The terrifying ratcheting of military combat between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan in May this year became the trigger for my putting fingers to the keyboard to write about Amartya Sen’s memoir A Home in the World. From the time I first read the account more than four years ago, I have turned to it time and again because the book has morphed into a talisman of hope. It is an account of the making of Sen into what the philosopher Michel Foucault has called the ‘ethical subject,’ and the unfolding of his ideas into what the social anthropologist Henrietta Moore has defined as the ‘ethical imagination.’
This is the story of Amartya Sen making a home in the world unfettered by parochial ideological straightjackets of class, caste, gender, community, and, significantly for the time and place where he was born, religious and ethnic nationalisms.
Amartya Sen was born in 1933 in Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan (Abode of Peace), referred to by him as the ‘school without walls.’
In the aftermath of the First World War, the old empires were cobbled into new nations: described by Benedict Anderson as ‘Imagined Communities’—construed mainly based on religious, ethnic and linguistic ‘difference’.
In a conversation, the historian Manan Asif stressed that this is not to be confused with the logic of difference that looks to history and current cultural and religious practices as evidence and celebrates their syncretic pluralism. Instead, it is an ahistorical and deliberate false peddling of ‘difference’ that fuels the current logic of ‘separation.’ This breeds false ‘truth’ claims, on both sides of the border: assertions that ‘Hindus and Muslims have nothing in common, they cannot and must not live together.’
The British spent two centuries categorising and labelling the people of South Asia along communal and religious lines: they deployed instruments such as the law, census and franchise. By 1933, based on the logic of separation, enough Hindus and Muslims participated in a rehearsed teleology. Amartya Sen makes clear that his family neither accepted this logic nor the teleology. They remained committed to what they saw as a shared, rich, syncretic world. For him and his family, as for countless people on both (literally) sides of the new borders, Partition spelt heartbreak and loss—of childhood, homes, roots, old stomping grounds, playmates, friends—a whole way of life.
I am aware that after 1947, Amartya has kept up with old friendships from his time in Dhaka, later in East Pakistan, now in Bangladesh. Moreover, he continues to value the relationships he formed with Pakistanis as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1950s. He travelled to Pakistan to meet his friends, Arif Iftikhar and Shireen Manzur Qadir in Lahore, as well as Mahbubul Haq and his wife Bani (both economists), working in Karachi. He collaborated with Mahbub when the latter was working on the Human Development Index at UNDP in New York. Importantly, I have witnessed his warm friendship with Asma Jehangir—based upon a shared commitment to justice and peace. In her Guardian obituary, he referred to Asma as ‘the angel of humanity’.
With news and social media and ‘responsible’ state actors baying for the ‘nuclear option’, there is a very real possibility of a nuclear Armageddon
In 2021, I emailed Amartya to ask if he thought that friendship between Indians and Pakistanis (non-state actors) could help improve relations between the two states. It was from his response to my email that I learnt of his long piece in The Guardian—and his soon-to-be-published memoir. Unfortunately, for personal reasons, I was unable to take that piece of work forward.
I have dipped into A Home in the World from time to time for many reasons. First, it is an unputdownable read—a wonderful travelogue and a gripping history of ideas. Concerns that take me back are the turn away from welfare economics by states across the world; the rise of governments tied to billionaire strings; the polarised acceptance or rejection of Marx, holding him (almost personally) responsible for the ‘excesses’ of the Soviet Union and Communist China. With the manmade famine in the context of the genocide in Gaza—not to mention the other famines in Sudan and Somalia—Amartya Sen’s insights take on a deeper resonance, for what it means to be human.
The knife-edge armed combat between India and Pakistan, in the aftermath of the Pahalgam tragedy in May this year, compelled me to think about how the two countries would complete the second quarter of the twenty-first century, and indeed, if they would survive, bearing in mind the environmental challenges of global warming and climate change, shared by both.
India and Pakistan have only one choice. They must confer as sovereign states and bury the hatchet (which now has transformed into nuclear warheads) and agree to an enduring peace. They must open their borders to people, sports, and trade. Peace in the region will enhance everyone’s choices and capabilities.
There is the tried and tested formula of blame, warmongering and nuclear arms parading based on the logic of separation (Hindus and Muslims cannot and should not live together). With news and social media and ‘responsible’ state actors baying for the ‘nuclear option’, there is a very real possibility of a nuclear Armageddon.
In the first of three pieces, I discuss Amartya Sen’s childhood with his parents and the decade he spent with his maternal grandparents in Santiniketan.
Santiniketan is where Amartya Sen’s ethical imagination and his core ideas took root, including those on freedom, social justice, and nationalism, alongside a firm rejection of communal identitarian politics. It was at Santiniketan that he studied and developed a love for Sanskrit and mathematics, forming lasting friendships.
Yet again, I think about how much Indians and Pakistanis would gain if the borders were opened and people met as ‘real’ human beings rather than encounter each other increasingly as disembodied ‘enemies’
The second piece discusses Amartya’s move as a young teenager to Presidency College, Calcutta (1951–1953). Although he was in Calcutta for just three years before he left for Trinity College, Cambridge, it was again a defining experience. It was his first time away from home, and he enjoyed his independence. He relished the addas (talking shops) and developed a discerning love for coffee at the cafes on College Street.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 had reverberations across the world and in India. By the time Sen enrolled at Presidency College in 1951, the city was a hotbed of Marxist ideas and Presidency College held a place among the great institutions of academic excellence in the world.
It was also at Presidency College, after he borrowed a book from his old Santiniketan friend Sukhmoy, that he hung on to Kenneth Arrow’s social choice theory. Marx and Arrow are thinkers whose works shaped, to different degrees, some of Amartya Sen’s key ideas, with clear dialogic departures. A considered analysis of Marx in a chapter called “What to Make of Marx” convinces the reader not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The Calcutta years also reveal a young man with grit and tenacity who self-diagnosed his oral cancer and fought it with the support of his family and local doctors in Calcutta and later in Cambridge.
The third piece traces Sen’s time at Trinity College, Cambridge. It chalks a history of Cambridge economics in dialogue with philosophy and history—varied and vibrant in a post-war, almost new-world milieu—and a widening world with longer stopovers in India, the US and England—all to do with his commitment to teaching and inquiry.
Amartya Sen was born in Santiniketan because his mother, Amita Sen (c. 1915–2005, née Sen), had gone to her maika (maternal home) for her confinement. Kshiti Mohan Sen, Dadu to Amartya, was a scholar of considerable repute, whom Tagore had invited to Santiniketan because of his classical scholarship and mastery over Sanskrit and Pali texts. He became Tagore’s respected associate, interlocutor and confidante. Also discussed below, his Didima, Kiranbala, was a formative influence. His name, Amartya, was coined by Rabindranath Tagore.
Amartya’s parents lived in Dhaka in Jagat Kutir (Cottage of the World), a house built by his paternal grandfather, Sharda Prasad Sen, a judge at the Dhaka High Court. Its name revealed his grandfather’s misgivings about nationalism. His father, Ashutosh Sen, was a professor of chemistry at Dhaka University.
Amartya spent his early years, travelling usually by river transport, between Dhaka and Santiniketan, but his earliest memories are of a journey, as a three-year-old, to Mandalay, where his father was to take up a three-year teaching professorship at the Agricultural College. At the time, Burma was part of the British Indian Empire.
In 1939, the six-year-old Amartya returned to Dhaka with his parents, but with abiding memories of the beauty of Mandalay, and of his wise, efficient and beautiful nanny, enhanced by later conversations with his parents.
Amartya filed his childhood memories and deployed them to inform his ideas on the importance of the agency of women in households and communities, and to this dossier, he added all the knowledge gained from his Didi Ma.
In Dhaka, his parents enrolled him at St Gregory’s, the top school in the city, where he was consistently less than a mediocre student, no doubt bored out of his mind. His worried parents remained undecided about withdrawing him from a school which had not succeeded in educating their son.
In 1941, after the Japanese bombed Bengal, Amartya’s parents decided to send him to Santiniketan to live with his maternal grandparents. This was a critically formative decade of Amartya Sen’s life. The chapter—‘The Company of Grandparents’—remains a favourite. I enjoyed reading it to my now eight-year-old granddaughter and to the grandchildren of friends.
His Dadu, Kshiti Mohan Sen’s worldview, was a seminal influence on him, and remains an important corrective for our times. Based on hard evidence and scholarship, Kshiti Mohan argued that Indian cultural practices were composite and syncretic. He also challenged British historiography, for instance, on Aurangzeb’s antipathy towards Hindus—an idea also taken up by Indian historians such as Jadunath Sarkar—and a part of mainstream curricula.
Kshiti Mohan translated into Bengali the songs of the medieval Indian saint Kabir (c. 1440–1518), who sang of the oneness of God and the equality of all human beings. It is no surprise, yet remarkable, that Amartya and his late wife Eva Colorni (1941–1985) named their son Kabir.
At Santiniketan, without the constraints of the colonial curriculum, Amartya excelled in Sanskrit and mathematics and read widely on varied disciplines in Bangla. At this point, his English was functional.
A compelling reason for recommending Sen’s memoir is his observations on education. Santiniketan was a name I heard often. I loathed going to school. I wept, sobbed, and lamented the boredom of school. My sympathetic father would say, ‘A shame, but we have no alternative… If we didn’t have this nonsense between India and Pakistan, we could have sent you to Santiniketan.’ Yet again, I think about how much Indians and Pakistanis would gain if the borders were opened and people met as ‘real’ human beings rather than encounter each other increasingly as disembodied ‘enemies’.
I would recommend that the authorities in India and Pakistan embrace upkarhatastakartavya and initiate peace and reconciliation measures
Amartya Sen writes of how a ‘dedicated pursuit’ of Tagore’s works has given him ‘a lifetime of rewarding engagement.’ The title of his memoir plays with the title of Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861–1941) novel The Home and the World. Published in 1916, in the aftermath of the first Partition of Bengal in 1905 along communal Hindu-Muslim lines and annulled in 1911, and in the context of the rise of the swadeshi nationalist movement in Bengal (1905–1908).
A strong critic of nationalism, with his inclusive humanist vision, Tagore explores the ruptures within wider social and familial relationships in the context of the swadeshi (nationalist) movement. Tagore reveals how self-righteous nationalists and their acolytes could manipulate, marginalise, even exclude weaker members of the nation, community and family—Rabindranath is particularly astute and sensitive on the positionality of women.
The women in Amartya’s family—his mother and grandmother—are women with agency. His Didi Ma, Kiranbala, played a formative role in Amartya’s intellectual development and in drawing his attention towards the welfare of others. An energetic and engaging human being, she was a woman of substance, respected for her skills, which extended from the knowledge and practice of local medicine and midwifery to the quotidian concerns of managing her household—which included the cheer of unannounced visitors, including Tagore—and all the expected and unexpected arrivals.
It was because of his Didi Ma that Amartya became an informed witness to the depredations of the Bengal famine of 1943. He assisted his grandmother in sharing their supply of rice. When Amartya expressed his concern at the state of the hungry, who arrived at their doorstep, and asked why his grandmother gave the person but a cigarette tin full of rice, she explained to the ten-year-old the cold reality of rationing. The experience and insights Amartya gained at the time signpost the formation of his ideas on famines—and his assertion, based on evidence, that famines are caused by human intervention.
Amartya Sen left Santiniketan in 1951 to go to Presidency College, Calcutta. Next week I shall take another dip into his memoir to follow his ideas and friendships in Calcutta—‘The Big City’.
Since my intention in recommending A Home in the World to readers is to discuss how Amartya Sen continues to make his home in the world with a vision of amity and social justice, I would like to end by compressing what the author has to say about Mricchakatika (The Little Clay Cart), a fourth-century Sanskrit play by Shudraka.
The protagonist, Charudatta, is an impoverished member of the gentry and a social reformer—a revolutionary. Vasantasena, a courtesan and the woman he loves, admires and stands by him. Charudatta succeeds and overthrows his opponents. Of the two ideas in the play that particularly appeal to Amartya, the first is that ‘human identity does not demand a single confinement…’ It helped him ‘to resist the imposition of a single overwhelming identity based on religion or community, including focusing on Hindu-Muslim divisions, which was becoming more and more common as my school days progressed.’
The second is the manner in which Charudatta rejects the tradition of retribution after he defeats his opponents. He decides ‘to kill the miscreant with benefaction’ (upkarhatastakartavya). Sen interprets Charudatta’s decision as one that prioritises the pursuit of nyaya, seeking a good world in which we can live with fairness, rather than fixing the niti of fixed rules, including required punishments, that are supposed to ‘fit’ the crime in standard theory.
Sen interprets Charudatta’s decision as one that prioritises the pursuit of nyaya, seeking a good world in which we can live with fairness, rather than fixing the niti of fixed rules, including required punishments, that are supposed to ‘fit’ the crime in standard theory.
I would recommend that the authorities in India and Pakistan embrace upkarhatastakartavya and initiate peace and reconciliation measures.
I dedicate this piece to the memory of Baba, my Abba’s friend, Zainul Abedin, who, for my thirteenth birthday, gave me the English translation of The Little Clay Cart by Arthur William Ryder. I loved the story. After reading A Home in the World, I have translated the play from English into Urdu, not in verse but prose. I hope Shahid Nadeem of Ajoka will agree to direct it.
To be continued…