by Amartya Sen
8. Max Müller, Sacred Books of the East, 50 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879–1910).
9. James Mill, The History of British India (London, 1817; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 223–4.
10. Quoted ibid., Introduction by John Clive, p. viii.
11. As Romila Thapar has noted, James Mill’s reading of India, which gained ground rapidly and by the middle of the nineteenth century became almost ‘axiomatic’ in England to ‘the understanding of Indian society and politics’, ‘suited the imperial requirements’ rather well (see her Interpreting Early India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 5–6, 33–4).
12. Alberuni’s India, trans. E. C. Sachau, ed. A. T. Embree (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 276–7.
13. Mill, The History of British India, pp. 225–6.
14. Ibid., p. 247.
15. On the importance of ‘third-person perspectives’ in the development of ‘identities’ in the presence of asymmetries of power, see Akeel Bilgrami, ‘What Is a Muslim?’, in Anthony Appiah and Henry L. Louis Gates (eds.), Identities (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995). See also Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London: Routledge, 2000).
16. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 6.
17. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet Press, 1946; centenary edn., Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).
18. See The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar, ed. Valerian Rodrigues (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), particularly essay 32 (‘Basic Features of the Indian Constitution’).
19. An interesting comparison can be made between the ideas of two of the stalwarts of political thinking in ancient India, viz. Kautilya and Ashoka. The continuing relevance of their respective viewpoints and the contrasts between them have been engagingly examined by Bruce Rich, To Uphold the World: The Message of Ashoka and Kautilya for the 21st Century (forthcoming).
20. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697, trans. W. G. Aston (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1972), pp. 128–33.
21. Nakamura Hajime, ‘Basic Features of the Legal, Political, and Economic Thought of Japan’, in Charles A. Moore (ed.), The Japanese Mind: Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and Culture (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1973), p. 144.
22. In fact, the Diamond Sutra was translated into Chinese many times – perhaps even a dozen times. But it is Kumārajīva’s translation of this Sanskrit document in 402 CE that was printed in what became the first dated printed book in the world. On this, see Essay 8 below.
23. The scroll was found in 1907 by the archaeologist Sir Marc Auriel Stein in one of the ‘Caves of the Thousand Buddhas’ in north-west China. The given date of printing translates, in the Gregorian calendar, as 11 May 868.
24. See Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (New York: Allworth Press, 2002), pp. 368–70. In general, McEvilley provides an admirably illuminating account of Greek-Indian interactions in the ancient world.
25. Alberuni’s India, p. 20. The Arabic word then used for Hindu or Indian was the same, and I have replaced Sachau’s choice of the English word ‘Hindu’ in this passage by ‘Indian’, since the reference is to the inhabitants of the country.
ESSAY 5. TAGORE AND HIS INDIA
1. Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (London: Unwin, 1931, 2nd edn., 1961), p. 105. The extensive interactions between Hindu and Muslim parts of Indian culture (in religious beliefs, civic codes, painting, sculpture, literature, music and astronomy) have been discussed by Kshiti Mohan Sen in Bharate Hindu Mushalmaner Jukto Sadhana (in Bengali) (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1949: extended edn., 1990) and Hinduism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, 2005).
2. Rabindranath’s father Debendranath had in fact joined a reformist religious group, the Brahmo Samaj, which rejected many contemporary Hindu practices as aberrations from the ancient Hindu texts.
3. Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). This essay draws on my Foreword to this collection. For important background material on Rabindranath Tagore and his reception in the West, see also the editors’ Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), and Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology (New York: Picador, 1997).
4. See Romain Rolland and Gandhi Correspondence, with a Foreword by Jawaharlal Nehru (New Delhi: Government of India, 1976), pp. 12–13.
5. On Dartington Hall, the school, and the Elmhirsts, see Michael Young, The Elmhirsts of Dartington: The Creation of an Utopian Community (London: Routledge, 1982).
6. Yasunari Kawabata, The Existence and Discovery of Beauty, trans. V. H. Viglielmo (Tokyo: Mainichi Newspapers, 1969), pp. 56–7.
7. W. B. Yeats, Introduction, in Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (London: Macmillan, 1913).
8. The importance of ambiguity and incomplete description in Tagore’s poetry provides some insight into the striking thesis of William Radice (one of the major English translators of Tagore) that ‘his blend of poetry and prose is all the more truthful for being incomplete’ (Introduction to his Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, p. 28).
9. Reported in Amita Sen, Anando Sharbokaje (in Bengali) (Calcutta: Tagore Research Institute, 2nd edn., 1996), p. 132.
10. B. R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1958; paperback, 1989), p. 149.
11. The economic issues are discussed in my Choice of Techniques (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), appendix D.
12. Mohandas Gandhi, quoted by Krishna Kripalani, Tagore: A Life (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1961, 2nd edn., 1971), pp. 171–2.
13. For fuller accounts of the events, see Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, ch. 25, and Ketaki Kushari Dyson, In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1988).
14. Published in English translation in Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary Volume, 1861–1961 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1961), with an Introduction by Jawaharlal Nehru.
15. English trans. from Kripalani, Tagore: A Life, p. 185.
16. ‘Einstein and Tagore Plumb the Truth’, New York Times Magazine, 10 Aug. 1930; repr. in Dutta and Robinson, Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore.
17. Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, 111.: Open Court, 1987). On related issues, see also Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
18. Isaiah Berlin, ‘Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness of Nationality’, in his The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History (Boston: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 265.
19. E. P. Thompson, Introduction to Tagore’s Nationalism (London, Macmillan, 1991), p. 10.
20. For a lucid and informative analysis of the role of Subhas Chandra Bose and his brother Sarat in Indian politics, see Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
21. Kawabata made considerable use of Tagore’s ideas, and even built on Tagore’s thesis that it ‘is easier for a stranger to know what it is in [Japan] which is truly valuable for all mankind’ (The Existence and Discovery of Beauty, pp. 55–8).
22. Tagore, Letters from Russia, trans. from Bengali by Sasadhar Sinha (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1960), p. 108.
23. See Satyajit Ray, Our Films Their Films (Calcutta: Disha Book/Orient Longman, 3rd edn., 1993). I have tried to discuss these issues in my Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture, included in this book as Essay 6. See also Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (London: André Deutsch, 1989).
24. Guardian, 1 Aug. 1991.
25. Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium (New York: Arcade Publishing), p. 1.
26. On this and related issues, see Jean Dréze and Amartya Sen, I
ndia: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), particularly ch. 6, and also Dréze and Sen (eds.), Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
27. Edward Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926).
28. Quoted in Tharoor, India, p. 9.
ESSAY 6. OUR CULTURE, THEIR CULTURE
1. Satyajit Ray, Our Films Their Films (Calcutta: Disha Book/Orient Longman, 3rd edn., 1993), p. 154.
2. An insightful analysis of the different processes involved in cultural interactions and their consequences can be found in Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
3. See particularly Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
4. See W. S. Wong, ‘The Real World of Human Rights’, mimeographed, Vienna, 1993.
5. Repr. in Our Films Their Films, pp. 42–3.
6. Ibid., p. 12.
7. Ibid., p. 160.
8. Ibid., p. 5.
9. Ray, My Years with Apu: A Memoir (New Delhi: Viking, 1994), p. 4.
10. In addition to Satyajit Ray’s own autobiographical accounts in Our Films Their Films and My Years with Apu, his involvement in ideas and arts from many different places is discussed in some detail in Andrew Robinson’s Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (London: André Deutsch, 1989).
11. Ray, Our Films Their Films, p. 9.
12. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 5.
13. The ‘last summer’ referred to here was the summer of 1996, preceding the Ray Lecture given in December 1996. In the original version of this Satyajit Ray Lecture, I also discussed the transmigration of mathematical ideas and terms from and to India, often going full circle. That discussion has been dropped in this reprint, since similar points have been made in other essays in this volume (see e.g. pp. 178–9).
14. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. xl.
15. Orlando Patterson, Freedom, vol. i: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
16. I have discussed this issue in ‘Is Coercion a Part of Asian Values?’, presented at a conference in Hakone, Japan, in June 1995. A later version of this paper was given as a Morgenthau Memorial Lecture at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, on 1 May 1997, published by the Council as a pamphlet, and also as an essay, ‘Human Rights and Asian Values’, New Republic, 14 and 21 July 1997.
ESSAY 7. INDIAN TRADITIONS AND THE WESTERN IMAGINATION
1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978; Vintage Books, 1979), p. 5; italics added.
2. Ibid., p. 5.
3. In the earlier article, ‘India and the West’, on which this essay draws, the third category was called ‘investigative’ rather than ‘curatorial’; the latter is more specific and I believe somewhat more appropriate.
4. See Alberuni’s India, trans. E. C. Sachau, ed. A. T. Embree (New York: Norton, 1971).
5. See Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), ch. 2.
6. Alberuni’s India, p. 246. The same Arabic word was commonly used for ‘Hindu’ and ‘Indian’ in Alberuni’s time. While the English translator had chosen to use ‘Hindus’ here, I have replaced it with ‘Indians’ in view of the context (to wit, Alberuni’s observations on the inhabitants of India). This is an issue of some interest in the context of the main theme of this essay, since the language used here in the English translation to refer to the inhabitants of India implicitly imposes a circumscribed ascription.
7. Ibid., p. 20.
8. William Jones, ‘Objects of Enquiry During My Residence in Asia’, in The Collected Works of Sir William Jones, 13 vols. (London: J. Stockdale, 1807; repr. New York: New York University Press, 1993).
9. I have discussed the ‘positional’ nature of objectivity, depending on the placing of the observer and analyst vis-à-vis the objects being studied, in ‘Positional Objectivity’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22 (1993), and ‘On Interpreting India’s Past’, in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (eds.), Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
10. Quoted in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 250.
11. James Mill, The History of British India (London, 1817; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 225–6.
12. Ibid., p. 248.
13. Ibid., p. 247.
14. Alberuni’s India, pp. 174–5.
15. For a modern account of the complex history of this mathematical development, see Georges Ifrah, From One to Zero (New York: Viking, 1985).
16. Mill, The History of British India, pp. 219–20.
17. Mill found in Jones’s beliefs about early Indian mathematics and astronomy ‘evidence of the fond credulity with which the state of society among the Hindus was for a time regarded’, and he felt particularly amused that Jones had made these attributions ‘with an air of belief’ (Mill, The History of British India, pp. 223–4). On the substantive side, Mill amalgamates the distinct claims regarding (1) the principle of attraction, (2) the daily rotation of the earth, and (3) the movement of the earth around the sun. Āryabhaṭa’s and Brahmagupta’s concern was mainly with the first two, on which specific assertions were made, unlike the third.
18. Mill, The History of British India, pp. 223–4.
19. Alberuni’s India, pp. 276–7.
20. Ibid., p. 277.
21. See Harold Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1958); repr. as Images of Asia: American Views of India and China (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958). See also the discussion of this issue in the Introduction in Sulochana Glazer and Nathan Glazer (eds.), Conflicting Images: India and the United States (Glen Dale, Md.: Riverdale, 1990).
22. Lloyd I. Rudolph, ‘Gandhi in the Mind of America’ in Glazer and Glazer (eds.), Conflicting Images, p. 166.
23. Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 8.
24. On this, see Glazer and Glazer (eds.), Conflicting Images. The influence of magisterial readings on American imaging of India has been somewhat countered in recent years by the political interest in Gandhi’s life and ideas, a variety of sensitive writings on India (from Erik Erikson to John Kenneth Galbraith), and the Western success of several Indian novelists in English. Since the early 1990s, when this essay was written, the success of Indian science and technology, especially in informational fields, has added another dimension to the re-evaluation of India in American discussions.
25. Quoted in John Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 95.
26. J. G. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, in Samtliche Werke; trans. Halbfass, India and Europe, p. 70.
27. Trans. Halbfass, India and Europe, pp. 74–5. Halbfass provides an extensive study of these European interpretations of Indian thought and the reactions and counter-reactions to them.
28. A. Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena; trans. Halbfass, India and Europe, p. 112.
29. See John H. Muirhead, Coleridge as a Philosopher (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1930), pp. 283–4, and Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination, ch. 6.
30. The nature of exoticist reading has typically had a strongly ‘Hindu’ character. This was, in some ways, present even in William Jones’s curatorial investigations (though he was himself a scholar in Arabic and Persian as well), but he was to some extent redressing the relative neglect of Sanskrit classics in the previous periods (even though the version of the Upaniṣads that Jones first read was the Persian translation prepared by the Moghal prince Dara Shikoh, Emperor Akbar’s great-grandson). The European Romantics, on the other hand, tended to identify In
dia with variants of Hindu religious thought.
31. William Davis, The Rich (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1982), p. 99.
32. On this issue, see Bimal Matilal, Perceptions: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). See also Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
33. On this issue in general, and on the hold of ‘a predominantly third-person perspective’ in self-perception, see Akeel Bilgrami, ‘What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity’, Critical Inquiry, 18 (4) (1992).
34. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet Press, 1946; centenary edn., Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 158.
35. While the constitution of independent India has been self-consciously secular, the tendency to see India as a land of the Hindus remains quite strong. The confrontation between ‘secularists’ and ‘communitarians’ has been an important feature of contemporary India, and the identification of Indian culture in mainly Hindu terms plays a part in this. While it is certainly possible to be both secular and communitarian (as Rajeev Bhargava has noted in ‘Giving Secularism Its Due’, Economic and Political Weekly, 9 July 1994), the contemporary divisions in India tend to make the religious and communal identities largely work against India’s secular commitments (as Bhargava also notes). I have tried to scrutinize these issues in my paper ‘Secularism and Its Discontents’, in Kaushik Basu and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), Unravelling the Nation: Sectarian Conflict and India’s Secular Identity (Delhi: Penguin, 1996); Essay 14 in this volume. See also the other papers in that collection, and the essays included in Bose and Jalal (eds.), Nationalism, Democracy and Development.
36. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 6.
37. The most effective move in that direction came under the leadership of Ranajit Guha; see his introductory essay in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982). See also the collection of ‘subaltern’ essays ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).