by Sylvia Nasar
If Santiniketan was a tranquil oasis, it hardly escaped the upheavals of the time. At the time of his death in 1941, Tagore was deeply disenchanted by the West, professing to see little difference between the Allied and Axis powers. The war accelerated the final break with Britain. After Gandhi launched the “Quit India” movement in 1942, the British arrested sixty thousand Congress Socialist Party supporters, including Amartya Sen’s uncle; by end of that year, over one thousand people had been killed in anti-British riots. “My uncle was in preventive detention for a very long time,” Sen recalled. “Several other ‘uncles’ also were jailed, including one who died in prison. I grew up feeling the injustice of this.”
The 1943 Bengal famine—the consequence of wartime inflation, censorship, and imperial indifference rather than crop failures—destroyed the last remnant of respect for the British. The new viceroy, Lord Wavell, wrote to Churchill, the “Bengal famine was one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and damage to our reputation here both among Indians and foreigners in India is incalculable.”7 Sen later estimated that 3 million people, mostly poor fishermen and landless laborers, perished from starvation and disease.
At the time, for the boy of ten, the famine meant a steady stream of starving villagers who passed through Santiniketan in a desperate attempt to reach Calcutta. His grandfather allowed him to hand out rice to beggars, “but only as much as would fill a cigarette tin” and only one tin per family. Later, as a university student, he reflected on the fact that only the very poor and members of despised castes had starved, while he and his family—and, indeed, their entire class—remained unaffected. That observation was to inform his theory of famines as man-made, not natural, disasters.
Even more traumatic was the eruption of communal violence on the eve of independence. The idea of a multicultural Indian nation was very much alive in Santiniketan, and, traditionally, Muslims and Hindus achieved a higher degree of assimilation in Bengal than in other parts of India. Yet when religious conflict erupted on the eve of independence, it set neighbor against neighbor in a vast pogrom. Ashutosh Sen, along with the other Hindus on the faculty of Dhaka University, were forced to leave Dhaka in 1945.
On one of his last school holidays in his Dhaka home, Sen witnessed a horrific scene. A Muslim laborer named Kader Mia staggered into the family compound, screaming and covered in blood. Stabbed in the back by some Hindu rioters, he died later that day. “The experience was devastating for me,” recalled Sen. Mia told Sen’s father, who took him to a hospital, that his wife had pleaded with him to stay home that day. But his family had no food, so he had little choice but to go to the Hindu part of town to seek work. The realization that “extreme poverty can make a person a helpless prey,” Sen said, was to inspire his philosophical inquiry into the conflict between necessity and freedom.8 A more immediate effect, however, was a strong distaste for all forms of religious fanaticism and cultural nationalism.
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Presidency College, one of the most elite institutions of higher education in India, looks today much as it did in 1951, when Sen enrolled there, and, for that matter, much as it did in 1817 when British expats and Indian notables founded the Hindu College. Its faded pink stucco façade with peeling green shutters, the black plaques identifying the different rooms, the dim interiors with their ceiling fans and row upon row of long wooden benches, all evoke a long-bygone era. In the years immediately following independence, though, the college was a political hotbed. Sen arrived thinking he would study physics but quickly found economics of greater urgency and interest.
Thanks to the traditions of Indian higher education, Sen was introduced to classical works like Marshall’s Principles of Economics as well as new work like Hicks’s Value and Capital and Samuelson’s Foundations. (Later, at Trinity, he would be disappointed in the relative lack of mathematical sophistication of his Cambridge dons.) His principal passion, however, was politics, and before his first term ended, he was elected as one of the leaders of the Communist-dominated All India Students Federation. He read voraciously, skipped lectures, and spent most of his time debating Marx with his Stalinist friends in the coffeehouse on nearby College Street, a street that then as now was lined with hundreds of booksellers’ stalls.
Later he recalled, “[A]s I look back at the fields of academic work in which I have felt most involved throughout my life . . . they were already among the concerns that were agitating me most in my undergraduate days in Calcutta.”9 Those concerns were crystallized by a life-and-death crisis in his second year at Presidency. Just before his nineteenth birthday, Sen felt a pea-sized lump in the roof of his mouth. A street-corner GP dismissed it as a fish bone that had worked its way under the skin. The lump, however, didn’t disappear and, in fact, grew larger. After consulting a premed student who lived next door to him at the YMCA, he learned that cancers of the mouth were fairly common among Indian men. A few hours with a borrowed medical textbook convinced Sen that he was suffering from stage two squamous cell carcinoma.
It took months and the intervention of relatives and family friends to arrange a biopsy at Calcutta’s Chittaranjan Cancer Hospital. The biopsy confirmed his suspicions. At that time, a diagnosis of oral cancer was a virtual death sentence. Surgery generally only accelerated the spread of the cancer, and, as a result, most sufferers slowly suffocated as their tumors gradually blocked their windpipes. Radiation, the standard treatment in England and the United States since the turn of the century, was still too difficult and costly to be widely available in Calcutta. After reading about radiation in medical journals, Sen was finally able to locate a radiologist willing to treat him. The radiologist urged Sen to let him use a maximum dose, justifying the risk by saying, “I can’t repeat it.” For Sen, possible death from radiation sickness seemed preferable to certain death by suffocation.
The treatment was unpleasant, if not as awful as its aftermath. A mold was taken. A leaden mask was made. Radium needles were placed inside the mask. Like the hero of the Victor Hugo novel, Sen sat in a tiny hospital room with the mask screwed down “so there would be no movement.” The procedure was repeated every day for one week. “I sat there for four hours at a time and read,” Sen recalled. “Out of the window, I could see a tree. What a relief it was to see that one green tree.”
The dose was massive, some 10,000 rads—four or five times today’s standard dose. After he was sent home—his parents now lived in Calcutta—the effects of the radiation appeared: weeping skin, ulcers, bone pain, raw throat, difficulty in swallowing. “My mouth was like putty. I couldn’t go to class. I couldn’t eat solids. I lived in fear of infection. I couldn’t laugh without bleeding. It brought home to me the misery of human life.” That misery lasted for nearly six months. And these were only the immediate effects. Over time, radiation destroys bone and tissue, leads to necrosis and fractures, and destroys the teeth.
Cancer was a defining moment. For one thing, learning that you have a devastating illness—especially one that carries a social stigma, that’s taboo—isn’t just terrifying, it makes you feel polluted, powerless, outcast. The awful things Sen witnessed growing up were shocking, but they were happening to others. This was happening to him. It produced a lasting identification with others who were also hurting, voiceless, deprived.
Overcoming the cancer was also empowering. His mother, Amita, said, “I gave Amartya to God when he was nineteen.”10 But he has said that taking matters into his own hands left him with enormous confidence in his own instincts and initiative. “Psychologically I was in the driver’s seat,” he recalled. “I was aggressive. I was the one asking whether I would live. What was best? What could I do? I had a sense of victory.”
When he returned to his classes, he said, “I came back with a bang,” full of fresh purpose. He promptly got a first, won all sorts of prizes, including a debate prize. He applied to Trinity College in Cambridge, where Nehru had studied. He was rejected initially but, some months l
ater, unexpectedly summoned. His father spent half his slender capital to pay for the journey. The airfare on BOAC proved prohibitive, so in September 1953, just before his twentieth birthday, Sen sailed from Bombay to London on the same liner as the Indian women’s hockey team.
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In Cambridge, new miseries—darkness, cold, awful food, dreadful loneliness—awaited Sen. His teeth, addled by radiation, were a chronic source of pain and embarrassment. The landlady of his rooming house, who had begged the college not to send her “Coloreds,” fussed at him about such things as drawing the curtains at night. “You can’t see out, but they can see you,” she would say, as if he were a stupid child.
At the university, Sen encountered a political minefield, split by rancorous rivalries among Keynes’s disciples and critics. Indira Gandhi, who studied in Santiniketan for a year, once remarked that she learned an essential survival skill there; namely, “the ability to live quietly within myself, no matter what was happening outside.”11 Sen, too, got by on inner quiet, eagerly engaging with scholars from different sides of the ideological divide but without giving up his independent way of looking at things.
He did, however, fall under the spell of the brilliant and imperious Joan Robinson. Newly independent India was divided not just along ethnic lines but also between diametrically opposite visions of the future. Gandhians envisioned a spiritual and rural India of hand-loom weavers. Followers of Nehru saw Soviet-style central planning and a landscape dotted with dams and steel plants. Sen’s thesis, The Choice of Techniques (1960), criticized government planning in India by underscoring basic economic principles. After completing a second BA and finishing his thesis research, he returned to India, first teaching at Jadvapur University and, subsequently, at the newly formed Delhi School of Economics.
Had Sen stopped writing in the late 1960s, we would know him, if at all, as one of a generation of Indian development economists who favored Nehru’s formula of heavy industry, state-run enterprises, and self-sufficiency—a formula that produced disappointing results and that has since been disavowed by most economists, including Sen. But beginning around 1970, he shifted his intellectual focus sharply and produced a series of startling philosophical papers on social welfare that account for much of his influence today.
This burst of creativity followed a second life crisis. In the space of a year, he accepted a position at the London School of Economics, his father died of prostate cancer, and he was forced to confront the possibility that his own cancer had come back. Once in England, he underwent extensive reconstructive surgery when it turned out that his symptoms had been due to the delayed effects of his earlier radiation. After a long and difficult convalescence, he left his wife and two young daughters and fell passionately in love with Eva Colorni, an Italian economist who was the daughter of a prominent Socialist philosopher killed by Fascist forces in World War II. Eva encouraged Sen’s new philosophical interests and urged him to apply his ethical insights to urgent issues like poverty, hunger, and women’s inequality. He and Eva lived together in London from 1973 until her death from stomach cancer in 1985, and had two children together.
When Sen turned to ethics, Robinson advised her star pupil to “give up all that rubbish.” He ignored her counsel. At Eva’s urging, he made a detailed study of what he saw as a particularly grim consequence of authoritarian rule, notably famines. “I once weighed nearly 250 children from two villages in West Bengal to check their nutritional status related to income, sex, etc,” he said. “If anyone asked me what I was doing, I would have said, I was doing welfare economics.”12
Famines like the one in Bengal, Sen argued, occurred despite adequate food supplies when higher prices and joblessness robbed the most vulnerable groups in society of their “entitlements” to food and when the lack of elections and a free press stifled public pressure on the government to intervene. By contrast, Robinson applauded draconian policies such as the Great Leap Forward—and, as Sen later pointed out with some bitterness, “failed utterly to detect the biggest famine in modern history,” in which an estimated 15 million to 30 million Chinese perished in the aftermath of forced collectivization. He never broke with her publicly, but by the time Robinson died in 1983, they had not corresponded in years.
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In the 1970s and 1980s, Sen proposed a general theory of social welfare that attempted to integrate economists’ traditional concern for material well-being with political philosophers’ traditional concern with individual rights and justice. Objecting to the utilitarian creed of his fellow economists, which called for judging material progress chiefly by the growth of GDP per head—and citing a long tradition from Aristotle to Friedrich von Hayek and John Rawls—Sen argued that freedom, not opulence per se, was the true measure of a good society, a primary end as well as a principal means of economic development. He wished, as he says in his book on India, to “judge development by the expansion of substantive human freedoms—not just by economic growth . . . or technical progress, or social modernization . . . [These] have to be appraised . . . in terms of their actual effectiveness in enriching the lives and liberties of people—rather than taking them to be valuable in themselves.”13
Sen asked three separate questions to which he proposed answers: Can society make choices in a way that reflects individual citizen’s preferences? Can individual rights be reconciled with economic welfare? And, lastly, what is the measure of a just society?
In the 1930s and 1940s, libertarians worried that the West would trade its commitment to political liberalism for economic security. A generation later, Sen worried that India and other third world nations would sacrifice democracy in the race for economic growth. How, he wondered, could conflicts between social action and individual rights be resolved?
When Sen took up the issue in the late 1960s, two powerful challenges had been laid down to the possibility of reconciling the two. One came from Friedrich von Hayek, who feared that “specialists” and specific interests would impose their own preferences on everyone. By substituting government plans for individual plans, he argued, the authorities were imposing a monolithic set of priorities on individuals who would prefer to make their own trade-offs among diverse alternatives.
The other, even more daunting, challenge came from a wholly unexpected quarter: a highly theoretical tract, Social Choice and Individual Values, published in 1951 by a politically moderate American economist, Kenneth Arrow. Sen first encountered Arrow’s impossibility theorem at Presidency College. The theorem appeared to be a logically unassailable proof that no system of voting could produce results that reflected the preferences of individual citizens. Except when there was complete consensus, all voting procedures yielded outcomes that were, in some sense, undemocratic. Most of Sen’s college friends were Stalinists. While Sen shared their enthusiasm for equality, he “worried about political authoritarianism.” Was Arrow’s theorem a rationale for dictatorship?
Since Arrow’s result could not be challenged directly, Sen chose to probe Arrow’s seemingly innocuous assumptions—the conditions any democratic procedure had to meet. In Collective Choice and Social Welfare, published in 1970, he argued that one of Arrow’s axioms—which ruled out comparisons between different citizens’ well-being—was not, in fact, essential, and was indeed arbitrary. If such comparisons were allowed, Sen suggested, the impossibility result no longer held. Sen, and researchers inspired by him, went on to pinpoint the conditions that would enable decision-making rules consistent with individual rights to work. In fact, Sen’s “comparative metrics of well-being” launched his pursuit of yardsticks that could prod democratic governments to adopt social reforms, and launched a long-running debate over the best ways to define and measure poverty.
Is there a conflict between individual rights and economic welfare? Sen proceeded to mount a much broader attack on utilitarianism, inspired, in part, by John Rawls’s magisterial 1971 A Theory of Justice, widely seen as a philosophical justification
for the modern welfare state. Utilitarians, including most economists, believe that society needs only to take account of the welfare of its citizens. Rights enter their thinking, if at all, only indirectly, as contributors to happiness or satisfaction. In a twist on Jeremy Bentham’s rule “the greatest good for the greatest number,” Rawls’s “difference principle” states that a just society should maximize the welfare of the worst-off group. This, of course, is a very utilitarian idea. But Rawls’s primary focus is on individual rights, which take precedence over material well-being, and which economists have traditionally ignored.
In another 1970 journal article, “The Impossibility of the Paretian Liberal,” Sen made an urgent case for paying attention to rights as well as welfare, pointing out a potentially serious conflict between the two.14 Most economists accept a criterion for economic welfare far less demanding than those proposed by Bentham or Rawls. The optimal state, argued the nineteenth-century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, is one in which it is no longer possible to make anyone better off without making someone else worse off. In other words, it is a society in which all conflict-free opportunities for improving overall utility have been exploited.
But Sen showed that even this seemingly innocuous standard can run afoul of individual rights. When many people define their own welfare in terms of restricting the freedom of others—Muslim clerics are happier if schooling is prohibited for girls, Catholic nuns feel better if abortion is illegal, parents like the idea of outlawing recreational drugs—free choice can conflict with Pareto optimality.