Reviewer: Yamaaraar
Title: The Argumentative Indian
Author: Amartya Sen
Penguin Books, New Delhi
Pages: 410
When I first opened this book, I expected to be at my wits end trying to decipher the thoughts of .a world renowned economist and thinker. But as moved from page one, it stuck me how wrong perceptions were. ‘The Argumentative Indian’ is anything but a treatise on economics. It is indeed a long lecture but it is not boring. In fact, it makes the ignoramus at home in India, and outside India to understand Indian history and culture. The narrative is laced with wit and logic.
The book is a collection of sixteen lectures Prof Amartya Sen had delivered long before he was honoured with the Nobel Prize. In Part One ‘Voice and Heterodoxy’, he highlights the tradition of argument and public debate and of intellectual pluralism and generosity that informs India’s history. He also focuses on the contemporary relevance of the argumentative traditions and its relative neglect in ongoing cultural discussions. The reach of Indian heterodoxy is remarkably extensive and ubiquitous, according to him. His basic premise is that India is inclusive, tolerant and multi-cultural.
The learned professor agrees that Hindutva has a special appeal to many Hindus, particularly the Hindu diaspora mostly because of pride in their culture but points out that the Hindutva movement promotes a narrow Hindu view of Indian civilisation. It (Hindutva) tries to ‘separate out the period preceding the Muslim conquests of India’ from the third millennium BCE to the beginning of the second millennium CE. He tells the adherents of Hindu politics – “especially those who are given to vandalising places of worship of other religions”- that in much of the Ramayana, “Rama is treated primarily as a hero – a great ‘epic hero’- with many good qualities and some weaknesses”.
For the benefit of the uninitiated he tells the story of Javali to drive home his point about the argumentative traditions of India. “A pundit, who gets considerable space in the Ramayana, called Javali, not only doesn’t treat Rama as God, he calls his actions ‘foolish’, (‘especially for’, as Javali puts it, ‘an intelligent and wise man’). Before he is persuaded to withdraw his allegations, Javali gets time enough in the Ramayana to explain in detail that ‘there is no after-world, nor any religious practice for attaining that’, and that ‘the injunctions about the worship of gods, sacrifice, gifts, and penance have been laid down in the sastras by clever people, just to rule over (other) people’”.
Echoes of Javali’s arguments are heard in contemporary India with a section of the society calling upon people to break out of the shackles of tradition and rituals.
It is difficult to disagree with Prof Amartya Sen when he puts forth the argument against invoking the Ramayana to propagate a ‘reductionist account’ of Hindu religiosity. It is a ‘marvellous parable’ as Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore described Ramayana once. It is ‘a part and parcel of India’s cultural heritage and Maryada Purushottam Ram is India’s great hero’, as Syed Shahbuddin (diplomat turned parliamentarian and a prominent voice in the Babri Masjid movement) told Parliament once at the height of Babri Masjid- Ramjnambjhoomi controversy in 1992.
While on the subject of secularism, the Nobel laureate is absolutely convinced that secularism is ‘the ideological mainstay of multi-religious India’ but it ‘looks pale and exhausted’. He goes on to say: “The nature of that predicament would be misidentified – and somewhat minimized –if it were to be seen simply in terms of the politics of Hindu sectarianism. While the attacks on secularism have often come from exactly that quarter, there are other elements as well, and the subject calls for a wider analysis and response”.
Simply put, the Professor’s contention is that secularist intellectuals in India must address this criticism “not only because the condemnations have implications for political and intellectual life in contemporary India but also because it is useful for secularists to face these issues explicitly – to scrutinise and re-examine habitually accepted priorities and the reasoning behind them”.
Prof Sen demolishes the Western view that India is ‘mainly Hindu country’. He tells his fellow Indians to ‘avoid the twin pitfalls of 1) taking democracy to be just a gift of the Western world that India simply accepted when it became independent, and 2) assuming that there is something unique in Indian history that makes the country singularly suited to democracy’. India is a complex country, which believes in inclusive philosophy, and accommodates even profound scepticism.
The Nobel laureate fields the issue of alleged Muslim disloyalty to India. The issue is important because there are charges that range from allegations of Indian Muslims spying for Pakistan, to their tendency, to cheer the Pakistani cricket team in test matches.
“There is, in fact, no serious evidence for the hypothesis of the political disloyalty of Indian Muslims”, says Prof Sen. He points out that a great many Muslims stayed on in post-partition India (instead of going to Pakistan) as a deliberate decision to remain where they felt they belonged. In the Indian armed forces, diplomatic services and administration, Muslims’ record on loyalty to India is no different from that of the Hindus and other Indians. There is no significant empirical evidence to substantiate the {‘Muslim sectarianism’) critique, and the unfairness of this specious line of reasoning is quite hard to beat” (Para 2, Page 311)
Writing in the same vein, Amartya Sen observes, “In the context of defending the importance of secularism in contemporary India, it is not in any way essential to make any claim whatsoever about how Muslim emperors of the past had behaved- whether they were sectarian or assimilative, oppressive or tolerant. There is no intrinsic reason why a defence of India’s secularism must take a position on what, say, the Moghals did or did not do. The ‘guilt’ of Muslim Kings, if any, need not be ‘transferred’ to the 140 million Muslims who live in India today. Also, we can scarcely form a view of the political commitments of Muslims in contemporary India, or of their political loyalties, by checking what Muslim kings might or might not have done many centuries ago”.
Telling Indians and the world alike that ‘there is indeed much in India to be proud of’, Prof Sen points out that Indians of any background have reason enough to “celebrate their historical and cultural association with (to consider a variety of example) Nagarjuna’s penetrating philosophical arguments, Harsa’s philanthropic leadership, Maitreyi’s or Gargi’s searching questions, Carvaka’s reasoned scepticism, Aryabhata’s astronomical and mathematical departures, Kalidasa’s dazzling poetry, Sudraka’s subversive drama, Abul Fazl’s astounding scholarship, Shah Jahan’s aesthetic vision, Ramanujan’s mathematics, or Ravi Shankar’s and Ali Akbar Khan’s music, without first having to check the religious background of each. (Para 1, Page 75)
The author frankly acknowledges that India which takes pride in its past and its contemporary achievements is a land of horrendous inequities. He however tells the sceptic that India has the intellectual strength and political will to deal with these problems peacefully.
And he has a word of advice to Indians including the diaspora – resist external isolation as well as internal miniaturisation. “Indeed, the openness of the argumentative tradition militates not only against exclusionary narrowness within the country, but also against the cultivated ignorance of well-frog. We need not agree to be incarcerated in the dinginess of a much diminished India, no matter how hard the political advocates of smallness try to jostle us.”(Para 3, Page 86)
With these words, the economist – thinker echoes what Mahatma Gandhi said thus “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. I refuse to live in other people’s houses as an interloper, a beggar or a slave”.
The Argumentative Indian is a must read for every Indian who wants to know his Indian roots, and for every non-Indian who wants to know what India stands for.