by Amartya Sen
18. Gender divisions within the family are sometimes studied formally as ‘bargaining problems’, taking off from Nash’s classic framework, but introducing critically important variations in its exact formulation. The literature includes, among other contributions, Marilyn Manser and Murray Brown, ‘Marriage and Household Decision Making: A Bargaining Analysis’, International Economic Review, 21 (1980); M. B. McElroy and M. J. Horney, ‘Nash Bargained Household Decisions: Toward a Generalization of Theory of Demand’, International Economic Review, 22 (1981); Shelly Lundberg and Robert Pollak, ‘Noncooperative Bargaining Models of Marriage’, American Economic Review, 84 (1994).
19. Attempts to discuss the causal influences and the implicit ethics underlying the treatment of cooperative conflicts within the family can be found in my Resources, Values and Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), chs. 5 and 16, and ‘Gender and Cooperative Conflict, in Irene Tinker (ed.), Persistent Inequalities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). See also Nancy Folbre, ‘Hearts and Spades: Paradigms of Household Economics’, World Development, 14 (1986); J. Brannen and G. Wilson (eds.), Give and Take in Families (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987); and Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (eds.), Beyond Economic Man (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), among other contributions.
20. See the discussion and the large literature cited in my joint books with Jean Drèze, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and India: Development and Participation.
21. Mamta Murthi, Anne-Catherine Guio and Jean Drèze, ‘Mortality, Fertility and Gender Bias in India: A District Level Analysis’, Population and Development Review, 21 (1995), and also in Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also Jean Drèze and Mamta Murthi, ‘Fertility, Education and Development: Evidence from India’, Population and Development Review, 27 (2001).
22. See, among other important contributions, J. C. Caldwell, ‘Routes to Low Mortality in Poor Countries’, Population and Development Review, 12 (1986); and J. R. Behrman and B. L. Wolfe, ‘How Does Mother’s Schooling Affect Family Health, Nutrition, Medical Care Usage, and Household Sanitation?’, Journal of Econometrics, 36 (1987).
23. See the papers of Mamta Murthi and Jean Drèze cited earlier, and also Drèze and Sen, India: Development and Participation.
24. On this see Dréze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, and India: Development and Participation.
25. This pioneering research has been led by Professor David Barker of Southampton University. See D. J. P. Barker, ‘Intrauterine Growth Retardation and Adult Disease,’ Current Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 3 (1993); ‘Fetal Origins of Coronary Heart Disease’, British Medical Journal, 311 (1995); Mothers, Babies and Diseases in Later Life (London: Churchill Livingstone, 1998). See also P. D. Gluckman, K. M. Godfrey, J. E. Harding, J. A. Owens, and J. S. Robinson, ‘Fetal Nutrition and Cardiovascular Disease in Adult Life’, Lancet, 341 (1995).
26. On this, see Siddiq Osmani and Amartya Sen, ‘The Hidden Penalties of Gender Inequality: Fetal Origins of Ill-Health’, Economics and Human Biology, 1 (2003).
ESSAY 12. INDIA AND THE BOMB
1. Times of India, 28 June 1998.
2. On this, see George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). See also T. Jayaraman, ‘Science, Politics and the Indian Bomb: Some Preliminary Considerations’, mimeographed, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, CIT Campus, Chennai, 2000.
3. Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik, New Nukes: India, Pakistan and Global Nuclear Disarmament (Oxford: Signal Books, 2000), p. 1.
4. For a graphic account of this episode and the chain of events related to it, see Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of Atomic Scientists(New York: Penguin Books, 1960).
5. Kenzaburo Oe, Hiroshima Notes, trans. David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa (New York: Grove Press, 1996), p. 182.
6. Pankaj Mishra, ‘A New, Nuclear India?’ in Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein (eds.), India: A Mosaic (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), p. 230. The essay is dated 28 May 1998.
7. Amitav Ghosh, ‘Countdown: Why Can’t Every Country Have the Bomb?’, New Yorker, 26 Oct. and 2 Nov. 1998. See also his later book, Countdown (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1999), which further develops some of his arguments.
8. N. Ram, Riding the Nuclear Tiger (New Delhi: Left Word Books, 1999), p. 106. See also his Preface to Silvers and Epstein (eds.), India: A Mosaic.
9. See Ghosh, Countdown.
10. Arundhati Roy, ‘The End of Imagination’, Frontline, 27 July 1998; repr. in The Cost of Living (New York: Modern Library, 1999). See also her Introduction to Silvers and Epstein (eds.), India: A Mosaic.
11. Arundhati Roy, ‘Introduction: The End of Imagination’, in Bidwai and Vanaik, New Nukes, p. xx.
12. Ghosh, ‘Countdown’, pp. 190 and 197.
13. C. Rammanohar Reddy, ‘Estimating the Cost of Nuclear Weaponization in India’, mimeographed, Hindu, Chennai, 1999.
14. Bidwai and Vanaik, New Nukes, pp. xiii, xv.
15. Eric Arnett, ‘Nuclear Tests by India and Pakistan’, in SIPRI Yearbook 1999 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 377.
16. Even though it is not clear whether Fernandes knew about the dates of the impending tests, he would certainly have seen – and in part been in charge of – the connection between Indian defence postures and its international pronouncements.
17. ‘Nuclear Anxiety: India’s Letter to Clinton on the Nuclear Testing’, New York Times, 13 May 1998, p. 4.
18. Mark W. Frazier, ‘China-India Relations since Pokhran II: Assessing Sources of Conflict and Cooperation’, Access Asia Review, National Bureau of Asian Research, 3 (July 2000), p. 10.
19. UNDP, Human Development Report 1994 (New York: United Nations, 1994), pp. 54–5, and table 3.6.
ESSAY 13. THE REACH OF REASON
1. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 7. Glover, a leading light in Oxford philosophy for many decades, is also the author of Responsibility (London: Routledge, and New York: Humanities Press, 1970) and Causing Death and Saving Lives(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), among other works of note. He is now the Director of Medical Law and Ethics at King’s College, London.
2. Trans. Vincent A. Smith, Akbar: The Great Mogul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), p. 257.
3. 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.
4. The last century, however, was subjected to a searching scrutiny by Eric Hobsbawm, a few years before the century and the millennium came to an end, in The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1916–1991 (London: M. Joseph, and New York: Vintage, 1994). See also Garry Wills, ‘A Reader’s Guide to the Century’, New York Review of Books, 15 July 1999.
5. An eminent example can be found in John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995). See also the perceptive review of this work by Charles Griswold, Political Theory, 27 (1999), pp. 274–81.
6. Kenzaburo Oe, Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha, 1995), pp. 118–19.
7. An important collection of perspectives on this is presented in Rajaram Krishnan, Jonathan M. Harris and Neva R. Goodwin (eds.), A Survey of Ecological Economics (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995). A far-reaching critique of the relationship between institutions and reasoned behaviour can be found in Andreas Papandreou, Externality and Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
8. I have discussed this question in my On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), ch. 1.
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p; 9. On this, see Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
10. David Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. E. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 172.
11. Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 102.
12. On the role of reasoning in the development of attitudes and feelings, see particularly T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
13. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: T. Cadell, 1790; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 319–20.
14. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 318.
15. Clifford Geertz, ‘Culture War’, New York Review of Books, 30 Nov. 1995. This is a review of Marshall Sahlins, How ‘Natives’ Think About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
16. Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The Illusions of Cosmopolitanism’, in Martha Nussbaum with Respondents, For Love of Country (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), pp. 74–5.
17. See Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, p. 69.
18. On this and related issues, see my Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 10, and the references cited there.
19. See my Human Rights and Asian Values (New York: Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 1997); a shortened version came out in New Republic, 14 and 21 July 1997.
20. See Basil Davidson, F. K. Buah and J. F. Ade Ajayi, A History of West Africa 1000–1800 (Harlow: Longman, new rev. edn., 1977), pp. 286–7.
21. See M. Athar Ali, ‘The Perception of India in Akbar and Abu’l Fazl’, in Habib, Akbar and His India, p. 220.
22. See Pushpa Prasad, ‘Akbar and the Jains’, in Habib, Akbar and His India, pp. 97–8. The one missing group seems to be the Buddhists (though one of the early translations included them in the account by misrendering the name of a Jain sect as that of Buddhist monks). Perhaps by then Buddhists were hard to find around Delhi or Agra.
23. See Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Akbar’s Personality Traits and World Outlook: A Critical Reappraisal’, in Habib, Akbar and His India, p. 96.
24. See also Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
25. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn., 1998), p. 150.
26. I discuss this issue in Reason before Identity: The Romanes Lecture for 1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
27. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994.
28. Alberuni’s India, trans. E. C. Sachau, ed. A. T. Embree (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 20. See also Essay 7.
ESSAY 14. SECULARISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
1. See e.g. T. N. Madan, ‘Coping with Ethnic Diversity: A South Asian Perspective’, in Stuart Plattner (ed.), Prospects for Plural Societies (Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society, 1984), and ‘Secularism in Its Place’, Journal of Asian Studies, 46 (1987); and Ashis Nandy, ‘An Anti-Secular Manifesto’, Seminar, 314 (1985), and ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance’, Alternatives, 13 (1988).
2. See Ashutosh Varshney’s helpful characterizations of different claims associated with ‘Hindu nationalism’, in his ‘Contested Meanings: Indian National Unity, Hindu Nationalism, and the Politics of Anxiety’, Daedalus, 122 (1993), pp. 230–31; see also Ashis Nandy, ‘The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the Fear of Self’, mimeographed paper, presented at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, April 1992.
3. Nandy, ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance’, pp. 188, 192. See also Madan, ‘Secularism in Its Place’.
4. On the history of this aspect of Indian laws, see John H. Mansfield, ‘The Personal Laws or a Uniform Civil Code?’, in Robert Baird (ed.), Religion and Law in Independent India (Delhi: Manohar, 1993), which also provides a balanced review of the pros and cons of the case for submerging different personal laws in India in a ‘uniform civil code’. See also Tahir Mahmood, Muslim Personal Law, Role of the State in the Indian Subcontinent (New Delhi: Vikas Pub. House, 1977; 2nd edn., Nagpur, 1983).
5. Constitution of India, Article 37.
6. This was done by the Supreme Court by giving priority – over the provisions of Islamic law for divorce settlements – to ‘section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure’, which requires a person of adequate means to protect from destitution and vagrancy their relations (including spouse, minor children, handicapped adult children and aged parents). For critical analyses of the rather complex considerations involved in the Shah Bano case, see Asghar Ali Engineer, The Shah Bano Controversy (Delhi: Ajanta Publishers, 1987), and Veena Das, Critical Events (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. IV. Also see Mansfield in Baird (ed.), Religion and Law in Independent India.
7. Mansfield in Baird (ed.), p. 140.
8. The Supreme Court had also taken this opportunity of commenting on the disadvantaged position of women in India (not just among the Muslims, but also among the Hindus), and had called for more justice in this field. The Shah Bano case did, in fact, get much attention from women’s political groups as well.
9. In fact, Azad was among the ‘traditionalist’ Muslims, as opposed to the ‘reformers’ (for example from the Aligarh school). On the intricacies of Azad’s religious and political attitudes, see Ayesha Jalal, ‘Exploding Communalism: The Politics of Muslim Identity in South Asia’, in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (eds.), Nationalism, Democracy and Development: Reappraising South Asian States and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). Jalal also discusses the much broader question of a general misfit between (1) the reformism–traditionalism division among Muslims in pre-partition India, and (2) the division between Muslims who favoured an undivided India and those who wanted a separate Pakistan. In particular, quite often the Muslim traditionalists opted for staying on in India (as Azad himself did), especially after the Khilafat movement.
10. In his perceptive paper, ‘Hindu/Muslim/Indian’ (Public Culture, 5 (1), Fall 1992), Faisal Devji begins with this (and another) quotation from Ambedkar, and goes on to scrutinize critically the relation between different identities (raising issues that are much broader than those addressed in this essay).
11. See also Nur Yalman, ‘On Secularism and Its Critics: Notes on Turkey, India and Iran’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 25 (1991). See also Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn, ‘Three Models of the Secular Constitution’, mimeographed, Williams College, 1995, and the literature cited there.
12. Whether or not Indian Muslims do this in any significant numbers, I ought to confess that this non-Muslim author has often done just that, either when the Pakistani team plays as well as it frequently does, or when a Pakistani win would make the test series (or the one-day series) more interesting.
13. Alberuni’s India, trans. E. C. Sachau, ed. A. T. Embree (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 22.
14. Ibid., p. 20.
15. See One Hundred Poems of Kabir, trans. Rabindranath Tagore (London: Macmillan, 1915), verse LXIX. See also Kshiti Mohan Sen, Hinduism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961, 2005), chs. 18 and 19, and his collection of Kabir’s poems and his Bengali commentary in Kabir (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1910, 1911), reissued with an Introduction by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1995).
ESSAY 15. INDIA THROUGH ITS CALENDARS
1. See The Oxford Companion to the Year, ed. Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 664.
2. See M. N. Saha and N. C. Lahiri, History of the Calendar (New Delhi: Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, 1992).<
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3. Ibid., pp. 252–3; also S. N. Sen and K. S. Shukla, History of Astronomy in India (New Delhi: Indian National Science Academy, 1985), p. 298.
4. Marquis Pierre-Simon de Laplace, as quoted in W. Brennand, Hindu Astronomy (London, 1896), p. 31.
5. On this, see O. P. Jaggi, Indian Astronomy and Mathematics (Delhi: Atma Ram, 1986), ch. 1.
6. E. M. Forster, ‘Nine Gems of Ujjain’, in Abinger Harvest (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1936, 1974), pp. 324–7
7. See Irfan Habib (ed.), Akbar and His India (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
ESSAY 16. THE INDIAN IDENTITY
1. Quoted in Lady Betty Balfour, The History of Lord Lytton’s Indian Administration 1876 to 1880 (London, 1899), p. 477.
2. F. R. Harris, Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata: A Chronicle of His Life (London: Blackie, 2nd edn., 1958), p. vii.
3. R. M. Lala, The Creation of Wealth (Bombay: IBH, 1981), p. 6.
4. Ibid., p. 47.
5. Lovat Fraser, Iron and Steel in India: A Chapter from the Life of Jamsetji N. Tata (Bombay: The Times Press, 1919), p. 3.
6. See S. B. Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade 1870–1914 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960), p. 199. The shifting trade pattern and its implications were investigated by the so-called Chamberlain Inquiry of 1895, Trade of the British Empire and Foreign Competition, C. 8449 of 1897.
7. Fraser, Iron and Steel in India, pp. 52–3.
8. Comparisons with alternative causal explanations are discussed in my paper, ‘The Commodity Pattern of British Enterprise in Early Indian Industrialization 1854–1914’, in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Economic History (Paris, 1965). I have examined the general relevance of values and commitments in behavioural choices in On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), and, more technically, in ‘Maximization and the Act of Choice’, Econometrica, 65 (1997), included in my Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).