The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  38. Alberuni’s India, p. 32.

  39. I have tried to discuss this general issue in ‘Description as Choice’, Oxford Economic Papers, 32 (1980), repr. in Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Blackwell; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982; repr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), and in ‘Positional Objectivity’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22 (1993).

  40. This contrast is discussed in my joint paper with Martha Nussbaum, ‘Internal Criticism and Indian Rationalist Traditions’, in Michael Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).

  41. For example, the fourteenth-century book Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha (‘Collection of All Philosophies’) by Mādhava Ācārya (himself a good Vaishnavite Hindu) devotes the first chapter of the book to a serious presentation of the arguments of the atheistic schools.

  42. Trans. H. P. Shastri, The Ramayana of Valmiki (London: Shanti Sadan, 1959), p. 389.

  43. Ifrah, From One to Zero, p. 434.

  44. Voltaire, Les Œuvres complètes, vol. 124; translated by Halbfass, India and Europe, p. 59.

  ESSAY 8. CHINA AND INDIA

  1. The exact question that Yi Jing asked was: ‘Is there anyone, in the five parts of India, who does not admire China?’ See J. Takakusu’s translation of Yi Jing’s book A Record of the Buddhist Religions as Practised in India and Malay Archipelago (Oxford, 1896), p. 136. Yi Jing’s name (as in Pinyin – now standard) is also spelt as I-tsing and I-Ching, among other earlier renderings.

  2. Faxian’s name has also been spelt in English as Fa-Hsien and Fa-hien, and Xuanzang’s name as Hiuan-tsang and Yuang Chwang (among other variants). Many of the documents cited in this essay use these earlier spellings, rather than the Pinyin versions used here.

  3. See Prabodh C. Bagchi, India and China: A Thousand Years of Cultural Relations (Calcutta: Saraswat Library, revised edn., 1981), p. 7. Zhang Qian is spelt as Chang Ch’ien in this and some other earlier works.

  4. Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), p. 184.

  5. In his well-researched study Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, Tansen Sen shows that the size and continuity of Sino-Indian trade relations are often underestimated. For example, in contrast with the common presumption that the trade between the two countries died out in the second millennium, Sen argues that Sino-Indian exchanges were very extensive between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries. Also, Sen provides evidence to conclude that Buddhism, too, continued to flourish simultaneously in Song dynasty China and in eastern India in the early part of the second millennium.

  6. See Bagchi, India and China, especially pp. 197–8; Lokesh Chandra, ‘India and China: Beyond and the Within’, ignca.nic.in/ks_41023.htm.

  7. The weakening of the hold of Buddhism in China is sometimes assigned to the ninth century, under the persecution of Buddhists by the Tang emperor Wuzong. These persecutions were important, but, as is argued by Tansen Sen (in Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade), Buddhism had plenty of life left in China in the centuries to follow. However, by then the form of Buddhism in China was turning more indigenous and less dependent on Indian Buddhism.

  8. This book (see n. 1 above) was followed by another monograph containing detailed accounts of Yi Jing’s reflections, Records of the High Monks Who Went Out to Seek for the Books of the Law in the Tang Time.

  9. There is a translation by James Legge, The Travels of Fa-Hien or Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (New York: Dover, 1965; Patna: Eastern Book House, 1993). There is a useful extract from this book in Mark A. Kishlansky (ed.), Sources of World History, vol. i (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 154–8.

  10. See Samuel Beal, Life of Hieun Tsang (London: Kegan Paul, 1914), and Sally Hovey Wriggins, Xuanzang: A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996). There are also two perceptive recent books that draw on Xuanzang’s travels and their continuing significance today: Richard Bernstein, Ultimate Journey: Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment (New York: Knopf, 2001), and Sun Shuyun, Ten Thousand Miles without a Cloud (London: HarperCollins, 2003).

  11. Among other things, Xuanzang noted King Harsa’s strong praise of the Chinese Tang ruler, Tang Taizong. In his book Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, Tansen Sen has questioned the authenticity of Xuanzang’s report, on the grounds, among others, that Harsa’s description of Taizong as a ‘saintly lord’ seems clearly inaccurate (he had gained the throne by murdering his brothers); Sen argues that Xuanzang, who knew and had the support of the Tang ruler, may have deliberately doctored the account. We have to judge, of course, whether it is more plausible that the Chinese scholar Xuanzang, with a great reputation for accuracy and authenticity, just heard wrong (rather than fabricating a story), or that the Indian emperor was simply misinformed about the Chinese monarch, at some considerable distance from him.

  12. See Bagchi, India and China, p. 250.

  13. Through Arthur Waley’s English translation of it (Monkey, London: Allen & Unwin, 1942), the story achieved considerable popularity in Europe and America as well. Waley’s translation, however, is incomplete. A complete translation can be found in Anthony Yu, The Journey to the West, 4 vols. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977–83).

  14. Charles O. Hucker, China’s Imperial Past: An Introduction to Chinese History and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 216.

  15. Leon Hurvitz and Tsai Heng-Ting, ‘The Introduction of Buddhism’, in Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (eds.), Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. i (New York: Columbia University Press, 2nd edn., 1999), pp. 425–6.

  16. Ibid., p. 425; the translators could not identify which ‘commentary’ is quoted here at the beginning of the passage.

  17. Chinese Buddhist scholars did, however, eventually succeed (by about the eighth century) in making China something of a second ‘homeland’ of Buddhism, complete with stories of prior sightings of Buddha in Chinese territory as well as prominent displays of Buddhist relics brought from India. On this see Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade.

  18. This striking feature was noted in The Descriptive Catalogue of the Imperial Library (1795) in the entry on Faxian’s book, Record of Buddhist Kingdoms. The commentator, well versed in the Chinese perspective, saw in this nothing more than an attempt to glorify Buddhism: ‘In this book we find India regarded as the Middle Kingdom, and China as a frontier country. This is because the ecclesiastics wish to do honour to their religion and is braggart-fiction which is not worth discussin.’

  19. Alberuni’s India, trans. E. C. Sachau, ed. A. T. Embree (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 19.

  20. In Legge’s translation (1965), p. 58.

  21. Quoted in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), vol. i, pp. 209–10.

  22. Jean-Claude Martzloff, A History of Chinese Mathematics, with a Foreword by Jacques Gernet and Jean Dhrombres (Berlin and London: Springer, 1997), p. 90.

  23. Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. iii (1959), pp. 146–8.

  24. Martzloff, A History of Chinese Mathematics, p. 91.

  25. John Kieschnick, The impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 166.

  26. Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. ii (1956), p. 427.

  27. Needham also points to the possibility that some Chinese ideas that appear to have been influenced by Indian Buddhism might have been ‘really Taoist’ (vol. iii, p. 427).

  28. See Bagchi, India and China, pp. 249–51.

  29. See Howard Eves, An Introduction to the History of Mathematics (New York: College Publishing House, 1990), p. 237: and Martzloff, A History of Chinese Mathematics, p. 100.

  30. Kaiyvan Zhanjing, in Pinyin, is often referred to as Khai-Yuan Chan Ching in earlier spelling.

  31. See Needh
am, Science and Civilization in China, vol. iii (1959), p. 202; also pp. 12 and 37. Note that Needham’s spelling of the Chinese version of Gautama’s name, ‘Chhütan’, corresponds to ‘Qutan’ in Pinyin, and he was referred to in that spelling earlier as ‘Qutan Xida’. Yang Jingfeng is spelt as Ching-Feng in Needham’s description. A general account of Indian calendrical systems is presented in my ‘India through Its Calendars’, Little Magazine, 1 (2000); Essay 15 below.

  32. Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture, pp. 199–214.

  33. Yi Jing, A Record of the Buddhist Religions as Practised in India and Malay Archipelago, trans. Takakusu, p. 169.

  34. Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture, p. 164.

  35. Wm. Theodore de Bary, ‘Neo-Confucian Education’, in de Bary and Bloom (eds.), Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. i, p. 820.

  36. From the translation of Legge, The Travels of Fa-Hien or Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (1993), p. 79.

  37. Trans. Bagchi, India and China, p. 134.

  ESSAY 9. TRYST WITH DESTINY

  1. I have discussed this issue in ‘Democracy and Secularism in India’, in Kaushik Basu, India’s Emerging Economy: Problems and Prospects in the 1990s and Beyond (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), which contains a number of fine essays providing helpful assessments from different perspectives.

  2. A collection of wide-ranging investigations of continuing social inequalities in India and the policy issues they raise can be found in Ramachandra Guha and Jonathan P. Parry (eds.), Institutions and Inequalities: Essays in Honour of André Béteille (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  3. On these and related assessments, see Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, India: Development and Participation (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  4. For the economic case for the reforms introduced by Manmohan Singh, see the essays included in Isher Judge Ahluwalia and I. M. D. Little (eds.), India’s Economic Reforms and Development: Essays for Manmohan Singh (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  5. A perceptive – and upbeat – diagnosis of India’s achievements and prospects in the global economic route can be found in Gurcharan Das’s forceful book, India Unbound (London: Viking/Penguin Books, 2000). See also his later study, The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change (London: Penguin Books, 2002). A less buoyant assessment of the process of economic reform in India, China and Russia can be found in Prem Shankar Jha, The Perilous Road to the Market (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

  6. On this, see Drèze and Sen, India: Development and Participation. See also Angus Deaton and Jean Dréze, ‘Poverty and Inequality in India: A Reexamination’, Economic and Political Weekly, 7 Sept. 2002. See also the large literature on Indian poverty that is cited in these writings.

  ESSAY 10. CLASS IN INDIA

  1. In the Nehru Lecture on which this essay is based, I not only paid tribute to Nehru as a maker of modern India, but also celebrated the intellectual contributions of a visionary thinker. For example, Nehru’s attempts at radically re-examining the history of India and of the world in his two remarkable collections (The Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History) were innovative as well as inspirational, and the underlying visions deserve more systematic attention than they have tended to get.

  2. On the interdependences between different sources of adversity, see also Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss, Reinventing India (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), and Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, India: Development and Participation (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  3. See my Inequality Reexamined (Oxford: Clarendon Press, and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); and jointly with Jean Drèze, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and India: Development and Participation.

  4. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

  5. See Peter Svedberg, Poverty and Undernutrition: Theory, Measurement and Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also S. R. Osmani, ‘Hunger in South Asia: A Study in Contradiction’, and Peter Svedberg, ‘Hunger in India: Facts and Challenges’, Little Magazine, Dec. 2001.

  6. See Nevin Scrimshaw, ‘The Lasting Damage of Early Malnutrition’, World Food Programme, mimeographed, 31 May 1997.

  7. See Siddiq Osmani and Amartya Sen, ‘The Hidden Penalties of Gender Inequality: Fetal Origins of Ill-Health’, Economics and Human Biology, 1 (2003).

  8. I have discussed this issue, jointly with Jean Dréze, in India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, and also in its follow-up study, India: Development and Participation.

  9. See particularly the PROBE report: Public Report on Basic Education in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  ESSAY II. WOMEN AND MEN

  1. I have addressed this issue in ‘Many Faces of Gender Inequality’, New Republic, 17 Sept. 2001, and Frontline, Nov. 2001.

  2. The nature and significance of this distinction have been discussed in my ‘Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lecture 1984’, Journal of Philosophy, 83 (Apr. 1985), and Inequality Reexamined (Oxford: Clarendon Press, and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Related empirical issues are discussed in my Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  3. The discussion that follows draws on my earlier essay, ‘Many Faces of Gender Inequality’.

  4. ‘India and Africa: What Do We Have to Learn from Each Other?’, in Kenneth Arrow (ed.), The Balance between Industry and Agriculture in Economic Development (London: Macmillan, 1988).

  5. The numbers as well as the causal influences that tend to produce ‘missing women’ were presented in my ‘More Than a Hundred Million Women Are Missing’, New York Review of Books, Christmas Number 1990, and in ‘Missing Women’, British Medical Journal, 304 (Mar. 1992). In the debate that followed, some commentators missed the fact that I had used the sub-Saharan African ratio as the standard, rather than the much higher European or North American ratio (which would have given far larger estimates of ‘missing women’). The misunderstanding led to the mistaken argument that I was comparing developing countries like China and India with advanced Western ones (in Europe and North America), which have high longevity and a different demographic history; see e.g. Ansley Coale, ‘Excess Female Mortality and the Balances of the Sexes in the Population: An Estimate of the Number of “Missing Females” ’ Population and Development Review, 17 (1991). In fact, however, my estimates of ‘missing women’ were based on contrasts within the so-called Third World, in particular using the sub-Saharan African ratio as the basis for estimating the numbers missing in Asia and North Africa.

  6. See Stephan Klasen, ‘ “Missing Women” Reconsidered’, World Development, 22 (1994), and his joint paper with Claudia Wink, ‘Missing Women: Revisiting the Debate’, Journal of Feminist Economics, 9 (July/Nov. 2003).

  7. Note, however, that the Chinese and Korean figures cover children between o and 4, whereas the Indian figures relate to children between o and 6. However, even after adjustment for age coverage, the relative positions remain much the same.

  8. A tiny exception, within the north and west of India, is the small territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, with less than a quarter of a million people altogether.

  9. On this see Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, India: Development and Participation (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 7, esp. pp. 232–5 and 257–66.

  10. There is, as identified in n. 8, the tiny exception of the minute territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli.

  11. There is also a possible political connection, in that the incidence of sex-specific abortion is, in general, significantly higher in those regions of the country in which religion-based politics has a strong hold (for example, Rajasthan, Gujarat or Jammu and Kashmir, in contrast with, say, Assam or West Bengal or Kerala). On the numerical asso
ciation, see Drèze and Sen, India: Development and Participation, sect. 7.5, pp. 257–62, and my essay ‘ “Missing Women” Revisited’, British Medical Journal, 327 (6 Dec. 2003). This association requires much further scrutiny before it can be concluded that the two phenomena are indeed causally linked directly, or perhaps indirectly through the influence of some third variable.

  12. See e.g. Irawati Karve, Kinship Organization in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1965); Pranab Bardhan, ‘On Life and Death Questions’, Economic and Political Weekly, Special Number, 9 (1974); David Sopher (ed.), An Exploration of India: Geographical Perspectives on Society and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980); Barbara Miller, The Endangered Sex (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Tim Dyson and Mick Moore, ‘On Kinship Structure, Female Autonomy, and Demographic Behaviour in India’, Population and Development Review, 9 (1983); Monica Das Gupta, ‘Selective Discrimination against Female Children in Rural Punjab’, Population and Development Review, 13 (1987); Alaka M. Basu, Culture, the Status of Women and Demographic Behaviour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); and Satish Balram Agnihotri, Sex Ratio Patterns in the Indian Population (New Delhi: Sage, 2000).

  13. See William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys (New York: Norton, 1989), pp. 504–8.

  14. See Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  15. World Health Organization, Handbook of Human Nutrition Requirement (Geneva: WHO, 1974).

  16. See the empirical literature cited in my Development as Freedom. Among later contributions, see particularly Gita Sen, Asha George and Pireska Östlin (eds.), Engendering International Health: The Challenge of Equity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).

  17. I have tried to discuss the importance of freedom of thought for rationality as well as freedom in general in the Introduction to my Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,200 2).