Customer Reviews

Argumentative Indian

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4 star:		(1)
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This is an important collection of essays by Dr.Amartya Sen for any reader interested in the full range of philosophic viewpoints in India"s cultural heritage. Often portrayed as a land of uncritical religiosity, Dr.Sen brings out India's long tradition of skepticism,doubt and critical reasoning including a considerable body of non-theistic literature. He argues that this rational argumentative tradition has been crucial in the development of India's secular polity and it's application will be essential in the ultimate success of her democratic framework and future social harmony. The book is beautifully written and each essay is a joy to read.A wide range of India's literary,philosophic,religious,scientific and mathematical contributions is comprehensively covered. It should be essential reading for anyone seriously interested in contemporary India and her heritage.

[I have just finished the first chapter of this book... can't wait to read the rest in the coming days]
This is my first reading of Amartya Sen's writings. After reading an excerpt of the "Argumentative Indian" recently, I ordered this book by this eminent Nobel Laureate.

The author doesn't waste time. Right off the bat, from the very first page in the first chapter, his book is filled with timely anecdotal commentary (with appropriate references) and precise discussion about the topic he is writing about.

His approach to Indian culture and history is very pragmatic and well thought out. His book clearly is not bound by any religious bias (... is sprinkled with examples of ancient and medieval Indian historical quotes/events of all religious contexts - from Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism...) The influence of Hinduism (and Buddhism) on Indian ethos and identity is of course not minimized.

Anecdotal quotes (... Jain philosophers response to Alexander's query) that are hard to find for the average reader and historical facts (that are not muddled by the popular historical accounts) are all presented here - and with riveting clarity and multiple references to scholarly works.

Reading through the book, one cannot but see how the profound philosophy and thoughts of two thousand years ago could be applied to the problems of today.

Many popular misconceptions of India will be dispelled by this book. For the well read about India, this is a treasure trove of information that one can refer to with satisfaction. Anyone with a desire to understand the Indian (be it in the US, Suriname or India) should read the book. In fact, every corporate head who is planning to open an office in India should read this book.

By the author's own admission, writing about India is a vast topic that is impossible to approach from any one perspective. My four star rating is simply an indication that no work is perfect and that there is always room for improvement. This book, IMHO, is far better than many of the 5-star rated books here on Amazon.

Excellent book and I highly recommend it. venu_ravi at yahoo dot com

A wonderful synthesis of the ancient with the modern with beautifully interwoven strands of Indian philosophy, history, politics, people and economics through the passage of time. This book is a product of a brilliant and wide ranging mind. Amartya Sen's book would help Indians rediscover missing links of their Indianness while foreigners learn to understand the fabric that is India.

The Argumentative Indian - The contents of this book and the arguments / reasoning presented by Dr. Sen could be argued upon for years to come. I don't necessarily agree with the author, 100 % on all topics. But I am impressed in the succinct manner in which he puts forth his views. This book has a superlative reach and moral vision-spanning history, cultural studies and political economy. Prof. Sen views reverberate with great kings like Ashoka, Akbar and India's visionary first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. His book serves as good source of inspiration for the younger generation to better understand how India's greatness lies in its diversity and tolerance towards people of all countries, caste, creed, religion and color. Sen points out how Hindu fundamentalism hurts Hinduism and the idea of India, because it is the accommodativeness that has been the hallmark of Hinduism. It has given it the resilience that it has shown through its long history. Dr. Sen also does an excellent job and driving the point that India has lot more than the religious, mystical land that has been portrayed over the years.

Unfortunately on some topics the argument presented were shallow and/ or too opinionated. Example: Dr. Sen also took India to task for becoming a Nuclear Nation, in spite of poverty. Dr. Sen's arguments would hold water in utopian world and egalitarian society. Unfortunately in today's uni-polar world and with India's "friendly" neighbors (China & Pakistan) increasing there defense spending year after year, India was left with no choice then shield itself. Dr. Sen also mentions Bangladesh to be safer than India after Pokhran II. I wonder what he must be thinking now when after all the media reports of the blasts and terrorist activities.

To sum it up in spite of the difference of opinions on some of the contents and reasoning, this book provides excellent food for thought and coerces the reader to ponder.

The report of Mahbubur Rahman, and Professor Hasanuzzaman's observation on one or more of Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen's articles relating to religion in his book, 'The Argumentative Indian', shows that Amartya Sen's views on Islam are utterly wrong and absolutely deplorable to say the least. Though I read Amartya Sen's Poverty and Famines and some of his articles many years ago, I haven't read the above book, but Hasanuzzaman's published observations are clear enough. According to the observations, Amartya Sen prescribed to the Muslims to reject 'Quraan and Sunnah' and accept Emperor Akbar's Deen-e-Ilahi religion, as, according to him, the latter is 'secular' in nature. The prescription is simply outrageous and obviously he himself has not administered the same medicine for himself, as according to him, Hindutvaism is secular and is a source of secularism!

One needs to be very careful to write about any religion, especially in writing anything contentious about other people's religion. In the name of secularism, Amartya Sen, without any doubt, has hurt the religious sentiments of the Muslims, which cannot be supported. On the other hand, Amartya Sen, according to Hasanuzzaman, has surrendered to Hindutvaism, which he claimed to be secular and a source of secularism. While being respectful about Hinduism and the righteous Hindus, one can ask questions about the 'secularism' of many of the practitioners of Hindutvaists or Hindu fundamentalists. In this regard, Amartya Sen certainly needs to explain the thousands of communal riots perpetrated by many of the 'secularist' Hindutvaists in India. Our position is: We oppose communal riots perpetrated by any religious groups anywhere in the world; we support the principles of equality of human beings irrespective of gender, religion, race, ethnicity, social groupings, beliefs, creed and culture; and we oppose all imperialist wars, including the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and, especially, also fanning the flames of Islamophobia in support of these genocidal wars.

Amartya Sen supports imperialist globalisation, albeit with some reform to alleviate inequality and poverty. But, we want people's globalisation with the principles of equality firmly established and the causes of poverty removed, which is totally a different position than that of Amartya Sen, who, I believe, needs to discern that without inequality, imperialism does not exist. I have similar reservations about his position on poverty and famines - he seems to have glossed over the questions of colonialism, neo-colonialism, exploitation, plunder, war, black marketing etc., which often are the real causes of famine, so that Amartya Sen has really failed to identify the real causes of famines, though his findings about distribution of food and freedom of the press are useful. This, of course, needs a long discussion.

Secularism is a much discussed subject with various and numerous analyses and views, which generally are debatable, including also the views of Hasanuzzaman in the present context. The questions of religion and tolerance and, in a way, of secularism, exist in the human society from very ancient times, certainly from the Sumerian and Babylonian times. Whatever our standing on the subject, we need to respect each other's beliefs and have tolerance to each other's views, provided these are honest and have not arisen from any ulterior motives or as a result of capitulations to any unjust power.

I, however, hope to read the book under reference at some point and have a better purview of Amartya Sen's denunciation of Islam and his not-too-veiled support for Hindutvaism in the name of secularism and agnosticism, in addition to his support for imperialist globalisation, with some reform.

Capacious Advocacy and Inquiry

By

Rajesh C. Oza, India Currents


Advocacy means speaking what you think, speaking for a point of view. Inquiry means looking into what you do not yet know, what you do not yet understand.... Bringing advocacy and inquiry together implies learning how to make explicit the thinking that leads you to say what you say.

-- William Isaacs from Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together

Brilliant teachers skillfully balance advocacy and inquiry. Using techniques such as Socratic Dialogue, the teacher asks as much as he tells, serving as a facilitator for critical thinking. If his splendid The Argumentative Indian can be thought of as a classroom doubling as a book, then Amartya Sen most certainly is a gifted teacher. The sources of Sen's pedagogy are suggested in his Nobelprize.org autobiography: "I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.... Born in Santiniketan, on the campus of Rabindranath Tagore's Visva-Bharati,... it was mainly in Tagore's school that my educational attitudes were formed." Outside of Santiniketan, Sen has studied or taught economics at universities in Kolkata, Delhi, London, Boston, and California.

While Presidency College, Delhi University, Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and other elite universities have undoubtedly shaped Sen's social choice and human development theories of economics, it is perhaps his early schooling that most informs The Argumentative Indian's collection of essays on Indian history, culture, and identity. Fondly recalling his Santiniketan education, Sen writes, "There was something remarkable about the ease with which class discussions could move from Indian traditional literature to contemporary as well as classical Western thought, and then to the culture of China or Japan or elsewhere."

This embrace of dialogue about, and between, different cultures recurs throughout The Argumentative Indian. In the book's preface, Sen writes, "The contemporary relevance of the dialogic tradition and of the acceptance of heterodoxy is hard to exaggerate. Discussions and arguments are critically important for democracy and public reasoning." Beginning with "The Argumentative Indian" and closing with "The Indian Identity," the essays explore what it means to be an Indian. A frisson of intellectual hope, excitement, and curiosity infects the reader upon realizing that Sen avoids "seeing Indian traditions as overwhelmingly religious, or deeply anti-scientific, or exclusively hierarchical, or fundamentally unsceptical." For Sen, "the issue relates directly to the plurality of identities... and to the scope for choice in the determination of identity." Indianness involves a choice for each Indian: matriarchal Keralite or patriarchal Punjabi, Kashmiri pandit or Hyderabadi imam, devotionally religious or skeptically agnostic, solidly rooted to the interior landscape or ever-responding to evolving externalities, high-tech entrepreneur or high-touch tiffin-wallah, deshi or diasporic, or some combination of identities depending on context.

A passionate commitment to reason (rather than blind faith in tradition) and Sen's insistence on pluralistic heterodoxy as core to Indian identity are The Argumentative Indian's leitmotif. Tedious repetition is risked, but like a musical score running through a film, the twin themes of reason and heterodoxy serve to integrate the book. Integration is vital because this thick book can at times result in intellectual fatigue.

The first two sentences of the book aptly describe the Sen's expansive quality: "Prolixity is not alien to us in India. We are able to talk at some length." Indeed, Sen covers a lot of territory: Bengali stalwarts Tagore and Satyajit Ray, India's version of secularism and her many versions of calendars (over 10 calendars are periodic reminders of pluralism), the bomb-based relationship with Pakistan contrasted with the Buddhism-based relationship with China, and a lovely essay titled "India: Large and Small" that challenges the xenophobic Hindutva movement. Sen advocates for a "capacious view of a broad and generous Hinduism" while simultaneously helping the reader to inquire into (and perhaps resist) the "miniaturization" of India. "Through their attempts to encourage and exploit separatism, the Hindutva movement has entered into a confrontation with the idea of India itself. This is nothing short of a sustained effort to miniaturize the broad idea of a large India - proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present - and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism."

In an otherwise exceptionally balanced book, the violence of Hindutva adherents brings out the scold in Sen. Some essays obsessively focus on how this movement has attempted to re-invent the past. It clearly pains Sen that these sectarian Indians conveniently forget the contributions of non-Hindus while waving saffron-colored flags proclaiming that India is a Hindu country created by Hindus for Hindus. As abhorrent as it is that schoolchildren have been educated with Hindutva textbooks that amplify the fraud that there was no India before Hindu India (and thus the even more repugnant syllogism that there should be no Indians except Hindu Indians), there is good reason to rewrite Indian history: it is not only members of the Hindutva movement who believe that history should be whisked away from the colonial lens and reconsidered from an Indian perspective; subaltern scholars go one step further and argue that Indian history needs to not only be re-appropriated from Western colonialism, but also from Indian elitism. Sen is certainly aware of the imperialistic hubris of John Mill's History of British India and is not unsympathetic to Ranajit Guha and his colleagues who have developed the subaltern historiography based on giving voice to the dispossessed. But his focus on the Hindutva movement seemingly squeezes out the possibility of anyone rewriting history.

Upbraiding the Hindutva bigots doesn't belong in this book; a longer, more specialized treatise would be better suited for that purpose. As a journey into Amartya Sen's brilliant, compassionate, fair, and, yes, argumentative mind, The Argumentative Indian (except for the understandable impatience with violent bigotry) is consistently faithful to the values Tagore expressed in Gitanjali. It is a book, a classroom...

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;...
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habits.

---------------------------------

(For Professor John "Jock" McLane, the first of a long line of teachers who fostered in RCO a life-long learning about - and love for - all things Indian.)

Brilliant discourse on a range of topics connected to India and Indians. More Indians should read this to appreciate how inclusive India has historically been, to understand how Tagore was much more than a poet, and to be amazed by the level of intercourse of ideas over two millenia between India and China. More westerners should read this to shatter their illusions, fed in great measure by the "simplicist" Samuel Huntington, about India being some sort of homogeneous "Hindu" civilization, and to appreciate that science, tolerance and democracy are not creations of the west. Sen is bound to make many enemies among his compatriots, though, with his implicit support for the "Aryan Invasion Theory" and his staunch secularism - but then as he points out himself - less than 25% of Indians over the last few general elections have voted for a certain political party.

I am rather surprised and dismayed that Dr. Amartya Sen did not make a single reference to the contribution of Kazi Nazrul Islam a.k.a. The Rebel Poet--a Bengali Muslim who revolutionized the independence movement in West Bengal and Bangladesh in the 1930s. Nazrul Islam brought Hinduism and Islam together in British India and condemned Islamic fundamentalism. He is the father figure of Bengali Muslims and by far the ultimate "Argumentative Indian".

i was amazed at the writing and content. i would definitely highly recommend!!