by Amartya Sen
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE ARGUMENTATIVE INDIAN
‘A kaleidoscope of subjects and ideas … Amartya Sen’s vision for a pluralistic and secular India, which comes out so vividly in this book, deserves wholehearted respect and endorsement. He writes with gentle and persuasive skill and with intellectual rigour, encompassing history, sociology, culture and economics’
Pavan K. Varma, Independent
‘A cosmopolitan view of India’s cultural and political history … stimulating … elegantly synthesized’
Pankaj Mishra, Guardian
‘Of the stream of eloquent Indians who have enlivened modern intellectual life in arenas such as history and economics, Amartya Sen is perhaps the most versatile and most determinedly argumentative … a distinguished inheritor of the tradition of public philosophy and reasoning – Roy, Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru’
Sunil Khilnani, Financial Times
‘This is how history should be written, not as a dry narrative about dead kings or a hysterical diatribe pushing a certain agenda, but as an account of ideas and arguments that have been passed on from hand to hand for years and that remain relevant even today. It’s a strange reflection, but India might have found its most accessible, most intellectually stimulating historian in the person of a Nobel Prize-winning economist’
Nilanjana S. Roy, Business Standard
‘Sen has explored his theme in the Indian context with the dexterity and doggedness of a Sherlock Holmes. And, as in all good detective stories, it is the measured delineation of the plot that grabs you more than the resolution of the mystery … the celebrated economist has offered a journey through India’s cultural and social heterodoxy which challenges the reader’s understanding and observation at every step’
Sahara Time
‘Sen is a probing reader of India’s past – not just because of the depth of his knowledge but because of his appreciation of the rules of a good argument … this collection of beautiful essays, at ease with India’s many-sided past and its historical role as the confluence of many world religions and cultures, is for the seeking reader an introduction as good as any to matters Indological’
Chandrahas Choudhury, Scotland on Sunday
‘Essential reading for anybody who hopes to understand India’
Business Today
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1998–2004. His most recent books are Development as Freedom and Rationality and Freedom. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
AMARTYA SEN
The Argumentative Indian
Writings on Indian History,
Culture and Identity
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Allen Lane 2005
Published in Penguin Books 2006
Copyright © Amartya Sen, 2005
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The publishers are grateful for permission to reproduce the following illustrations: Tagore and Gandhi at Santiniketan, © Akg-Images; ‘Xuanzang [Hiuan-tsang] returning to China with Sanskrit manuscripts from India in 645 AD’, © Fujita Museum of Art, Osaka; ‘Arjuna hits the target’ © British Library, London.
Earlier versions of some of the essays in this book have appeared in the following publications: New York Review of Books, Essays 5, 8, 13; as Our Culture, Their Culture (Calcutta: Nandan, 1996), Essay 6 (abridged earlier version); New Republic, Essay 6 (abridged earlier version, 12; Daedalus, Essay 7; Financial Times, Essay 9; Kaushik Basu and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds, Unravelling the Nation: Sectarian Conflict and India’s Secular Identity (Delhi: Penguin, 1996), Essay 14; Little Magazine, Essay 15.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196479-9
To my sister, Supurna Datta
Contents
Preface
Diacritical Notation for Sanskrit Words
PART ONE
Voice and Heterodoxy
1. The Argumentative Indian
2. Inequality, Instability and Voice
3. India: Large and Small
4. The Diaspora and the World
PART TWO
Culture and Communication
5. Tagore and His India
6. Our Culture, Their Culture
7. Indian Traditions and the Western Imagination
8. China and India
PART THREE
Politics and Protest
9. Tryst with Destiny
10. Class in India
11. Women and Men
12. India and the Bomb
PART FOUR
Reason and Identity
13. The Reach of Reason
14. Secularism and Its Discontents
15. India through Its Calendars
16. The Indian Identity
Notes
Index of Names
General Index
Preface
These essays on India were written over the last decade – about half of them over the last couple of years. The first four, which make up the first part of the collection, introduce and explain the principal themes pursued in this book, related to India’s long argumentative tradition.
India is an immensely diverse country with many distinct pursuits, vastly disparate convictions, widely divergent customs and a veritable feast of viewpoints. Any attempt to talk about the culture of the country, or about its past history or contemporary politics, must inescapably involve considerable selection. I need not, therefore, labour the point that the focus on the argumentative tradition in this work is also a result of choice. It does not reflect a belief that this is the only reasonable way of thinking about the history or culture or politics of India. I am very aware that there are other ways of proceeding.
The selection of focus here is mainly for three distinct reasons: the long history of the argumentative tradition in India, its contemporary relevance, and its relative neglect in ongoing cultural discussions. It can in addition be claimed that the simultaneous flourishing of many different convictions and viewpoints in India has drawn substantially on the acceptance – explicitly or by implication – of heterodoxy and dialogue. The reach of Indian heterodoxy is remarkably extensive and ub
iquitous.
Consider the politically charged issue of the role of so-called ‘ancient India’ in understanding the India of today. In contemporary politics, the enthusiasm for ancient India has often come from the Hindutva movement – the promoters of a narrowly Hindu view of Indian civilization – who have tried to separate out the period preceding the Muslim conquest of India (from the third millennium BCE to the beginning of the second millennium CE). In contrast, those who take an integrationist approach to contemporary India have tended to view the harking back to ancient India with the greatest of suspicion. For example, the Hindutva activists like invoking the holy Vedas, composed in the second millennium BCE, to define India’s ‘real heritage’. They are also keen on summoning the Rāmāyaṇa, the great epic, for many different purposes, from delineating Hindu beliefs and convictions to finding alleged justification for the forcible demolition of a mosque – the Babri masjid – that is situated at the very spot where the ‘divine’ Rama, it is claimed, was born. The integrationists, by contrast, have tended to see the Vedas and the Rāmāyaṇa as unwelcome intrusions of some specific Hindu beliefs into the contemporary life of secular India.
The integrationists are not wrong to question the factional nature of the choice of ‘Hindu classics’ over other products of India’s long and diverse history. They are also right to point to the counterproductive role that such partisan selection can play in the secular, multi-religious life of today’s India. Even though more than 80 per cent of Indians may be Hindu, the country has a very large Muslim population (the third largest among all the countries in the world – larger than the entire British and French populations put together), and a great many followers of other faiths: Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Parsees and others.
However, even after noting the need for integration and for a multicultural perspective, it has to be accepted that these old books and narratives have had an enormous influence on Indian literature and thought. They have deeply influenced literary and philosophical writings on the one hand, and folk traditions of storytelling and critical dialectics on the other. The difficulty does not lie in the importance of the Vedas or the Rāmāyaṇa, but in the understanding of their role in Indian culture. When the Muslim Pathan rulers of Bengal arranged for making good Bengali translations of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa in the fourteenth century (on which see Essay 3), their enthusiasm for the ancient Indian epics reflected their love of culture, rather than any conversion to Hinduism.* It would be as difficult to ignore their general importance in Indian culture (on some allegedly ‘secular’ ground) as it would be to insist on viewing them through the narrow prism of a particularly raw version of Hindu religiosity.
The Vedas may be full of hymns and religious invocations, but they also tell stories, speculate about the world and – true to the argumentative propensity already in view – ask difficult questions. A basic doubt concerns the very creation of the world: did someone make it, was it a spontaneous emergence, and is there a God who knows what really happened? As is discussed in Essay 1, the Rigveda goes on to express radical doubts on these issues: ‘Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? … perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know.’ These doubts from the second millennium BCE would recur again and again in India’s long argumentative history, along with a great many other questions about epistemology and ethics (as is discussed in Essay 1). They survive side by side with intense religious beliefs and deeply respectful faith and devotion.
Similarly, the adherents of Hindu politics – especially those who are given to vandalizing places of worship of other religions – may take Rama to be divine, but in much of the Rāmāyaṇa, Rama is treated primarily as a hero – a great ‘epic hero’ – with many good qualities and some weaknesses, including a tendency to harbour suspicions about his wife Sītā’s faithfulness. A pundit who gets considerable space in the Rāmāyaṇa, called Jāvāli, not only does not treat Rama as God, he calls his actions ‘foolish’ (‘especially for’, as Jāvāli puts it, ‘an intelligent and wise man’). Before he is persuaded to withdraw his allegations, Jāvāli gets time enough in the Rāmāyaṇa to explain in detail that ‘there is no after-world, nor any religious practice for attaining that’, and that ‘the injunctions about the worship of gods, sacrifice, gifts and penance have been laid down in the śāstras [scriptures] by clever people, just to rule over [other] people.’* The problem with invoking the Rāmāyaṇa to propagate a reductionist account of Hindu religiosity lies in the way the epic is deployed for this purpose – as a document of supernatural veracity, rather than as ‘a marvellous parable’ (as Rabindranath Tagore describes it) and a widely enjoyed part of India’s cultural heritage.
The roots of scepticism in India go back a long way, and it would be hard to understand the history of Indian culture if scepticism were to be jettisoned. Indeed, the resilient reach of the tradition of dialectics can be felt throughout Indian history, even as conflicts and wars have led to much violence. Given the simultaneous presence of dialogic encounters and bloody battles in India’s past, the tendency to concentrate only on the latter would miss something of real significance.
It is indeed important to understand the long tradition of accepted heterodoxy in India. In resisting the attempts by the Hindutva activists to capture ancient India as their home ground (and to see it as the unique cradle of Indian civilization), it is not enough to point out that India has many other sources of culture as well. It is necessary also to see how much heterodoxy there has been in Indian thoughts and beliefs from very early days. Not only did Buddhists, Jains, agnostics and atheists compete with each other and with adherents of what we now call Hinduism (a much later term) in the India of the first millennium BCE, but also the dominant religion in India was Buddhism for nearly a thousand years. The Chinese in the first millennium CE standardly referred to India as ‘the Buddhist kingdom’ (the far-reaching effects of the Buddhist connections between the two largest countries in the world are discussed in Essay 8). Ancient India cannot be fitted into the narrow box where the Hindutva activists want to incarcerate it.
It was indeed a Buddhist emperor of India, Ashoka, who, in the third century BCE, not only outlined the need for toleration and the richness of heterodoxy, but also laid down what are perhaps the oldest rules for conducting debates and disputations, with the opponents being ‘duly honoured in every way on all occasions’. That political principle figures a great deal in later discussions in India, but the most powerful defence of toleration and of the need for the state to be equidistant from different religions came from a Muslim Indian emperor, Akbar. This was of course much later, but those principles of religious toleration, enunciated in the 1590s, were still early enough at a time when the Inquisition was in full swing in Europe.
The contemporary relevance of the dialogic tradition and of the acceptance of heterodoxy is hard to exaggerate. Discussions and arguments are critically important for democracy and public reasoning. They are central to the practice of secularism and for even-handed treatment of adherents of different religious faiths (including those who have no religious beliefs). Going beyond these basic structural priorities, the argumentative tradition, if used with deliberation and commitment, can also be extremely important in resisting social inequalities and in removing poverty and deprivation. Voice is a crucial component of the pursuit of social justice.
It is sometimes asserted that the use of dialectics is largely confined to the more affluent and more literate, and is thus of no value to the common people. The elitism that is rampant in such a belief is not only extraordinary, it is made more exasperating through the political cynicism and impassivity it tends to encourage. The critical voice is the traditional ally of the aggrieved, and participation in arguments is a general opportunity, not a particularly specialized skill (like composing sonnets or performing trapeze a
cts).
Just before the Indian general elections in the spring of 2004, when I visited a Bengali village not far from my own home, I was told by a villager, who was barely literate and certainly very poor: ‘It is not very hard to silence us, but that is not because we cannot speak.’ Indeed, even though the recording and preservation of arguments tend to be biased in the direction of the articulations of the powerful and the well schooled, many of the most interesting accounts of arguments from the past involve members of disadvantaged groups (as is discussed in Essays 1 and 2).
The nature and strength of the dialogic tradition in India is sometimes ignored because of the much championed belief that India is the land of religions, the country of uncritical faiths and unquestioned practices. Some cultural theorists, allegedly ‘highly sympathetic’, are particularly keen on showing the strength of the faith-based and unreasoning culture of India and the East, in contrast with the ‘shallow rationalism’ and scientific priorities of the West. This line of argument may well be inspired by sympathy, but it can end up suppressing large parts of India’s intellectual heritage. In this pre-selected ‘East–West’ contrast, meetings are organized, as it were, between Aristotle and Euclid on the one hand, and wise and contented Indian peasants on the other. This is not, of course, an uninteresting exercise, but it is not pre-eminently a better way of understanding the ‘East–West’ cultural contrast than by arranging meetings between, say, Āryabhaṭa (the mathematician) and Kauṭilya (the political economist) on the one hand, and happily determined Visigoths on the other. If the immediate motivation for this book is social and political understanding in India, it has, I believe, some relevance also for the way the classification of the cultures of the world has become cemented into a shape that pays little or no attention to a great deal of our past and present.*
