Amartya Sen on the idea of India

(Did the interview with Amartya Sen for the Business Standard; will put the transcript up as soon as I have some time, because it's got much more meat than the piece below.
It was, from my perspective, a slightly strange experience: I'm used to interviewing writers or artists whose works are familiar, used to being able to research the background adequately before I go in.
But Professor Sen, quite apart from being formidably well-read and possessing a sharp, clear intellect, is an economist: I know of his work in the most general terms, and lack the background to analyse or even understand most of it.
That's one reason why I have a great respect for the "generalists" among journalists, the people who are able to shift from business to literature to politics apparently seamlessly, having done awesome quantities of spadework in order to get their questions right.
The other thing that bothered me about the interview is what increasingly troubles me about the media interview in its present form. Amartya Sen had been interviewed for the past three days, about his book--The Argumentative Indian (read Jai's post here)--about the economy, about China, about India's political situation, about globalisation...
On the day I met him, he was generous with his time, incisive and patient--but he was also extremely tired. He'd done back-to-back interviews for about five hours running. Most of us weren't going to get to use more than three "soundbytes" or so; a few had the luxury of a full page, or an hour's worth of television time. Many of the questions we asked must have been similar, even though he's one of those polite souls who takes the trouble to vary the answers.
In some ways, it makes more sense to me to do this sort of interview over email. It forces the interviewer to sharpen his or her questions; it allows the interviewee the luxury of writing one-size-fits-all general answers and then tweaking them a bit for each person. If we need to "see" the person in order to compose our stories, fine, maybe we should have "manna moments": five minutes of time in the sacred presence, during which (just for fun) he gets to talk about whatever he'd like to talk about. But then, I guess if this was the way it worked, I would never have got such personal pleasure out of Prof Sen's erudition, most of it omitted from the story for structural reasons.)

When the Nobel Prize marked its centenary in 2001, the foundation asked a handful of laureates for two mementos each that might be included in an exhibit.
"They took away my bicycle, on which I had done a lot of field research on the famine and indeed later my research for gender inequality in Bengali villages," says Professor Amartya Sen. "Also a modern print of Aryabhatta's book on mathematics and astronomy. These were the two, to reflect my past."

There are many ways in which you might attempt to describe the progress of Professor Amartya Sen, from his brilliant career at Cambridge, returning to India to set up a new department of economics at Jadavpur University at the tender age of 23, to the pathbreaking work in welfare economics that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1998.

You might want to point to his books--on subjects as diverse as economics, gender, philosophy and now, with The Argumentative Indian, on the idea of India; or to the six-page long list of honorary degrees conferred on the former Master of Trinity. But the mementos, one a tribute to the image that many in Shantiniketan still carry of Sen, bicycling down the paths of Tagore's university, the other testimony to his deep and passionate love of learning and his early acquaintance with Sanskrit, will do.

Earlier in the week, Sen gave a talk in which he set out the positions he's taken in The Argumentative Indian, one of the most profound and wide-ranging inquiries into the idea of India written in recent times. Indians like to argue, he said, pointing to what he calls the "argumentative tradition", an acceptance of plurality as the natural state of affairs, a long and robust tradition of heterodoxy, dissent, inquiry and analysis. During question time, the audience proved his point, to excess. Sen responded with patience and wit, producing answers of admirable brevity and depth to questions of astonishing prolixity and obtuseness.

Speaking of his view of Indian history, he says, "There was a great strength in the old Indian tradition, where you took plurality as the natural state of affairs. Ashoka in the 12th century BC mentions the fact that we have different beliefs, we should listen to each other, we must argue with each other. That was an acceptance of heterodoxy."

In recent years, that tradition has been threatened: "When we have a miniaturized view of Hinduism and of the Indian past, presented by the Hindutva parties, suddenly all that intellectual discourse disappears. We're concentrating on where Rama was born, allegedly, with the holiness of the cow, the nastiness of Christian missionaries trying to convert us. It was the psychology of the loser--if we can't win the argument, we will eliminate the argument. That debate continues. But I definitely hope that those who are in favour of a non-miniaturised view of India in which arguments of different quarters could be entertained continue to occupy a good position."

His view of history clashes, as William Dalrymple pointed out, with the opinions expressed by another Nobel laureate, V S Naipaul. Sen won't comment on Naipaul's views directly--"I leave it to him to determine his own position"--but he makes his position clear. "To see the Muslim arrival in India as primarily destructive is to blind oneself to a big part of Indian history," he says, pointing to the interactions between Islamic and Hindu culture in art, in literature, in politics, the encounter between Muslim Sufi and Hindu Bhakti thought between the 15th and 17th centuries.

We trace the history of Aryabhatta's contribution to mathematics in the 5th century, the export of those ideas to Europe via the Arabs in the 11th century, the fallacy of the belief that democracy is strictly a Western invention, how you might explain the occasional but prevalent Indian suspicion of the outsider and of "foreign thought" through the parable about the Kupamanduka, the frog in the well who can see nothing but the inside of the well.

"Our understanding of right and wrong is really dependent on our ability to listen to other arguments and think about it. To me, knowledge is post-interaction and post-openness, rather than pre-interaction and pre-openness. It's not a question of winning the argument; it's a question of making a perspective available that people can invoke later, even if at that time it doesn't win the day." Given the intensity of the battle over Indian history in recent years, one hopes that the last word will rest with Amartya Sen.