Winning Argument

Sen is particularly critical of the Western overemphasis on India's religiosity at the expense of any recognition of the country's equally impressive rationalist, scientific, mathematical and secular heritage. The son of a professor of soil chemistry, he vividly recalls going to the lab with his father, "testing hypotheses, seeing whether experiments worked out or not." That "scientific spirit of inquiry," he says, can also be seen in ancient India. His book cites 3,500-year-old verses from the Vedas that speculate skeptically about creation, and details India's contributions to the world of science, rationality and plural discourse--fields generally treated by Orientalists as "Western spheres of success."

But he reserves plenty of criticism for India's homegrown radical Hindu fundamentalists. "My view of India is of a very broad civilization, which I've seen being miniaturized by sectarians," he says, alluding to the Hindutva ("Hindu-ness") movement that has sought to promote a strictly Hindu identity for India. Sen's book attacks such a "narrow and bellicose" interpretation, while reaffirming his own "capacious idea of India" as an authentically plural and tolerant civilization. "One of the points of my retaining my Indian citizenship is to be able to participate in Indian political discussions," says Sen, who since his student days has never been out of India for more than six months at a stretch and manages a visit several times a year.

That sense of passionate engagement with India informs all the essays in "The Argumentative Indian." On Indian democracy, he is both reasoned and critical. While hailing India's success in preventing the famines that occurred with depressing regularity under British colonial rule, he stresses that this does not mean the problem of chronic and endemic hunger ("a much more complex task") has been solved.

Back at Harvard after serving six years as the first non-English master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Sen--film and theater buff, cricket fan, badminton player, devoted power walker and voracious reader--embodies the yearning for eclectic learning. As a young man he translated a number of George Bernard Shaw's plays into Bengali, but mislaid the manuscripts; perhaps they will turn up, he imagines, in his recently deceased mother's trunkfuls of papers. His next book will be on "identity and violence--a cultural and political analysis of terrorism in today's world, on how high theory feeds low politics."

For Sen, who is married to historian Emma Rothschild and has four children from two previous marriages, being Indian and being cosmopolitan are by no means mutually exclusive. He traces his convictions to sources as disparate as Condorcet and Chakravarti and does not consider any one place home. "I feel very at home in Shantiniketan, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Cambridge, England, in Italy. If I had to choose one of them and live there only, that I would regard as a very serious loss." One of his essays, on the films of the great director Satyajit Ray, affirms Sen's case for India's absorptive culture. "In our heterogeneity and in our openness lies our pride, not our disgrace," Sen writes. "Satyajit Ray taught us this, and that lesson is profoundly important for India." Not to mention the rest of the world.

© 2005