Bank of Italy, 1991), repr. in Economics and Philosophy, 9 (1993).