Refreshing honesty & erudition: Home in the World

Home in the World: A Memoir -Amartya Sen Allen Lane Rs.899 Pages 464 Nobel economics laureate (1998), and quintessential argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen comes across as a true citizen of the world in his newly penned memoir. Traversing continents, he is as much at home in Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, Trinity College Cambridge, as in New Delhi and Kolkata — places where he has held prestigious research and teaching positions. Sen’s memoir recollects his early childhood in colonial Bengal, memories of his ancestral home in Dhaka, his grandparents’ home and later ‘Pratichi’ in Santiniketan, and a temporary home in picturesque Mandalay, Burma. Journeys to and from these varied locations were an initiation into a concept of belonging rather than displacement, an idea of ‘inclusiveness’ that remained with him through his later travels across continents, as he encountered diverse cultures and environments, people and places, reinforcing his perspective of a global civilisation. A memoir is more than a mere autobiography as it captures and explores tangible and intangible experiences — strands of thinking, reflections, events, dilemmas. In this narrative, Sen draws on his early intellectual discoveries which became foundational for his later research in social choice theory and decisional analysis. The eclecticism and plurality of Sen’s training nurtured a weltanschauung that was humanitarian, compassionate, unprejudiced, gender sensitive and just. Recollecting the three decades over which Sen ruminates in this memoir, he looks before and after. Part Two reinforces three extreme tensions of the early 1940s — the World War drawing closer to eastern India, the escalating politically engineered Hindu-Muslim divide in the subcontinent, and the horrors and human toll of the Bengal famine in 1943. The scenes he encountered as a sensitive boy, the prevailing milieu with its complex politics and pervasive poverty, shaped his consciousness. This was the stimulus for his research on famines, questions of supply and demand, rural poverty and inflation, and welfare economics in general. Sen’s family was uprooted from Dhaka in the midst of escalating communal riots. The death of Kader Mia, who chanced to come to them for help after being stabbed, brought home the reality of economics, class and poverty that robbed people of their freedom. Victims of communal violence were mainly the poor and dispossessed. In Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006), Sen recounts how he probed the dangers of viewing people in terms of a single identity. That train of thought was seeded decades earlier when he witnessed Kader Mia’s tragic death. This capability to absorb experiences and conversations and transform them into theoretical formulations is Sen’s unique gift. His observations on the history of multicultural integration in Bengal negates the later ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis formulated by Samuel Huntington. The irony of growing up under British rule made Sen aware of the dichotomy between what Britain practiced back home and the iniquity of colonial administration in India. Even as multi-party democracy and freedom of the press prevailed in the home country, British India suffered authoritarianism, press censorship, surveillance, punishment of…