Michael Collopy

The lives of Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize winner in economics and one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of our time, and Pranab Bardhan, a Berkeley economics professor who specializes in issues of global development and poverty, were marked by coincidence long before they became friends and colleagues. Several years apart, they both spent some of their childhoods in Santiniketan, a Bengali university town famous as the home of the Indian poet and thinker, Rabindranath Tagore. Both attended Presidency College in Calcutta, and they finally met at Cambridge University. Like Bardhan, Sen also taught at Berkeley, arriving in 1964 - an intellectually seminal year for him, he says. Beyond economics, Sen and Bardhan share a broad interest in history and culture, perhaps in part, Bardhan suggests, because the Bengali language, which they and more than 200 million others speak, has spawned such a rich literary tradition. California magazine recently reunited the two friends in San Francisco for a discussion of issues raised in Sen's most recent books, The Argumentative Indian and Identity and Violence.

Although Sen was primarily awarded the Nobel, in 1998, for highly technical and mathematical advances in social choice theory, he is more widely known as an untiring champion for ending world poverty, for mass education, health care, and women's autonomy, and for promoting democracy and public reasoning, values that he has explicitly linked, notably in his book, Development as Freedom. Sen's two recent books, both released within the last year, share a concern with religious and ethnic extremism, and violence.

The Argumentative Indian resurveys Indian history, finding strong traditions of tolerance, scientific and mathematical achievement, and nascent democracy, particularly in the important sense of decision making through public discussion. Sen believes Hindu nationalists (and American "clash of civilizations" theorists) distort India's history with their singular focus on the Hindu tradition, a theme he again takes up in Identity and Violence. There he argues that the erroneous and belligerent insistence by religious and ethnic extremists that we have one, true, "discovered" identity - rather than multiple ones that we can reasonably choose among - underlies much of the world's violence.

Pranab Bardhan (PB): Your book, The Argumentative Indian, challenges the rather naive interpretation of Indian culture in the West - that analytical reasoning is quintessentially Western, and that Indian culture is primarily concerned with spirituality and uncritical religious faith.

Amartya Sen (AS): That interpretation of Indian culture and civilization has been dominant in the West's relation with India. When the British were first establishing themselves in the 18th century, people like William Jones and others were quite interested in Indian mathematics and astronomy, and science generally. But by the time the empire settled down, James Mill - who was very proud of the fact that he wrote his history of India without going to India at all, and who also didn't speak any Indian language - argued that if there was anything to Indian culture, it's just kind of spiritual, religious stuff. Whereas Jones had discussed important astronomers and mathematicians in ancient India, like Aryabhata, who rejected the prevailing view of the sun going around the earth.

PB: This is in the sixth century?

AS: He was very late fifth century - his major book was completed in ad 499. He also discussed diurnal motion of the earth and why is it that objects don't get thrown out into space.

His students and followers, like Varahamihira and Brahmagupta, argued that every object attracted every other - early speculations on gravity. Making India the domain of religion played a part in the undermining of Indian culture. To some extent, India fell into the trap. Rather than contesting that there was quite a strong tradition of science, and also one of atheism and materialism (the earliest atheistic verses you see in the Rig Veda itself, which is around 1500 bc), they said, "Okay, the West is terrific in science, but we are very good in spirituality." It's something quite important to resist.

PB: But the really more dangerous oversimplification about Indian culture and history today is the creation of the Hindu chauvinists in India.

AS: I agree it's dangerous, and a distortion. It's not entirely unrelated to the colonial history. In some ways people had got used to the idea that India was spiritual and religion-oriented. That gave a leg up to the religious interpretation of India, despite the fact that Sanskrit had a larger atheistic literature than exists in any other classical language. Even within the Hindu tradition, there are many people who were atheist. Madhava Acharya, the remarkable 14th century philosopher, wrote this rather great book called Sarvadarshansamgraha, which discussed all the religious schools of thought within the Hindu structure. The first chapter is "Atheism" - a very strong presentation of the argument in favor of atheism and materialism. The second chapter is on Buddhism, which is treated as an offshoot of Hinduism. And then it goes through the other schools of Hinduism.

People got used to the idea that India was spiritual and religion-oriented, despite the fact that Sanskrit had a larger atheistic literature than exists in any other classical language.

One of the things I tried to argue in The Argumentative Indian is that there's a long tradition of philosophical argument. People ask, "Which really reflects Indian culture? Is it this or is it that?" What reflects Indian culture most are the arguments themselves, rather than any resolution in one direction or the other. The Hindu sectarian view of Indian nationalism is based on a historical misinterpretation, and then they distort history by rewriting textbooks. The religious rhetoric is exaggerated to suggest that the dominant religion is all there is in terms of the Indian cultural history. That point of view is very limited, very misleading, and indeed, wrong. Then if you add to it the nastiness of sectarian politics whereby regarding other communities to be either inferior or nasty or having treated Hindus badly in the past, like Muslim conquerors are supposed to have, then you generate needless anger and hostility. Sometimes they try to be quite nasty to other communities, and sometimes pretty violent. Some killings have occurred, especially in Gujarat in 2002 and in Bombay about a decade earlier.

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