Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T16:56:07.887Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Identity and Shared Humanity: Reflections on Amartya Sen's Memoir

Review products

Home in the World: A Memoir, AmartyaSen (New York: Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2022), 480 pp., cloth $30.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2022

Deen Chatterjee
Deen Chatterjee*
Affiliation:
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States ([email protected])
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Amartya Sen's memoir, Home in the World, is a compelling read, giving a fascinating view of the making of the mind of one of the foremost public intellectuals of our time. In reflections on the first three decades of his life—all filled with an amazing range of experiences, encounters, and intellectual explorations that span Asia, Europe, and North America—Sen weaves a comprehensive and interlocking narrative that brings together a unitary worldview where two multi-dimensional themes are juxtaposed throughout the book: the presence of the past and the convergence of the near and the far. In this essay, I highlight some of the life experiences and lessons shared in Sen's memoir grounded in his ideas of identity and shared humanity. These ideas took on a prominent place in Sen's life, in part, through his educational experience at the innovative school founded by the visionary poet Rabindranath Tagore. I draw on the views of both Sen and Tagore, as discussed in Sen's memoir. These lessons and ideas can help us in appreciating the power of knowledge, the value of education, and the allure of diversity. They can also guide us in our search for a more just world.

Keywords

women's agencyGautama Buddhademocracyshared humanityidentityjusticenationalismAmartya SenRabindranath Tagorewar
Type
Review Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 91 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Noted philosopher and ethicist Amy Gutmann cites the compelling example of Cornelia Sorabji to make a similar point: “Sorabji's cultivation of multiple cultural identities permitted her to feel more rather than less at home in England, despite the fact that it was not her homeland.” Gutmann, Amy, Identity in Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar (Amartya Sen brings in the example of Sorabji's plural identities in one of his essays, and Gutmann cites Sen to make her point about Sorabji.)

2 Sen cites friendship as a good example of this. In extolling the virtues of friendship in fostering connections between people far and near, Sen points out the “admirable goodness” of humanity that often gets overlooked (Amartya Sen, Home in the World [New York: Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2022], p. 301Google Scholar). Likewise, Sen notes that shared vulnerabilities, not just strength, can also bring people together. He bemoans the lack of sufficient coverage on the topic of friendship in literature, compared to, say, love (p. 54).

3 Tagore's school “began as a school for boys in 1901, but in effect it was co-educational throughout because the teachers’ daughters were a part of the school and its activities from its inception.” (Uma Das Gupta, “Shantiniketan: Education for Girls,” in Tagore's Ideas of the New Woman: The Making and Unmaking of Female Subjectivity, eds. Chandrava Chakravarty and Sneha Kar Chaudhuri [London: Sage Publications, 2017], pp. 13–25, at p. 13). The school became a coeducational international university with the name Visva-Bharati in 1921, with facilities for higher studies and research. Its institutes for art, music, languages, and area studies, as well as undergraduate and graduate studies, were widely known.

4 In other words, Tagore showed us that rejecting relativism is not inconsistent with endorsing pluralism.

5 Amartya Sen, “Tagore and His India” (New York Review of Books, June 26, 1997), pp. 55–63, at p. 62.

6 Satyajit Ray, quoted in Sen, “Tagore and His India,” p. 63.

7 The feature that Sen considers a “global lesson” for him in his Mandalay memories is how propaganda and selective hatred focused on a singular identity can move a tolerant and serene people toward militancy, as happened in Myanmar (formerly Burma) in its treatment of the Rohingya people.

8 Sen's mother, Amita Sen, a noted alumna of Tagore's school, played the lead role in several of Tagore's dance dramas and also learned judo at the school.

9 Sen and his exceptionally gifted friend at Presidency College, Sukhamoy Chakravarty, among others, were actively engaged in pursuing the implications of Arrow's social choice theory at the Calcutta coffee house. To Sen's delight, Chakravarty was also teaching at MIT on a visiting appointment when Sen was invited to teach there for a year during his Cambridge days in 1960.

10 Neither Arrow nor Smith featured prominently in the curriculum of Sen's Cambridge studies. Sen has been instrumental in taking social choice theory to a new height. The topic played a central role in Sen's later work on justice. He and Arrow collaborated on this and other related ideas and were later colleagues at Stanford and Harvard. Sen's work on justice also benefited greatly from Smith's ideas.

11 Noted economist Joan Robinson was Sen's PhD thesis director. In discussing with Robinson her critique of mainstream economics as well as the Marxian perspective, Sen found her rather dogmatic and rigid. Sen could not help thinking about the open-minded argumentative Indian philosophical tradition that he found so inspiring in his study of Sanskrit at Tagore's school.

12 Lange's name often came up in Sen's political and economic discussions with his friends at the Calcutta coffee house.

13 Coming from the Indo-Gangetic plain, Sen was taken in by the early sunset in his first autumn in Cambridge. Sen comments: “No wonder the British have had such an obsession with possessing an empire where the sun never sets” (p. 295). In the colonial world, however, some people have a different take on this. For them, the sun did not set on the British empire because God did not trust the Brits in the dark!

14 The Charvaka example of rational discourse, in its emphasis on a penchant for clarity and nonconformity, a questioning mind, and a humanist spirit, has played a seminal role in Sen's own thinking.

15 Sen's learned maternal grandfather, Kshiti Mohan Sen, was a big influence on Sen's intellectual development. Kshiti Mohan introduced young Sen to Buddha's ideas and to various Sanskrit texts, as well as to the songs and poems of the medieval Muslim Sufis who pursued religion in their own ways that showed respect for both Muslim and Hindu thought. Kshiti Mohan was Tagore's associate from the early days of the Santiniketan school and helped Tagore in the broadening of his understanding of religious pluralism.

16 Sen, Amartya, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 173Google Scholar.

17 Sen, Amartya, “Consequential Evaluation and Practical Reason,” Journal of Philosophy 97, no. 9 (September 2000), pp. 477–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 483.

18 Sen, The Idea of Justice, p. 2.

19 Nonetheless, pointing to the richness of the evolving narrative depicted in the epic, especially Krishna's nuanced and lengthy exploration of moral psychology in defending an innovative and far-reaching duty-ethic, Sen acknowledges that the debate could possibly have two reasonable sides where both positions have ample room to develop their respective arguments (Sen, “Consequential Evaluation and Practical Ethics,” p. 482). I discuss this “valuational plurality” in more detail in the section titled “Democracy and Identity Politics.”

20 Tagore, Rabindranath, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1918), pp. 39, 22Google Scholar.

21 Burke, Anthony, “Against the New Internationalism,” Ethics & International Affairs 19, no. 2 (Summer 2005), pp. 73–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 86.

22 Rabindranath Tagore, “Crisis in Civilization,” in The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, vol. 3, ed. S. K. Das (New Delhi: Sahitya Academy, 1999), at p. 726.

23 Ellen Barry, “How Kamala Harris's Immigrant Parents Found a Home, and Each Other, in a Black Study Group,” New York Times, updated October 6, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/us/kamala-harris-parents.html.

24 Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018); and Martha C. Nussbaum, The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

25 Early on, Sen found a version of this valuational plurality in Tagore's thinking. Sen writes: “One important aspect of it was his willingness to accept that many questions may be unresolved even after our best efforts, and our answers may remain incomplete. I found Tagore's outlook very persuasive and it had a great influence on my own thinking. The domain of unfinished accounts would change over time, but not go away, and in this Rabindranath saw not a defeat, but a beautiful, if humble, recognition of our limited understanding of a vast world” (p. 90).

26 We saw an instance of this in the preceding section where Sen notes that America's turn toward greater social equity and inclusive public policies was in large part due to the free speech movement and rising public debates in the 1960s.

27 Sen has famously shown that famines do not happen in democracies that thrive on public debates and discussions, even when there is scarcity of resources.

28 Besides Keynes, Adam Smith's idea of the “impartial spectator” in the “Smithian moral reasoning”— “paying attention to the lack of bias and divisiveness that we should try to utilize by imagining how someone from outside, devoid of personal or local prejudices, would assess a particular situation” (p. 406)—was an inspiration for Sen in developing his idea that public reasoning is critically important in a vibrant democracy.

29 Sen, Amartya, “Ethics and the Foundation of Global Justice,” Ethics & International Affairs 31, no. 3 (Fall 2017), pp. 261–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 269.

30 Ibid., p. 269.

31 Ibid., pp. 269–70.

32 On a similar note, Joshua Cohen writes: “We are not without resources for addressing possible tensions between and among the values of liberty, equality, and community built into the deliberative conception. But whether or not those resources are exploited is, of course, a matter of politics.” Joshua Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 95–119, at p. 113.

33 Sissela Bok, “From Part to Whole,” in Joshua Cohen, ed., For Love of Country? A New Democracy Forum on the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), pp. 38–44, at p. 43.

34 In noting the influence of Tagore's ideas in his life, Sen writes: “The title of this memoir is inspired by [Tagore's] book The Home and the World, and reflects his influence” (p. xiv).