by Amartya Sen
*On this general issue, see my ‘The Reach of Reason: East and West’, New York Review of Books, 47 (20 July 2000), repr. as Essay 13. See also Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, ‘Internal Criticism and Indian Rationalist Traditions’, in Michael Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), and Bimal Matilal, Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
†In fairness to Western expertise on India, it must be conceded that there has never been any lack of Occidental interest in what may be called the ‘carnal sciences’, led by the irrepressible Kāmasūtra and Anaṇgaraṇga.
*Ram Mohun Roy was one of the pioneering reformers in nineteenth-century India, whose intellectual contributions matched his public work and leadership. In his far-reaching history of the emergence of the modern world, C. A. Bayly illuminatingly discusses the role of Ram Mohun Roy, ‘who made in two decades an astonishing leap from the status of a late-Moghul state intellectual to that of the first Indian liberal’, and who ‘independently broached themes that were being simultaneously developed in Europe by Garibaldi and Saint-Simon’ (The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, p. 293). Ram Mohun Roy’s love of reasoned arguments combined well with the independence and reach of his mind.
*This is indeed a central issue in ‘multiculturalism’ which has become a matter of much contention in contemporary Europe and America. The denial of swīkriti can be illustrated, for example, by the persecution of Turkish immigrants in Germany and by Lord Tebbit’s more amiable ‘cricket yardstick’, to wit, you cannot be accepted to be truly settled in England unless you support the English cricket team in test matches.
†On class- and gender-based inequalities, see Essays 10 and 11 below. I have discussed a particularly elementary – and brutal – aspect of gender inequality in ‘Missing Women’, British Medical Journal, 304 (7 Mar. 1992), and ‘Missing Women Revisited’, British Medical Journal, 327 (6 Dec. 2003), and in my joint book with Jean Drèze, India: Development and Participation (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also the large literature on these inequalities that is cited in these works.
*Many of the ‘challenges’ that India faces in the new millennium link closely with continuing inequalities in India; see Romila Thapar (ed.), India: Another Millennium (New Delhi and London: Penguin Books, 2000).
*See the discussion of these ‘rights’ and their practical usability in Drèze and Sen, India: Development and Participation, especially pp. 184–8, 336–40, 369–79.
*There is also the further issue of the undermining of the role of deprived groups, for example women, through the belittling ideology of sectarian politics. In the context of the Hindutva movement, see the problems identified in Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Religion, Community, Cultural Nationalism (Delhi: Permanent Black, and Indian University Press, 2001), and also Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (eds.), Women and the Hindu Right (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995), among other contributions in this area.
†General anti-upper-caste movements, in fact, played an important part in the transformation of Kerala in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by working for more egalitarian sharing of social benefits, for example of basic education and healthcare. On this, see V. K. Ramachandran, ‘Kerala’s Development Achievements’, in Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (eds.), Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
*There was, of course, some plasticity about the exact borders of what counts as India, but such ambiguity is a common feature of nearly all territorial delineations. Indeed, there is considerable dispute even today about where, say, India ends and China begins, on the northern borders.
†Ujjain had to compete initially with Benares, which is an older city. The early astronomical work Paulisa Siddhānta, which preceded Āryabhaṭa’s major breakthrough in the fifth century, focused its attention on longitudes at three places in the world: Ujjain, Benares and Alexandria.
*Essay 12 goes specifically into the nuclear issue. See also the literature cited there, and also Drèze and Sen, India: Development and Participation, ch. 8, Arundhati Roy, War Talk (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003), and other recent writings on the terrible insecurities involved. Pervez Hoodbhoy’s documentary film Pakistan and India: Under the Nuclear Shadow and Anand Patwardhan’s film War and Peace also provide well-informed and well-reasoned critiques of the nuclear policies of the two countries and bring out starkly the seriousness of the problem both countries face.
*The Indian press can take some pride in its reach and independence over a long period. However, the rapid expansion of the breadth and coverage of parts of the Pakistani news media is among the most significant developments in South Asia. The tradition of non-sectarianism, particularly advanced by periodicals led by the excellent Friday Times and the Herald, finds considerable reflection in the daily papers, including the Dawn, the Daily Times, the Nation and others.
*Octavio Paz, In Light of India (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), p. 133.
*See Kshiti Mohan Sen, Medieval Mysticism of India, with a Foreword by Rabindranath Tagore, trans. from Bengali by Manomohan Ghosh (London: Luzac, 1930), and Hinduism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, 2005). His Bengali books include not only investigations of the ancient Hindu texts (often focusing on social issues), but also of the ‘medieval’ religious schools that drew on both Hinduism and Islam. His Bengali books are still very widely read, particularly those on Kabir, Dadu and the Bauls, and on the scriptural diversities on the subject of the caste system and women’s social status.
*This book, called Hinduism and first published in 1961, will be reissued soon by Penguin Books, with a new Foreword, written by the present author.
*Rabindranath Tagore was keen to preserve the obvious distinction between mythological tales and historical truths: ‘the story of the Rāmāyaṇa’ is not to be interpreted as ‘a matter of historical fact’ but ‘in the plane of ideas’, as a marvellous parable of ‘reconciliation’ (A Vision of India’s History, Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1951, p. 10).
†There are also several distinct versions of the Rāmāyaṇa, varying with region and community within India, offering somewhat different accounts of what was meant to have happened in this epic story. The versions of the Rāmāyaṇa known in South-East Asia, for example in Thailand and Indonesia, include further variations.
*The insecurities to which some minorities (particularly Muslims) have recently been subjected clearly violate the right to equal treatment that all Indian citizens have reason to expect. That basic human right was shamefully violated in the recent barbarities, in 2002, in Gujarat. The underlying issues are insightfully discussed by Rafiq Zakaria, Communal Rage in Secular India (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2002).
*The far-reaching role of plurality and choice in the idea of ‘identity’ is discussed in my Romanes Lecture at Oxford University, published as Reason before Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and my book on identity to be published by Norton, New York.
†See Essay 8, and also my paper ‘Passage to China’, in New York Review of Books, 2 Dec. 2004.
*There is a connection here with the general point that Shashi Tharoor makes powerfully that ‘the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts’ (India: Midnight to the Millennium, New York: Arcade, 1997, p. 5).
*Even though Aurangzeb certainly had much intolerance, it is interesting to note that he too had Hindu scholars and musicians in his court in positions of importance.
†These historical connections are discussed more fully in Essay 14.
‡In fact, Sir William Jones, the founder of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, who did so much to expand Sanskrit scholarship in India and to spread it abroad, was first introduced, as a Persian scholar, to the Upaniṣads, by Dara Shikoh’s translation.
*The importance of
the identity issue for the diaspora is discussed in Essay 4.
*For the sake of clarity, we have to distinguish between three distinct errors that are conflated together in this invented history: (1) the spurious claim of the indigenous origin of Sanskrit and the Vedas (denying their Indo-European roots); (2) the absurd belief in the Sanskrit-based nature of the Indus civilization (despite all evidence to the contrary); and (3) the manifestly false affirmation that the Vedas contain much sophisticated mathematics and many scientific discoveries (even though non-partisan readers cannot find them there). The third claim, by the way, also has the effect of implicitly asserting that Āryabhaṭa or Varāhamihira or Brahmagupta were not original in the fifth to the seventh centuries: their far-reaching scientific ideas and mathematical results had been, it was implied, known all along from ancient Vedic times, for more than two thousand years.
*Also, as discussed in Essay 1, the Indian understanding of secularism, which has emerged mainly from its history of tolerant pluralism, is inclined towards favouring neutrality of the state between members of different religious communities.
*It is particularly important in this context to see the distinction, well analysed by Ayesha Jalal, between ‘religion as faith’ and ‘religion as identity’; see her Self and Sovereignty (London: Routledge, 2000).
*Vajpayee is reported to have said: ‘It is very difficult to say what all the reasons are for the defeat [of the BJP] in the elections but one impact of the violence was we lost the elections’ (see ‘Gujarat bloodbath cost us dearly: Vajpayee’, Times of India, 12 June 2004).
*Some general issues of identity are discussed in Essay 16 below.
*See the discussion of ‘the magisterial view’ in Essay 7 below.
†One of the oddities of the intellectually underinformed world of the Hindutva movement is the chastisement that it offers to the Arab world. The international head of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Praveen Togadia, whose knowledge of science cannot far exceed his political wisdom, is even on record asking ‘Indian Muslims to get their genetics tested’, to rule out the possibility that ‘the blood of Arabia’ may ‘flow in their blood’ (‘Togadia Said It, and He’s Proud of It’, Indian Express, 21 Oct. 2002). The grossness of this gratuitous counsel is particularly galling, not just because of its moral crudity and scientific stupidity, but also because of Togadia’s evident ignorance of the generosity and fairness with which the Arab authors have, historically, tended to treat the creative works of Hindu intellectuals (on this see Essay 7 below). In fact, Hindu mathematics became known in the Christian West mainly through the efforts of Muslim Arabs.
*These and other Millian diagnoses are more fully discussed in Essay 7 below.
*Buddhism also had the effect, typically, of enhancing the social importance of general literacy. The continuing influence of this can, to a considerable extent, be seen in the relatively high levels of literacy in countries in which Buddhism has survived, from Japan and Korea, to Thailand and Sri Lanka, and even in an otherwise miserable Burma. The Buddhist commitment clearly gave way to other priorities in the thousand years after its effective exit from India.
*There were early attempts at printing by Indian Buddhists also, but with far less success. Yi Jing, a Chinese scholar who visited India in the seventh century, talks of Buddhist images on silk and paper in India. On this and other early attempts at printing, see Essay 8 below, and the illuminating assessment of the different attempts by Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. V, part i, pp. 148–50.
†The influences going in both directions between these two countries are discussed in Essay 8 below, and also in ‘Passage to China’, New York Review of Books, 2 Dec. 2004.
*The relevance of these changes and the tasks that remain to be urgently taken up are discussed in Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, India: Development and Participation (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); see also Essay 9 below.
*I had initially hoped that, despite all its transgressions, the Hindutva movement would have the good effect of enhancing the study of Sanskrit in India, on which there were many declarations of intent. This expectation has not, however, been substantially realized, perhaps because so few of the Hindutva advocates seem to know Sanskrit, but also because many enthusiasts for ‘Hindu traditions’ evidently prefer to rely on garbled ‘summaries’ of the Vedas and the Rāmāyaṇa, combined with ‘rewritten’ Indian history, rather than looking for the classical documents themselves.
*On this and related issues, see especially Sheldon Pollock, ‘India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500’, Daedalus, 127 (1998). Pollock discusses the vernacularization that occurred in the early centuries of the second millennium, following a long period of international dominance of Sanskrit, when ‘Sanskrit literary texts circulated from Central Asia to Sri Lanka and from Afghanistan to Annam, and participating in such a literary culture meant participating in a vast ecumene’ (p. 45).
†Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s far-reaching work, for example, is at its productive best in its reactive mode. She writes, in a self-descriptive passage: ‘I am viewed by the Marxists as too codic, by feminists as too male-dominated, by indigenous theorists as too committed to Western theory. I am uneasily pleased about this’ (The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym, New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 69–70; italics added). These arguments can indeed be interesting as well as constructive, and Gayatri Spivak, as the quintessential ‘argumentative Indian’ (if I may so describe a lifelong friend), need not be so ‘uneasy’ about her justified delight in these dialectics.
*I discuss Tagore’s critique of intellectual isolation in Essay 5 below.
*The original publication of this essay in the New York Review of Books, on 26 June 1997, corresponded roughly with the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence on 15 August 1947, and the occasion is referred to in the text. The essay is also included in Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein (eds.), India: A Mosaic (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000). For helpful discussions I am most grateful to Akeel Bilgrami, Sissela Bok, Sugata Bose, Supratik Bose, Krishna Dutta, Rounaq Jahan, Salim Jahan, Marufi Khan, Andrew Robinson, Nandana Sen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Shashi Tharoor.
*I have tried to analyse these ‘exotic’ approaches to India (along with other Western approaches) in ‘India and the West’, New Republic, 7 June 1993, and in Essay 7 below.
*Tagore himself vacillated over the years about the merits of his own translations. He told his friend Sir William Rothenstein, the artist: ‘I am sure you remember with what reluctant hesitation I gave up to your hand my manuscript of Gitanjali, feeling sure that my English was of that amorphous kind for whose syntax a school-boy could be reprimanded.’ These – and related – issues are discussed by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, ‘The “Foreign Reincarnation” of Rabindranath Tagore’, Journal of Asian Studies, 25 (1966), reprinted, along with other relevant papers, in her Counterpoints: Essays in Comparative Literature (Calcutta: Prajna, 1985).
*Satyajit Ray, the film director, has argued that, even in Tagore’s paintings, ‘the mood evoked … is one of a joyous freedom’ (Ray, Foreword to Andrew Robinson, The Art of Rabindranath Tagore, London: André Deutsch, 1989).
*Martha Nussbaum initiates her wide-ranging critique of patriotism (in a debate that is joined by many others) by quoting this passage from The Home and the World (in Martha C. Nussbaum et al., For Love of Country, ed. Joshua Cohen, Boston: Beacon Press, 1996, pp. 3–4).
*It was, however, published in the Manchester Guardian shortly after it was meant to be published in Izvestia. On this see Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 297.
*I have tried to discuss the linkage between democracy, political incentives and prevention of disasters in Resources, Values and Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984, repr. 1997), ch
. 19, and in my presidential address to the American Economic Association, ‘Rationality and Social Choice’, American Economic Review, 85 (1995).
*This essay is an abridged version of the text of the Satyajit Ray Lecture, given at Nandan in Calcutta on 22 December 1995, and published as Our Culture, Their Culture (Calcutta: Nandan, 1996). Another version of the text, also abridged, was published in New Republic, 1 April 1996.
*As a postscript, I can express much happiness that the extraordinary talents of Meera Nair – which were absolutely clear even in Salaam Bombay!, despite what I thought was a serious flaw – have since then found predictable expression in her later films, which have established Meera Nair as one of the leading directors of our time.
*This essay draws on an earlier article entitled ‘India and the West’, New Republic, 7 June 1993. For helpful discussions, I am grateful to Akeel Bilgrami, Sugata Bose, Barun De, Jean Drèze, Ayesha Jalal, Dharma Kumar, V. K. Ramachandran, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Emma Rothschild, Lloyd Rudolph, Suzanne Rudolph, Ashutosh Varshney, Myron Weiner, Leon Wieseltier and Nur Yalman.