”SILENCE IS A powerful enemy of social justice,” writes Amartya Sen. Despite living in England and for whom Cambridge and Harvard are said to have fought over for the privilege of offering an appointment, retains his blue Indian passport. This book is actually a compilation of essays written over a decade.

 

It may amaze many people that the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for economics returns to Santiniketan every year, the tiny university town in Calcutta founded by his mentor, Rabindranath Tagore. He can be seen on a bicycle, chatting with the locals and working for a trust he has set up with the money from his Nobel Prize, unassumingly. One of the most influential public thinkers of our times is strongly rooted and deeply engaged in the country in which he grew up.

 

Amartya Sen, professor at Harvard, writes about India and the Indian identity, especially at a time when the stereotype of India as a land of exoticism and mysticism is being supplanted with the stereotype of India as the back office of the world. His essays are neutral because, as the book reveals, Sen was not instructed. And, was without belief, but was surrounded by the belief that he could understand its emotional charge.

 

In this superb collection of essays, Sen smashes quite a few stereotypes. He praises Indian polarity, but feels hurt of Indians siege mentality on minorities, particularly regarding Muslims. What is remarkable about this book is that Amartya Sen has quoted some famous, but forgotten works of Muslims, which contributed greatly to its pluralism. Sen refutes many facile descriptions of Indian Muslims of being indulged in munificence only: “When Akbar was writing on religious tolerance in Agra in 1592, Giordano Bruno was arrested for heresy, and ultimately, in 1600, burnt at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome.” Many such electrifying examples can be found in this book.

 

Sen does not indulge in platitude about India’s past. “The often repeated belief that India was a ‘Hindu country’ before Islam arrived is, of course, a pure illusion…” He quotes famous pundit of Ramayana epic, Javali, who tells Rama, “There is no after-world, nor any religious practice for attaining that.”

 

While describing Indian democracy, he quotes Dr B R Ambedkar, “In politics, we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.” It is not enough, writes Sen, to continue to have systematic elections, to safeguard political liberties and civil rights, to guarantee free speech and an open media. He doesn’t also spare Western influences “The resistance to Western hegemony — a perfectly respectable cause in itself — takes the form, under this interpretation, of justifying suppression of journalistic freedoms and the violations of elementary political and civil rights on grounds of the alleged unimportance of these freedoms in the hierarchy of what are claimed to be ‘Asian values’. ”

 

Also, he attacks those people who claim that Pakistani laws of Blasphemy are discriminatory in nature: “…but the same set of people forget that even in British they have laws of blasphemy, especially protective of Christianity!”

 

Sen’s tone is heartwarmingly celebratory in two essays, which talk about two Bengali figures, who according to him, are exemplars of the heterodoxy that reflects the best of the Indian tradition. One essay is a spirited tribute to Rabindranath Tagore, where he quotes powerful quotation from Rabindranath Tagore rebutting patriotism and jingoism of Hinduvata brigade: “Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.”

 

The second essay concerns the cinema of Satyajit Ray, one of India’s greatest filmmakers. The Argumentative Indian provides a new dimension and perspective to Indian rhetoric of being the next happening thing after China. It is a strange reflection on being India and Indian. And, as Rabindranath Tagore, said, “To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.”

 

This is a book that must be read and re-read.