‘The Argumentative Indian’

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998, but he is perhaps better known as a social philosopher than an economist. Sen is a prolific writer, with 11 books and numerous articles to his credit. The Argumentative Indian is a collection of closely linked essays on Indian culture, history, and identity.

“Not another one!” the reader fed up of fashionable ethnic treatises might exclaim; and rightly so. But Sen has a contrarian purpose in putting together this collection of writings. As the title suggests, the central theme is the tradition of argument in India. “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,” Sen explains. He adds, “…seeing Indian traditions as overwhelmingly religious, or deeply anti-scientific, or exclusively hierarchical, or fundamentally unsceptical (to consider a set of diagnoses that have received some championing in cultural categorisations) involve significant oversimplification of India’s past and present.”

Sen’s broad and balanced brush has local relevance to Trinidad in respect to the narrow political activism of the Maha Sabha, the mendicant cultural activism of the Hindu Prachar Kendra, and the pseudo-intellectualism of the Swaha. He writes, “Through their attempts to encourage and exploit separatism, the Hindutva movement has entered into a confrontation with the idea of India itself. This is nothing short of a sustained effort to miniaturise the broad idea of a large India - proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present - and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism.”

Indeed, Sen cuts the feet out from under all such ethnocentrists by pointing out that, although Hindus form a majority in India, this does not mean that India is a Hindu nation. “…the use of a statistical argument for seeing India as a pre-eminently Hindu country is based on a conceptual confusion: our religion is not our only identity, nor necessarily the identity to which we attach the greatest importance.”

Sen is himself an atheist (and, when he gave a lecture at UWI some years ago, he made sure to mention his lack of religious belief), and he notes that the only agnostic world religion (Buddhism) is of Indian origin and that Hinduism itself contained two atheistic schools of thought (the C?rv?ka and Lok?yata). He also observes that the R?m?yana itself contains dissenting characters, with a pundit named J?v?li telling Rama “there exists no world but this, that is certain!” Indeed, the early Indian Buddhists had public councils aimed at resolving different viewpoints, and the largest and best known of these was held under the aegis of the Emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, while 2000 years later the Moghal Emperor Akbar sponsored dialogues between adherents of different faiths in order to pursue reason rather than tradition as a means of finding social harmony.

So India was first in many respects that are usually credited to Western civilisation. Without descending into vulgar ethnic championing, Sen points up some of the areas where Indian accomplishments pre-dated the West’s.

Apart from analytical philosophy, the first dated printed book was a Chinese translation of an Indian Sanskrit treatise known as The Diamond Sutra. The idea of a rotating Earth and gravitational attraction was proposed 800 years (499 CE, in a treatise by ?rybhata) before the concepts were discussed in Europe. Sen also asserts that Kautilya’s 400 BCE treatise on political economy and governance, titled Artha??stra (Economics) is a secular work.

All this is not to say that Sen hides or glosses over India’s myriad faults. The poverty, the oppressiveness of the caste system, the treatment of women, infant mortality, even the deficiencies of Mahatma Gandhi (in a telling essay titled “Tagore and his India”) are all dealt with. So this is a book useful for anyone who wants to get an insight into India’s past and present and, for those of us whose ancestors came from that land, even an idea of why we are what we are.