When Penguin released Amartya Sen's latest book The Argumentative India in early August, the book became a metaphor for both Sen, the man, as well as Sen, the Noble prize-winning economist. The book reflects on Indian culture, history, and identity. It gives us an opportunity to understand where Sen derives his notion of economics as a discipline which should be rooted in equality, fairness and entitlements. The 400-odd page of elegant prose that is accessible to the general reader paints India in particular, and Southasia in general, in broad strokes. While retaining an eye for the detail, never once does Sen miss the larger canvass. Unlike a single theme, Sen's anthology of essays brings out the heterodoxy of the mosaic called Subcontinent.
The first section, 'Voice and Heterodoxy', takes the reader on a moral and ethical tour of the beginnings of Southasian thought. Starting with an analysis of the Bhagvad Gita, the essential arguments between Krishna and Arjuna, Sen concludes that though Krishna's argument for action and duty captured the imagination of Isherwood and T S Eliot, it was Arjuna's profound doubt about pain and post-war desolation that has emerged of eternal value. The entire book operates on the one cardinal principle that a defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated remains alive. It is thus central for any system or society to remember Arjuna's consequential analysis and not to be just driven by Krishna's notion of "doing one's duty".
There is another handsome technique Sen uses to demolish hegemonising ideology to embark upon a concrete empirical analysis. Refuting Samuel Huntington's 'Clash of Civilisations' thesis, which has placed India firmly in the category of 'the Hindu civilisation', Sen argues that this reductionist approach downplays the fact that India has more Muslims than any other country in the world with the exception of Indonesia. The Muslim population in India is about 140 million- larger than the entire British and French populations put together. The chapter titled "India: Large and Small" is a fine exploration into the number based classification of majorities and minorities. For instance, he explains there can be at least five different ways to identify a majority group among Hindus: 1) the category of low-or middle-income people; 2) the class of non-owners of much capital; 3) the group of rural Indians; 4) the people who do not work in the organized industrial sector; and 5) Indians who are against religious persecution. Using these five examples, he successfully establishes the erroneous nature of the assumption of the centrality of religion-based categorization over other systems of classification. What gives this essay its edge is that Sen, by broad basing his arguments, not only challenges the assumption of the Western Huntington but also the local proponents of Hindutva. He patiently weaves warp by warp, weft by weft, the multiple strands and plurality of voices that constitute India's past and the present. By drawing attention of the reader to every nuance, he warns us of the danger of simplification and reductionism.
The essays on Tagore and Satyajit Ray are a great primer into the works of these two masters of their respective arts. While writing about Tagore and Ray, Sen also brings out the creative tension in dealing with other cultures, problems of representations, and narrative logics of a work of art. Unlike Edward Said who sought identity in every work of art, Sen manages to establish the space for both identity as well as universality in the realms of narratives – be it novels or films. He successfully retrieves the sacred space of art's autonomy and the deepest conviction of not to be ghettoized into any singular identity even as it deals with cultural particularity and peculiarity. He brings out Tagore's valiant struggle against the corruptibility of nationalism.