The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  *Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1974), pp. 8629–30.

  *Theodore C. Sorenson, Kennedy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), p. 705. The ‘Kennedy Tapes’, too, bring out how close the world came to a nuclear annihilation.

  *This essay was previously published in the New York Review of Books, 20 July 2000. For helpful suggestions, I am most grateful to Sissela Bok, Mozaffar Qizilbash, Emma Rothschild and Thomas Scanlon.

  *I have tried to discuss the causes of famines and the policy requirements for famine prevention in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) and, jointly with Jean Drèze, in Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Famine prevention requires diverse policies, among which income creation is immediately and crucially important (for example, through emergency employment in public works programmes); but, especially for the long term, they also include expansion of production in general and food production in particular.

  *John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  *The different Indian calendars are discussed (both on their own and as ways of interpreting India’s history and traditions) in my essay ‘India through Its Calendars’, Little Magazine, 1 (May 2000), Essay 15 below.

  *This is a slightly revised version of an essay published in Kaushik Basu and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), Unravelling the Nation: Sectarian Conflict and India’s Secular Identity (Delhi: Penguin, 1996). For helpful discussion I am grateful to Kaushik Basu, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Akeel Bilgrami, Sugata Bose, Emma Rothschild and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

  †Ashutosh Varshney, ‘Contested Meanings: Indian National Unity, Hindu Nationalism, and the Politics of Anxiety’, Daedalus, 122 (1993), p. 231. See also his later book, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). The various components of the Hindutva movement were described in Essay 2 above.

  *In this context, see also Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

  *The historical lineage of this interpretation of secularism and some of the implications of this broader approach have been discussed in Essay 1, section headed ‘Understanding Secularism’.

  *Some of the arguments presented here draw on an earlier paper (my Nehru Lecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, on 5 Feb. 1993), published under the title ‘Threats to Indian Secularism’, in the New York Review of Books, 8 Apr. 1993. See also Akeel Bilgrami, ‘Two Concepts of Secularism’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 7 (1994).

  *I have touched on this question in my ‘India and the West’, New Republic, 7 June 1993. It is also discussed in Essay 7 above.

  †The emergence of Pakistan as a ‘Muslim state’, under the leadership of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, has a complex – and circumstantially quite contingent – history, on which see particularly Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  *As this essay, originally written in 1995, is republished in this volume a decade later, it is perhaps worth noting that India has, at this time, a Muslim President, a Sikh Prime Minister and a Christian head of the ruling party.

  *The importance of scepticism in Indian traditions was discussed in Essay 1, particularly in the section headed ‘Sceptics, Agnostics and Atheists’.

  *This document was discussed in Essay 1.

  *The case of Kashmir is, of course, different in several respects, including its separate history and the peculiar politics of its accession to India and its aftermath. The evident disaffection of a substantial part of the Kashmiri Muslim population relates to the very special political circumstances obtaining there and the treatment they have received respectively from both India and Pakistan. The Kashmir issue certainly demands political attention on its own (I am not taking up that thorny question here), but the special circumstances influencing the viewpoint of 4 million Kashmiri Muslims can scarcely be used to question the strong record of national loyalty and solidarity of more than 140 million Muslims in general in India.

  *In fact, Alberuni’s work and his translations of Indian mathematical and astronomical treatises had great influence in continuing the Arabic studies (well established by the eighth century) of Indian science and mathematics, which reached Europe through the Arabs.

  *On this, see Kshiti Mohan Sen, Hinduism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961, 2005). He discusses the interrelations in greater detail in his Bengali book Bharate Hindu Mushalmaner Jukto Sadhana (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1949; extended edn., 1990).

  *This issue was discussed in a broader context in Essay 3.

  †On the nature and influence of James Mill’s reading of Indian culture, see Essays 4 and 7.

  *This essay was first published in the Little Magazine, 1 (May 2000).

  *This essay is based on my Dorab Tata Memorial Lectures given in India (the first one in Mumbai, the second in New Delhi) in February 2001. I should acknowledge that some of the material that formed part of these lectures has been used in the introductory essays (Essays 1–4) in this volume. Those discussions are omitted here, except what has to be recapitulated for the coherence of the present essay, drawn on the two lectures.

  †Indeed, the history of the entrepreneurship of the Tatas was one of my principal concerns in a paper I wrote more than forty years ago: ‘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). A shortened version was published as ‘The Pattern of British Enterprise in India 1854–1914: A Causal Analysis’, in B. Singh and V. B. Singh (eds.), Social and Economic Change (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1967). The shorter version was made somewhat more intriguing through a small misprint – with the title of the paper making the heady claim that I was presenting a ‘casual’ analysis.

  *The literal meaning of the Sanskrit term svadeshi is ‘of one’s own country’, so that the name ‘Svadeshi Mills’ need not, in itself, convey anything more than these mills being designated as ‘domestic’. But the term had already become significantly assertive in Indian nationalist politics. Indeed, the industrial entrepreneurship of the Tatas would soon be championed as an object of considerable pride by the rapidly growing ‘Svadeshi’ movement, which would also urge Indians to buy ‘svadeshi’ goods.

  *The main argument was presented in my Commencement Address (‘Global Doubts’) at Harvard University in June 2000, and then more elaborately in ‘How to Judge Globalism’, American Prospect, 13 (Jan. 2002).

  *Japan’s demonstration, already apparent by the early twentieth century, that school education can greatly contribute to economic development was largely ignored in India.

  *See in particular Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).

  *In the original lecture, I went on from here to discuss other examples of multidirectional migration of ideas, such as the impact of Indian Buddhism on the development of printing in China, Korea and Japan, and the eventual use of that achievement in India itself. There was also a discussion of international interchange leading to innovations in mathematics and science between India and the Arabs and Europeans, on the West, and China and east Asia, on the East. These cases have been discussed elsewhere, particularly in Essays 1 and 6–8, and are therefore omitted here.

  *Essay 5 goes into some of the differences between Gandhi and Tagore.

  *The discussion that follows draws on the conceptual analyses presented in my 1998 Romanes Lecture at Oxford University, published as Reason before Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and the 2000 Annual Lecture of the British Academy, ‘Other People’, published both by the British Aca
demy and in a slightly shortened form in New Republic, 18 Dec. 2000.

  *This issue was discussed in Essay 3.

  †See my On Interpreting India’s Past (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1996); also published in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (eds.), Nationalism, Democracy and Development: Reappraising South Asian States and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  *The spread of Buddhism from India to nearly half the world is one of the great events of global history. For an excellent account of that remarkable process, see H. Bechert and Richard Gombrich, The World of Buddhism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987). See also Richard Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988).

  *See the discussion in Essay I of the presence of heterodox beliefs in India throughout its history going back even to the Rigveda.