Allen Lane £25 pp256
It is a commonplace these days that the West is the home of religious freedom and democracy: when George W Bush talks of bringing these ideas to the Muslim world, he envisages exporting them from the West to the East.
It is, therefore, no bad thing to be reminded by Amartya Sen, in this profound and stimulating collection of essays, that the East has its own venerable traditions of public participation in decision-making, of government by discussion, and of religious tolerance. Indeed, as Sen points out, while most of Catholic Europe was given over to the Inquisition, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake for heresy, in India the 16th-century Mogul emperor Akbar was declaring, “no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him”.
Sen is unquestionably one of the most distinguished minds of our time, a Nobel prizewinner for economics, a former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and now Lamont University Professor at Harvard. Yet while the pieces here are, as one would expect, enjoyably erudite and full of intriguing insights, they are not written in academese nor, perhaps surprisingly, do they touch much on economics.
Instead, the book is formed from a series of elegantly written historical and philosophical essays which cohere to form a single original argument: that the sheer diversity of views and faiths and competing ideas that have always coexisted in India has naturally led to a fecund and tolerant argumentative tradition. “In India,” Sen writes, heterodoxy “has always been the natural state of affairs”.
India’s genius, argues Sen, derives from its diversity, from the way that its different orthodoxies have always been challenged: Indians, he writes, have always had a habit of asking difficult questions. They also like to speak, often at length. India’s ancient epics are the longest poems ever composed, while more recently Krishna Menon set the record for the longest speech to be delivered at the UN — a remarkable nine hours.
All this, according to Sen, provides inherently rich soil for disagreement, dialogue, reasoning and compromise. “Discussions and argument are critically important for democracy and public reasoning,” he contends. “They are central to the practice of secularism and for even-handed treatment of adherents of different religious faith (including those who have no religious beliefs). The argumentative tradition, if used with deliberation and commitment, can also be extremely important in resisting social inequalities and removing poverty and deprivation. Voice is a crucial component of the pursuit of social justice.” Voting and balloting — the inventions of Athens and the ancient West — are just part of a much larger story.
Sen believes that it is a fundamental western mistake to see India as enveloped in an eternal mystical fog: instead he traces the region’s rational, analytical, sceptical and even atheistic traditions back to their earliest roots. The Rig Veda, India’s oldest sacred text, written when the Pyramids and Stonehenge were still in use, enshrines this idea of uncertainty about the divine: “Who really knows?” it asks. “Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? Perhaps it formed itself, perhaps it did not. The one who looks down on it from the highest heaven, only he knows — or perhaps he does not know.”
Likewise, the great Hindu scriptures are notably open to ambiguity. In both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, even the greatest heroes have their weaknesses and the opponents their strengths: nothing is black and white; alternative views are always presented. Even the Gita, the endlessly subtle centrepiece of Hindu scriptures, is a debate between Arjun and Krishna, both of whom hold equally tenable moral positions and different understandings of dharma or duty.
This tradition was augmented by the Buddhist Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BC, who “laid down what are perhaps the oldest rules for conducting debates” at his great councils, with the opponents of his position “duly honoured in every way on all occasions”. Ashoka also set in stone basic freedoms for all his people, and did not exclude women and slaves as Aristotle had done.
Crucially, Sen argues that Islam greatly added to the richness of Indian civilisation. He points out that there is a considerable history of the cultivation of public reasoning and of tolerance of heterodoxy in the Islamic world, too, especially among the Sufis, and he writes at length of the “tolerant multiculturalism” of the Mogul emperor Akbar, his codification of minority rights and his belief that “the pursuit of reason” rather than reliance on tradition is the best way to address difficult problems of social harmony, so laying the foundations for the secularism and non-denominational religious neutrality of the modern state. Having entrusted his army to a Hindu, his former opponent Raja Man Singh of Jaipur, and filled his court with artists and intellectuals, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, in the 1590s Akbar also set up the earliest known multi-religious discussion groups, where groups of Muslims, Christians, Jains, Jews, Parsees and even atheists discussed where and why they differed and how they could live together.
In this celebration of Islam’s complex contribution to Indian culture, Sen of course stands in direct opposition to the other great Indian Nobel laureate, Vidia Naipaul, who has always seen the Islamic incursion into South Asia in entirely negative terms as something that fatally “wounded” ancient Hindu civilisation. Unlike Naipaul, who had always been an apologist of India’s Hindu revivalist movement and its Hindu Nationalist party, the BJP, Sen is extremely critical of the “exclusionary” thinking of the Hindutva movement, which he says is a product of an essential ignorance of the diversity and internationalism of Indian tradition. India, he points out, has many sources of its culture, and as well as the great Hindu traditions, there are profound contributions from Buddhists, Jains, agnostics, atheists, Jews, Christians, Muslims and Sikhs. Sen also writes of the “deep shame” felt by many Indians at the mass murder of Muslims organised by the BJP state government in Gujerat.
This is an original and provocative book, which will surprise and challenge many middle-class Indians, especially those on the right. But whether you stand in Sen’s camp, or that of Naipaul, you will find this erudite and sophisticated collection of essays engaging and thought-provoking. The product of a great mind at the peak of its power, it is one of the most stimulating books about India to be written for years, and deserves the widest possible readership.
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