The Argumentative Amartya?

Farzana bibi has obviously better judgement on who ought to get a Nobel and who ought not than the Nobel Committee....

Being on the wrong side of everything, and coming out as despicable can make one a Chowk writer, but not a contributor, Madam...

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Re: # 34

aaah! Here’s a sight one doesn’t witness often. An idol-worshipper and an ignorant, fanatical mullah befriending each other, laughing with each other instead of at each other. It’s true! Need makes strange bed-fellows!

#33 by hamzaad

Kaka (do you even film star Rajesh Khanna is referred to by this name?), what can I say except that I had to clutch my stomach laughing after I read this post.

BTW, your diagnosis of FV`s condition is pretty accurate.

Amartya Sen – Autobiography
I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another. My family is from Dhaka - now the capital of Bangladesh. My ancestral home in Wari in ``old Dhaka`` is not far from the University campus in Ramna. My father Ashutosh Sen taught chemistry at Dhaka University. I was, however, born in Santiniketan, on the campus of Rabindranath Tagore`s Visva-Bharati (both a school and a college), where my maternal grandfather (Kshiti Mohan Sen) used to teach Sanskrit as well as ancient and medieval Indian culture, and where my mother (Amita Sen), like me later, had been a student. After Santiniketan, I studied at Presidency College in Calcutta and then at Trinity College in Cambridge, and I have taught at universities in both these cities, and also at Delhi University, the London School of Economics, Oxford University, and Harvard University, and on a visiting basis, at M.I.T., Stanford, Berkeley, and Cornell. I have not had any serious non-academic job.

My planned field of study varied a good deal in my younger years, and between the ages of three and seventeen, I seriously flirted, in turn, with Sanskrit, mathematics, and physics, before settling for the eccentric charms of economics. But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years. I am used to thinking of the word ``academic`` as meaning ``sound,`` rather than the more old-fashioned dictionary meaning: ``unpractical,`` ``theoretical,`` or ``conjectural.``

During three childhood years (between the ages of 3 and 6) I was in Mandalay in Burma, where my father was a visiting professor. But much of my childhood was, in fact, spent in Dhaka, and I began my formal education there, at St. Gregory`s School. However, I soon moved to Santiniketan, and it was mainly in Tagore`s school that my educational attitudes were formed. This was a co-educational school, with many progressive features. The emphasis was on fostering curiosity rather than competitive excellence, and any kind of interest in examination performance and grades was severely discouraged. (``She is quite a serious thinker,`` I remember one of my teachers telling me about a fellow student, ``even though her grades are very good.``) Since I was, I have to confess, a reasonably good student, I had to do my best to efface that stigma.

The curriculum of the school did not neglect India`s cultural, analytical and scientific heritage, but was very involved also with the rest of the world. Indeed, it was astonishingly open to influences from all over the world, including the West, but also other non-Western cultures, such as East and South-East Asia (including China, Japan, Indonesia, Korea), West Asia, and Africa. I remember being quite struck by Rabindranath Tagore`s approach to cultural diversity in the world (well reflected in our curriculum), which he had expressed in a letter to a friend: ``Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin... Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine.``

Identity and violence
I loved that breadth, and also the fact that in interpreting Indian civilization itself, its cultural diversity was much emphasized. By pointing to the extensive heterogeneity in India`s cultural background and richly diverse history, Tagore argued that the ``idea of India`` itself militated against a culturally separatist view, ``against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one`s own people from others.`` Tagore and his school constantly resisted the narrowly communal identities of Hindus or Muslims or others, and he was, I suppose, fortunate that he died - in 1941 - just before the communal killings fomented by sectarian politics engulfed India through much of the 1940s. Some of my own disturbing memories as I was entering my teenage years in India in the mid-1940s relate to the massive identity shift that followed divisive politics. People`s identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way - quite suddenly - to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities. The broadly Indian of January was rapidly and unquestioningly transformed into the narrowly Hindu or finely Muslim of March. The carnage that followed had much to do with unreasoned herd behaviour by which people, as it were, ``discovered`` their new divisive and belligerent identities, and failed to take note of the diversity that makes Indian culture so powerfully mixed. The same people were suddenly different.

I had to observe, as a young child, some of that mindless violence. One afternoon in Dhaka, a man came through the gate screaming pitifully and bleeding profusely. The wounded person, who had been knifed on the back, was a Muslim daily labourer, called Kader Mia. He had come for some work in a neighbouring house - for a tiny reward - and had been knifed on the street by some communal thugs in our largely Hindu area. As he was being taken to the hospital by my father, he went on saying that his wife had told him not to go into a hostile area during the communal riots. But he had to go out in search of work and earning because his family had nothing to eat. The penalty of that economic unfreedom turned out to be death, which occurred later on in the hospital. The experience was devastating for me, and suddenly made me aware of the dangers of narrowly defined identities, and also of the divisiveness that can lie buried in communitarian politics. It also alerted me to the remarkable fact that economic unfreedom, in the form of extreme poverty, can make a person a helpless prey in the violation of other kinds of freedom: Kader Mia need not have come to a hostile area in search of income in those troubled times if his family could have managed without it.

Calcutta and its debates
By the time I arrived in Calcutta to study at Presidency College, I had a fairly formed attitude on cultural identity (including an understanding of its inescapable plurality as well as the need for unobstructed absorption rather than sectarian denial). I still had to confront the competing loyalties of rival political attitudes: for example, possible conflicts between substantive equity, on the one hand, and universal tolerance, on the other, which simultaneously appealed to me. On this more presently.

The educational excellence of Presidency College was captivating. My interest in economics was amply rewarded by quite outstanding teaching. I was particularly influenced by the teaching of Bhabatosh Datta and Tapas Majumdar, but there were other great teachers as well, such as Dhiresh Bhattacharya. I also had the great fortune of having wonderful classmates, particularly the remarkable Sukhamoy Chakravarty (more on him presently), but also many others, including Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri (who was also at Santiniketan, earlier) and Jati Sengupta. I was close also to several students of history, such as Barun De, Partha Gupta and Benoy Chaudhuri. (Presidency College had a great school of history as well, led by a most inspiring teacher in the form of Sushobhan Sarkar.) My intellectual horizon was radically broadened.

The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active. Though I could not develop enough enthusiasm to join any political party, the quality of sympathy and egalitarian commitment of the ``left`` appealed to me greatly (as it did to most of my fellow students as well, in that oddly elitist college). The kind of rudimentary thinking that had got me involved, while at Santiniketan, in running evening schools (for illiterate rural children in the neighbouring villages) seemed now to be badly in need of systematic political broadening and social enlargement.

I was at Presidency College during 1951 to 1953. The memory of the Bengal famine of 1943, in which between two and three million people had died, and which I had watched from Santiniketan, was still quite fresh in my mind. I had been struck by its thoroughly class-dependent character. (I knew of no one in my school or among my friends and relations whose family had experienced the slightest problem during the entire famine; it was not a famine that afflicted even the lower middle classes - only people much further down the economic ladder, such as landless rural labourers.) Calcutta itself, despite its immensely rich intellectual and cultural life, provided many constant reminders of the proximity of unbearable economic misery, and not even an elite college could ignore its continuous and close presence.

And yet, despite the high moral and ethical quality of social commiseration, political dedication and a deep commitment to equity, there was something rather disturbing about standard leftwing politics of that time: in particular, its scepticism of process-oriented political thinking, including democratic procedures that permit pluralism. The major institutions of democracy got no more credit than what could be portioned out to what was seen as ``bourgeois democracy,`` on the deficiencies of which the critics were most vocal. The power of money in many democratic practices was rightly identified, but the alternatives - including the terrible abuses of non-oppositional politics - did not receive serious critical scrutiny. There was also a tendency to see political tolerance as a kind of ``weakness of will`` that may deflect well-meaning leaders from promoting ``the social good,`` without let or hindrance.

Given my political conviction on the constructive role of opposition and my commitment to general tolerance and pluralism, there was a bit of a dilemma to be faced in coordinating those beliefs with the form of left-wing activism that characterized the mainstream of student politics in the-then Calcutta. What was at stake, it seemed to me, in political toleration was not just the liberal political arguments that had so clearly emerged in post-Enlightenment Europe and America, but also the traditional values of tolerance of plurality which had been championed over the centuries in many different cultures - not least in India. Indeed, as Ashoka had put it in the third century B.C.: ``For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the splendour of his own sect, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect.`` To see political tolerance merely as a ``Western liberal`` inclination seemed to me to be a serious mistake.

Even though these issues were quite disturbing, they also forced me to face some foundational disputes then and there, which I might have otherwise neglected. Indeed, we were constantly debating these competing political demands. As a matter of fact, as I look back at the fields of academic work in which I have felt most involved throughout my life (and which were specifically cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in making their award), they were already among the concerns that were agitating me most in my undergraduate days in Calcutta. These encompassed welfare economics, economic inequality and poverty, on the one hand (including the most extreme manifestation of poverty in the form of famines), and the scope and possibility of rational, tolerant and democratic social choice, on the other (including voting procedures and the protection of liberty and minority rights). My involvement with the fields of research identified in the Nobel statement had, in fact, developed much before I managed to do any formal work in these areas.

It was not long after Kenneth Arrow`s path-breaking study of social choice, Social Choice and Individual Values, was published in New York in 1951, that my brilliant co-student Sukhamoy Chakravarty drew my attention to the book and to Arrow`s stunning ``impossibility theorem`` (this must have been in the early months of 1952). Sukhamoy too was broadly attracted by the left, but also worried about political authoritarianism, and we discussed the implications of Arrow`s demonstration that no non-dictatorial social choice mechanism may yield consistent social decisions. Did it really give any excuse for authoritarianism (of the left, or of the right)? I particularly remember one long afternoon in the College Street Coffee House, with Sukhamoy explaining his own reading of the ramifications of the formal results, sitting next to a window, with his deeply intelligent face glowing in the mild winter sun of Calcutta (a haunting memory that would invade me again and again when he died suddenly of a heart attack a few years ago).

Cambridge as a battleground
In 1953, I moved from Calcutta to Cambridge, to study at Trinity College. Though I had already obtained a B.A. from Calcutta University (with economics major and mathematics minor), Cambridge enroled me for another B.A. (in pure economics) to be quickly done in two years (this was fair enough since I was still in my late teens when I arrived at Cambridge). The style of economics at the-then Cambridge was much less mathematical than in Calcutta. Also, it was generally less concerned with some of the foundational issues that had agitated me earlier. I had, however, some wonderful fellow students (including Samuel Brittan, Mahbub ul Haq, Rehman Sobhan, Michael Nicholson, Lal Jayawardena, Luigi Pasinetti, Pierangelo Garegnani, Charles Feinstein, among others) who were quite involved with foundational assessment of the ends and means of economics as a discipline.

However, the major debates in political economy in Cambridge were rather firmly geared to the pros and cons of Keynesian economics and the diverse contributions of Keynes`s followers at Cambridge (Richard Kahn, Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson, among them), on the one hand, and of ``neo-classical`` economists sceptical of Keynes, on the other (including, in different ways, Dennis Robertson, Harry Johnson, Peter Bauer, Michael Farrell, among others). I was lucky to have close relations with economists on both sides of the divide. The debates centred on macroeconomics dealing with economic aggregates for the economy as a whole, but later moved to capital theory, with the neo-Keynesians dead set against any use of ``aggregate capital`` in economic modelling (some of my fellow students, including Pasinetti and Garegnani, made substantial contributions to this debate).

Even though there were a number of fine teachers who did not get very involved in these intense fights between different schools of thought (such as Richard Stone, Brian Reddaway, Robin Matthews, Kenneth Berrill, Aubrey Silberston, Robin Marris), the political lines were, in general, very firmly - and rather bizarrely - drawn. In an obvious sense, the Keynesians were to the ``left`` of the neo-classicists, but this was very much in the spirit of ``this far but no further``. Also, there was no way in which the different economists could be nicely ordered in just one dimension. Maurice Dobb, who was an astute Marxist economist, was often thought by Keynesians and neo-Keynesians to be ``quite soft`` on ``neo-classical`` economics. He was one of the few who, to my delight, took welfare economics seriously (and indeed taught a regular course on it), just as the intensely ``neo-classical`` A.C. Pigou had done (while continuing to debate Keynes in macroeconomics). Not surprisingly, when the Marxist Dobb defeated Kaldor in an election to the Faculty Board, Kaldor declared it to be a victory of the perfidious neo-classical economics in disguise (``marginal utility theory has won,`` Kaldor told Sraffa that evening, in commenting on the electoral success of a Marxist economist!)

However, Kaldor was, in fact, much the most tolerant of the neo-Keynesians at Cambridge. If Richard Kahn was in general the most bellicose, the stern reproach that I received often for not being quite true to the new orthodoxy of neo-Keynesianism came mostly from my thesis supervisor - the totally brilliant but vigorously intolerant Joan Robinson.

In this desert of constant feuding, my own college, Trinity, was a bit of an oasis. I suppose I was lucky to be there, but it was not entirely luck, since I had chosen to apply to Trinity after noticing, in the handbook of Cambridge University, that three remarkable economists of very different political views coexisted there. The Marxist Maurice Dobb and the conservative neo-classicist Dennis Robertson did joint seminars, and Trinity also had Piero Sraffa, a model of scepticism of nearly all the standard schools of thought. I had the good fortune of working with all of them and learning greatly from each.

The peaceful - indeed warm - co-existence of Dobb, Robertson and Sraffa was quite remarkable, given the feuding in the rest of the University. Sraffa told me, later on, a nice anecdote about Dobb`s joining of Trinity, on the invitation of Robertson. When asked by Robertson whether he would like to teach at Trinity, Dobb said yes enthusiastically, but he suffered later from a deep sense of guilt in not having given Robertson ``the full facts. `` So he wrote a letter to Robertson apologizing for not having mentioned earlier that he was a member of the Communist Party, supplemented by the statement - I think a rather ``English`` statement - that he would understand perfectly if in view of that Robertson were to decide that he, Dobb, was not a fit person to teach Trinity undergraduates. Robertson wrote a one-sentence reply: ``Dear Dobb, so long as you give us a fortnight`s notice before blowing up the Chapel, it will be all right.``

So there did exist, to some extent, a nice ``practice`` of democratic and tolerant social choice at Trinity, my own college. But I fear I could not get anyone in Trinity, or in Cambridge, very excited in the ``theory`` of social choice. I had to choose quite a different subject for my research thesis, after completing my B.A. The thesis was on ``the choice of techniques,`` which interested Joan Robinson as well as Maurice Dobb.

Philosophy and economics
At the end of the first year of research, I was bumptious enough to think that I had some results that would make a thesis, and so I applied to go to India on a two-years leave from Cambridge, since I could not - given the regulation then in force - submit my Ph.D. thesis for a degree until I had been registered for research for three years. I was excitedly impatient in wanting to find out what was going on back at home, and when leave was granted to me, I flew off immediately to Calcutta. Cambridge University insisted on my having a ``supervisor`` in India, and I had the good fortune of having the great economic methodologist, A.K. Dasgupta, who was then teaching in Benares. With him I had frequent - and always enlightening - conversations on everything under the sun (occasionally on my thesis as well).

In Calcutta, I was also appointed to a chair in economics at the newly created Jadavpur University, where I was asked to set up a new department of economics. Since I was not yet even 23, this caused a predictable - and entirely understandable - storm of protest. But I enjoyed the opportunity and the challenge (even though several graffitis on the University walls displayed the ``new professor`` as having been just snatched from the cradle). Jadavpur was quite an exciting place intellectually (my colleagues included Paramesh Ray, Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri, Anita Banerji, Ajit Dasgupta, and others in the economics department). The University also had, among other luminaries, the immensely innovative historian, Ranajit Guha, who later initiated the ``subaltern studies`` - a highly influential school of colonial and post-colonial history. I particularly enjoyed getting back to some of the foundational issues that I had to neglect somewhat at Cambridge.

While my thesis was quietly ``maturing`` with the mere passage of time (to be worthy of the 3-year rule), I took the liberty of submitting it for a competitive Prize Fellowship at Trinity College. Since, luckily, I also got elected, I then had to choose between continuing in Calcutta and going back to Cambridge. I split the time, and returned to Cambridge somewhat earlier than I had planned. The Prize Fellowship gave me four years of freedom to do anything I liked (no questions asked), and I took the radical decision of studying philosophy in that period. I had always been interested in logic and in epistemology, but soon got involved in moral and political philosophy as well (they related closely to my older concerns about democracy and equity).

The broadening of my studies into philosophy was important for me not just because some of my main areas of interest in economics relate quite closely to philosophical disciplines (for example, social choice theory makes intense use of mathematical logic and also draws on moral philosophy, and so does the study of inequality and deprivation), but also because I found philosophical studies very rewarding on their own. Indeed, I went on to write a number of papers in philosophy, particularly in epistemology, ethics and political philosophy. While I am interested both in economics and in philosophy, the union of my interests in the two fields far exceeds their intersection. When, many years later, I had the privilege of working with some major philosophers (such as John Rawls, Isaiah Berlin, Bernard Williams, Ronald Dworkin, Derek Parfit, Thomas Scanlon, Robert Nozick, and others), I felt very grateful to Trinity for having given me the opportunity as well as the courage to get into exacting philosophy.

Delhi School of Economics
During 1960-61, I visited M.I.T., on leave from Trinity College, and found it a great relief to get away from the rather sterile debates that the contending armies were fighting in Cambridge. I benefited greatly from many conversations with Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Franco Modigliani, Norbert Wiener, and others that made M.I.T such an inspiring place. A summer visit to Stanford added to my sense of breadth of economics as a subject. In 1963, I decided to leave Cambridge altogether, and went to Delhi, as Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics and at the University of Delhi. I taught in Delhi until 1971. In many ways this was the most intellectually challenging period of my academic life. Under the leadership of K.N. Raj, a remarkable applied economist who was already in Delhi, we made an attempt to build an advanced school of economics there. The Delhi School was already a good centre for economic study (drawing on the work of V.K.R.V. Rao, B.N. Ganguli, P.N. Dhar, Khaleq Naqvi, Dharm Narain, and many others, in addition to Raj), and a number of new economists joined, including Sukhamoy Chakravarty, Jagdish Bhagwati, A.L. Nagar, Manmohan Singh, Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri, Dharma Kumar, Raj Krishna, Ajit Biswas, K.L. Krishna, Suresh Tendulkar, and others. (Delhi School of Economics also had some leading social anthropologists, such as M.N. Srinivas, Andre Beteille, Baviskar, Veena Das, and major historians such as Tapan Ray Chaudhuri, whose work enriched the social sciences in general.) By the time I left Delhi in 1971 to join the London School of Economics, we had jointly succeeded in making the Delhi School the pre-eminent centre of education in economics and the social sciences, in India.

Regarding research, I plunged myself full steam into social choice theory in the dynamic intellectual atmosphere of Delhi University. My interest in the subject was consolidated during a one-year visit to Berkeley in 1964-65, where I not only had the chance to study and teach some social choice theory, but also had the unique opportunity of observing some practical social choice in the form of student activism in the ``free speech movement.`` An initial difficulty in pursuing social choice at the Delhi School was that while I had the freedom to do what I liked, I did not, at first, have anyone who was interested in the subject as a formal discipline. The solution, of course, was to have students take an interest in the subject. This happened with a bang with the arrival of a brilliant student, Prasanta Pattanaik, who did a splendid thesis on voting theory, and later on, also did joint work with me (adding substantially to the reach of what I was trying to do). Gradually, a sizeable and technically excellent group of economists interested in social choice theory emerged at the Delhi School.

Social choice theory related importantly to a more widespread interest in aggregation in economic assessment and policy making (related to poverty, inequality, unemployment, real national income, living standards). There was a great reason for satisfaction in the fact that a number of leading social choice theorists (in addition to Prasanta Pattanaik) emanated from the Delhi School, including Kaushik Basu and Rajat Deb (who also studied with me at the London School of Economics after I moved there), and Bhaskar Dutta and Manimay Sengupta, among others. There were other students who were primarily working in other areas (this applies to Basu as well), but whose work and interests were influenced by the strong current of social choice theory at the Delhi School (Nanak Kakwani is a good example of this).

In my book, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, published in 1970, I made an effort to take on overall view of social choice theory. There were a number of analytical findings to report, but despite the presence of many ``trees`` (in the form of particular technical results), I could not help looking anxiously for the forest. I had to come back again to the old general question that had moved me so much in my teenage years at Presidency College: Is reasonable social choice at all possible given the differences between one person`s preferences (including interests and judgments) and another`s (indeed, as Horace noted a long time ago, there may be ``as many preferences as there are people``)?

The work underlying Collective Choice and Social Welfare was mostly completed in Delhi, but I was much helped in giving it a final shape by a joint course on ``social justice`` I taught at Harvard with Kenneth Arrow and John Rawls, both of whom were wonderfully helpful in giving me their assessments and suggestions. The joint course was, in fact, quite a success both in getting many important issues discussed, and also in involving a remarkable circle of participants (who were sitting in as ``auditors``), drawn from the established economists and philosophers in the Harvard region. (It was also quite well-known outside the campus: I was asked by a neighbour in a plane journey to San Francisco whether, as a teacher at Harvard, I had heard of an ``apparently interesting`` course taught by ``Kenneth Arrow, John Rawls, and some unknown guy.``)

There was another course I taught jointly, with Stephen Marglin and Prasanta Pattanaik (who too had come to Harvard), which was concerned with development as well as Policy making. This nicely supplemented my involvements in pure social choice theory (in fact, Marglin and Pattanaik were both very interested in examining the connection between social choice theory and other areas in economics).

From Delhi to London and Oxford
I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970. My wife, Nabaneeta Dev, with whom I have two children (Antara and Nandana), had constant trouble with her health in Delhi (mainly from asthma). London might have suited her better, but, as it happens, the marriage broke up shortly after we went to London.

Nabaneeta is a remarkably successful poet, literary critic and writer of novels and short stories (one of the most celebrated authors in contemporary Bengali literature), which she has combined, since our divorce, with being a University Professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. I learned many things from her, including the appreciation of poetry from an ``internal`` perspective. She had worked earlier on the distinctive style and composition of epic poetry, including the Sanskrit epics (particularly the Ramayana), and this I had got very involved in. Nabaneeta`s parents were very well-known poets as well, and she seems to have borne her celebrity status - and the great many recognitions that have come her way - with unaffected approachability and warmth. She had visits from an unending stream of literary fans, and I understand, still does. (On one occasion, arrived a poet with a hundred new poems, with the declared intention of reading them aloud to her, to get her critical judgement, but since she was out, he said that he would instead settle for reading them to me. When I pleaded that I lacked literary sophistication, I was assured by the determined poet: ``That is just right; I would like to know how the common man may react to my poetry.`` The common man, I am proud to say, reacted with appropriate dignity and self-control.)

When we moved to London, I was also going through some serious medical problems. In early 1952, at the age of 18 (when I was an undergraduate at Presidency College), I had cancer of the mouth, and it had been dealt with by a severe dose of radiation in a rather primitive Calcutta hospital. This was only seven years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the long-run effects of radiation were not much understood. The dose of radiation I got may have cured the cancer, but it also killed the bones in my hard palate. By 1971, it appeared that I had either a recurrence of the cancer, or a severe case of bone necrosis. The first thing I had to do on returning to England was to have a serious operation, without knowing whether it would be merely plastic surgery to compensate for the necrosis (a long and complicated operation in the mouth, but no real threat to survival), or much more demandingly, a fresh round of efforts at cancer eradication.

After the long operation (it had lasted nearly seven hours) when I woke up from the heavy anaesthesia, it was four o`clock in the morning. As a person with much impatience, I wanted to know what the surgeon had found. The nurse on duty said she was not allowed to tell me anything: ``You must wait for the doctors to come at nine.`` This created some tension (I wanted to know what had emerged), which the nurse noticed. I could see that she was itching to tell me something: indeed (as I would know later) to tell me that no recurrence of cancer had been detected in the frozen-section biopsy that had been performed, and that the long operation was mainly one of reconstruction of the palate to compensate for the necrosis. She ultimately gave in, and chose an interesting form of communication, which I found quite striking (as well as kind). ``You know,`` she said, ``they were praising you very much!`` It then dawned on me that not having cancer can be a subject for praise. Indeed lulled by praise, I went quietly back to my post-operative sleep. In later years, when I would try to work on judging the goodness of a society by the quality of health of the people, her endorsement of my praiseworthiness for being cancer-free would serve as a good reference point!

The intellectual atmosphere at the LSE in particular and in London in general was most gratifying, with a dazzling array of historians, economists, sociologists and others. It was wonderful to have the opportunity of seeing Eric Hobsbawm (the great historian) and his wife Marlene very frequently and to interact regularly with Frank and Dorothy Hahn, Terence and Dorinda Gorman, and many others. Our small neighbourhood in London (Bartholomew estate, within the Kentish Town) itself offered wonderful company of intellectual and artistic creativity and political involvement. Even after I took an Oxford job (Professor of Economics, 1977-80, Drummond Professor of Political Economy, 1980-87) later on, I could not be budged from living in London.

As I settled down at the London School of Economics in 1971, I resumed my work on social choice theory. Again, I had excellent students at LSE, and later on at Oxford. In addition to Kaushik Basu and Rajat Deb (who had come from Dehli), other students such as Siddiq Osmani, Ben Fine, Ravi Kanbur, Carl Hamilton, John Wriglesworth, David Kelsey, Yasumi Matsumoto, Jonathan Riley, produced distinguished Ph.D. theses on a variety of economic and social choice problems. It made me very proud that many of the results that became standard in social choice theory and welfare economics had first emerged in these Ph.D. theses.

I was also fortunate to have colleagues who were working on serious social choice problems, including Peter Hammond, Charles Blackorby, Kotaro Suzumura, Geoffrey Heal, Gracieda Chichilnisky, Ken Binmore, Wulf Gaertner, Eric Maskin, John Muellbauer, Kevin Roberts, Susan Hurley, at LSE or Oxford, or neighbouring British universities. (I also learned greatly from conversations with economists who were in other fields, but whose works were of great interest to me, including Sudhir Anand, Tony Atkinson, Christopher Bliss, Meghnad Desai, Terence Gorman, Frank Hahn, David Hendry, Richard Layard, James Mirrlees, John Muellbauer, Steve Nickel, among others.) I also had the opportunity of collaboration with social choice theorists elsewhere, such as Claude d`Aspremont and Louis Gevers in Belgium, Koichi Hamada and Ken-ichi Inada in Japan (joined later by Suzumura when he returned there), and many others in America, Canada, Israel, Australia, Russia, and elsewhere). There were many new formal results and informal understandings that emerged in these works, and the gloom of ``impossibility results`` ceased to be the only prominent theme in the field. The 1970s were probably the golden years of social choice theory across the world. Personally, I had the sense of having a ball.

From social choice to inequality and poverty
The constructive possibilities that the new literature on social choice produced directed us immediately to making use of available statistics for a variety of economic and social appraisals: measuring economic inequality, judging poverty, evaluating projects, analyzing unemployment, investigating the principles and implications of liberty and rights, assessing gender inequality, and so on. My work on inequality was much inspired and stimulated by that of Tony Atkinson. I also worked for a while with Partha Dasgupta and David Starrett on measuring inequality (after having worked with Dasgupta and Stephen Marglin on project evaluation), and later, more extensively, with Sudhir Anand and James Foster.

My own interests gradually shifted from the pure theory of social choice to more ``practical`` problems. But I could not have taken them on without having some confidence that the practical exercises to be undertaken were also foundationally secure (rather than implicitly harbouring incongruities and impossibilities that could be exposed on deeper analytical probing). The progress of the pure theory of social choice with an expanded informational base was, in this sense, quite crucial for my applied work as well.

In the reorientation of my research, I benefited greatly from discussions with my wife, Eva Colorni, with whom I lived from 1973 onwards. Her critical standards were extremely exacting, but she also wanted to encourage me to work on issues of practical moment. Her personal background involved a fine mixture of theory and practice, with an Italian Jewish father (Eugenio Colorni was an academic philosopher and a hero of the Italian resistance who was killed by the fascists in Rome shortly before the Americans got there), a Berlinite Jewish mother (Ursula Hirschman was herself a writer and the brother of the great development economist, Albert Hirschman), and a stepfather who as a statesman had been a prime mover in uniting Europe (Altiero Spinelli was the founder of the ``European Federalist movement,`` wrote its ``Manifesto`` from prison in 1941, and officially established the new movement, in the company of Eugenio Colorni, in Milan in 1943). Eva herself had studied law, philosophy and economics (in Pavia and in Delhi), and lectured at the City of London Polytechnic (now London Guildhall University). She was deeply humane (with a great passion for social justice) as well as fiercely rational (taking no theory for granted, subjecting each to reasoned assessment and scrutiny). She exercised a great influence on the standards and reach that I attempted to achieve in my work (often without adequate success).

Eva was very supportive of my attempt to use a broadened framework of social choice theory in a variety of applied problems: to assess poverty; to evaluate inequality; to clarify the nature of relative deprivation; to develop distribution-adjusted national income measures; to clarify the penalty of unemployment; to analyze violations of personal liberties and basic rights; and to characterize gender disparities and women`s relative disadvantage. The results were mostly published in journals in the 1970s and early 1980s, but gathered together in two collections of articles (Choice, Welfare and Measurement and Resources, Values and Development, published, respectively, in 1982 and 1984).

The work on gender inequality was initially confined to analyzing available statistics on the male-female differential in India (I had a joint paper with Jocelyn Kynch on ``Indian Women: Well-being and Survival`` in 1982), but gradually moved to international comparisons (Commodities and Capabilities, 1985) and also to some general theory (``Gender and Cooperative Conflict,`` 1990). The theory drew both on empirical analysis of published statistics across the world, but also of data I freshly collected in India in the spring of 1983, in collaboration with Sunil Sengupta, comparing boys and girls from birth to age 5. (We weighed and studied every child in two largish villages in West Bengal; I developed some expertise in weighing protesting children, and felt quite proud of my accomplishment when, one day, my research assistant phoned me with a request to take over from her the job of weighing a child ``who bites every hand within the reach of her teeth.`` I developed some vanity in being able to meet the challenge at the ``biting end`` of social choice research.)

Poverty, famines and deprivation
From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines. This was initially done for the World Employment Programme of the International Labour Organization, for which my 1981 book Poverty and Famines was written. (Louis Emmerij who led the programme took much personal interest in the work I was trying to do on famines.) I attempted to see famines as broad ``economic`` problems (concentrating on how people can buy food, or otherwise get entitled to it), rather than in terms of the grossly undifferentiated picture of aggregate food supply for the economy as a whole. The work was carried on later (from the middle of 1980s) under the auspices of the World Institute of Development Economics Research (WIDER) in Helsinki, which was imaginatively directed by Lal Jayawardena (an old friend who, as I noted earlier, had also been a contemporary of mine at Cambridge in the 1950s). Siddiq Osmani, my ex-student, ably led the programme on hunger and deprivation at WIDER. I also worked closely with Martha Nussbaum on the cultural side of the programme, during 1987-89.

By the mid-1980s, I was collaborating extensively with Jean Drèze, a young Belgian economist of extraordinary skill and remarkable dedication. My understanding of hunger and deprivation owes a great deal to his insights and investigations, and so does my recent work on development, which has been mostly done jointly with him. Indeed, my collaboration with Jean has been extremely fruitful for me, not only because I have learned so much from his, imaginative initiatives and insistent thoroughness, but also because it is hard to beat an arrangement for joint work whereby Jean does most of the work whereas I get a lot of the credit.

While these were intensely practical matters, I also got more and more involved in trying to understand the nature of individual advantage in terms of the substantive freedoms that different persons respectively enjoy, in the form of the capability to achieve valuable things. If my work in social choice theory was initially motivated by a desire to overcome Arrow`s pessimistic picture by going beyond his limited informational base, my work on social justice based on individual freedoms and capabilities was similarly motivated by an aspiration to learn from, but go beyond, John Rawls`s elegant theory of justice, through a broader use of available information. My intellectual life has been much influenced by the contributions as well as the wonderful helpfulness of both Arrow and Rawls.

Harvard and beyond
In the late 1980s, I had reason to move again from where I was. My wife, Eva, developed a difficult kind of cancer (of the stomach), and died quite suddenly in 1985. We had young children (Indrani and Kabir - then 10 and 8 respectively), and I wanted to take them away to another country, where they would not miss their mother constantly. The liveliness of America appealed to us as an alternative location, and I took the children with me to ``taste`` the prospects in the American universities that made me an offer.

Indrani and Kabir rapidly became familiar with several campuses (Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, UCLA, University of Texas at Austin, among them), even though their knowledge of America outside academia remained rather limited. (They particularly enjoyed visiting their grand uncle and aunt, Albert and Sarah Hirschman, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; as a Trustee of the Institute, visits to Princeton were also very pleasurable occasions for me.) I guess I was, to some extent, imposing my preference for the academic climate on the children, by confining the choice to universities only, but I did not really know what else to do. However, I must confess that I worried a little when I overheard my son Kabir, then nine years old, responding to a friendly American`s question during a plane journey as to whether he knew Washington, D.C.. ``Is that city,`` I heard Kabir say, ``closer to Palo Alto or to New Haven?``

We jointly chose Harvard, and it worked out extremely well. My colleagues in economics and philosophy were just superb, some of whom I knew well from earlier on (including John Rawls and Tim Scanlon in philosophy, and Zvi Griliches, Dale Jorgenson, Janos Kornai, Stephen Marglin in economics), but there were also others whom I came to know after arriving at Harvard. I greatly enjoyed teaching regular joint courses with Robert Nozick and Eric Maskin, and also on occasions, with John Rawls and Thomas Scanlon (in philosophy) and with Jerry Green, Stephen Marglin and David Bloom (in economics). I could learn also from academics in many other fields as well, not least at the Society of Fellows where I served as a Senior Fellow for nearly a decade. Also, I was again blessed with wonderful students in economics, philosophy, public health and government, who did excellent theses, including Andreas Papandreou (who moved with me from Oxford to Harvard, and did a major book on externality and the environment), Tony Laden (who, among many other things, clarified the game-theoretic structure of Rawlsian theory of justice), Stephan Klasen (whose work on gender inequality in survival is possibly the most definitive work in this area), Felicia Knaul (who worked on street children and the economic and social challenges they face), Jennifer Ruger (who substantially advance the understanding of health as a public policy concern), and indeed many others with whom I greatly enjoyed working.

The social choice problems that had bothered me earlier on were by now more analyzed and understood, and I did have, I thought, some understanding of the demands of fairness, liberty and equality. To get firmer understanding of all this, it was necessary to pursue further the search for an adequate characterization of individual advantage. This had been the subject of my Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford in 1979 (published as a paper, ``Equality of What?`` in 1980) and in a more empirical form, in a second set of Tanner Lectures at Cambridge in 1985 (published in 1987 as a volume of essays, edited by Geoffrey Hawthorne, with contributions by Bernard Williams, Ravi Kanbur, John Muellbauer, and Keith Hart). The approach explored sees individual advantage not merely as opulence or utility, but primarily in terms of the lives people manage to live and the freedom they have to choose the kind of life they have reason to value. The basic idea here is to pay attention to the actual ``capabilities`` that people end up having. The capabilities depend both on our physical and mental characteristics as well as on social opportunities and influences (and can thus serve as the basis not only of assessment of personal advantage but also of efficiency and equity of social policies). I was trying to explore this approach since my Tanner Lectures in 1979; there was a reasonably ambitious attempt at linking theory to empirical exercises in my book Commodities and Capabilities, published in 1985. In my first few years at Harvard, I was much concerned with developing this perspective further.

The idea of capabilities has strong Aristotelian connections, which I came to understand more fully with the help of Martha Nussbaum, a scholar with a remarkably extensive command over classical philosophy as well as contemporary ethics and literary studies. I learned a great deal from her, and we also collaborated in a number of studies during 1987-89, including in a collection of essays that pursued this approach in terms of philosophical as well as economic reasoning (Quality of Life was published in 1993, but the essays were from a conference at WIDER in Helsinki in 1988).

During my Harvard years up to about 1991, I was much involved in analyzing the overall implications of this perspective on welfare economics and political philosophy (this is reported in my book, Inequality Reexamined, published in 1992). But it was also very nice to get involved in some new problems, including the characterization of rationality, the demands of objectivity, and the relation between facts and values. I used the old technique of offering courses on them (sometimes jointly with Robert Nozick) and through that learning as much as I taught. I started taking an interest also in health equity (and in public health in particular, in close collaboration with Sudhir Anand), a challenging field of application for concepts of equity and justice. Harvard`s ample strength in an immense variety of subjects gives one scope for much freedom in the choice of work and of colleagues to talk to, and the high quality of the students was a total delight as well. My work on inequality in terms of variables other than incomes was also helped by the collaboration of Angus Deaton and James Foster.

It was during my early years at Harvard that my old friend, Mahbub ul Haq, who had been a fellow student at Cambridge (and along with his wife, Bani, a very old and close friend), returned back into my life in a big way. Mahbub`s professional life had taken him from Cambridge to Yale, then back to his native Pakistan, with intermediate years at the World Bank. In 1989 he was put in charge, by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), of the newly planned ``Human Development Reports.`` Mahbub insisted that I work with him to help develop a broader informational approach to the assessment of development. This I did with great delight, partly because of the exciting nature of the work, but also because of the opportunity of working closely with such an old and wonderful friend. Human Development Reports seem to have received a good deal of attention in international circles, and Mahbub was very successful in broadening the informational basis of the assessment of development. His sudden death in 1998 has robbed the world of one of the leading practical reasoners in the world of contemporary economics.

India and Bangladesh
What about India? While I have worked abroad since 1971, I have constantly retained close connections with Indian universities, I have, of course, a special relation with Delhi University, where I have been an honorary professor since leaving my full-time job there in 1971, and I use this excuse to subject Delhi students to lectures whenever I get a chance. For various reasons - personal as well as academic - the peripatetic life seems to suit me, in this respect. After my student days in Cambridge in 1953-56, I guess I have never been away from India for more than six months at a time. This - combined with my remaining exclusively an Indian citizen - gives me, I think, some entitlement to speak on Indian public affairs, and this remains a constant involvement.

It is also very engaging - and a delight - to go back to Bangladesh as often as I can, which is not only my old home, but also where some of my closest friends and collaborators live and work. This includes Rehman Sobhan to whom I have been very close from my student days (he remains as sceptical of formal economics and its reach as he was in the early 1950s), and also Anisur Rehman (who is even more sceptical), Kamal Hossain, Jamal Islam, Mushairaf Hussain, among many others, who are all in Bangladesh.

When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh. The Pratichi Trust, which I have set up with the help of some of the prize money, is, of course, a small effort compared with the magnitude of these problems. But it is nice to re-experience something of the old excitement of running evening schools, more than fifty years ago, in villages near Santiniketan.

From campus to campus
As far as my principal location is concerned, now that my children have grown up, I could seize the opportunity to move back to my old Cambridge college, Trinity. I accepted the offer of becoming Master of the College from January 1998 (though I have not cut my connections with Harvard altogether). The reasoning was not independent of the fact that Trinity is not only my old college where my academic life really began, but it also happens to be next door to King`s, where my wife, Emma Rothschild, is a Fellow, and Director of the Centre for History and Economics. Her forthcoming book on Adam Smith also takes on the hard task of reinterpreting the European Enlightenment. It so happens that one principal character in this study is Condorcet, who was also one of the originators of social choice theory, which is very pleasing (and rather useful as well).

Emma too is a convinced academic (a historian and an economist), and both her parents had long connections with Cambridge and with the University. Between my four children, and the two of us, the universities that the Sen family has encountered include Calcutta University, Cambridge University, Jadavpur University, Delhi University, L.S.E., Oxford University, Harvard University, M.I.T., University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, Cornell University, Smith College, Wesleyan University, among others. Perhaps one day we can jointly write an illustrated guide to the universities.

I end this essay where I began - at a university campus. It is not quite the same at 65 as it was at 5. But it is not so bad even at an older age (especially, as Maurice Chevalier has observed, ``considering the alternative`` ). Nor are university campuses quite as far removed from life as is often presumed. Robert Goheen has remarked, ``if you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.`` Right on. But then who wants to be planted on ground? There are places to go.

From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1998, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1999

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above

Amartya Sen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Jump to: navigation, search

Amartya SenAmartya Kumar Sen (born November 3, 1933) is an Indian Economist best known for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare economics, and the underlying mechanisms of poverty. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in welfare economics in 1998 and the Bharat Ratna in 1999. In 2003, he was conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian Chamber of Commerce.

Contents [hide]
1 Education and career
2 Important works
3 Personal Life
4 Quotes
5 List of main publications
6 See also
7 External Links



[edit]
Education and career
Sen was born in Santiniketan, West Bengal, the University town established by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, another Indian Nobel Prize winner. Tagore is said to have given Amartya Sen his name. Sen first studied in India at the school system of Visva-Bharati University, Presidency College, Kolkata and at the Delhi School of Economics before moving to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a BA in 1956 and then a Ph.D. in 1959. He has taught economics at University of Calcutta, Jadavpur University, Delhi, Oxford, London School of Economics, Harvard and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1997 and 2004. In January 2004 Sen returned to Harvard, where he currently teaches.

[edit]
Important works
Sen`s seminal papers in the late sixties and early seventies helped develop the theory of social choice, which first came to prominence in the work by the American economist Kenneth Arrow, who, while working in the fifties at the RAND Corporation, famously proved that all voting rules, be they majority voting or two thirds-majority or status quo, must inevitably conflict some basic democratic norm. Sen`s contribution to the literature was to show under what conditions Arrow`s Impossibility Theorem would indeed come to pass as well as to extend and enrich the theory of social choice, informed by his interests in history of economic thought and philosophy.

Sen`s best-known work is his 1981 volume Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, in which he demonstrated that famine occurs not from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. In addition to his important work on the causes of famines, Sen`s work in the field of development economics has had considerable influence in the formulation of the Human Development Report, published by the United Nations Development Programme. This annual publication that ranks countries on a variety of economic and social indicators owes much to the contributions by Sen among other social choice theorists in the area of economic measurement of poverty and inequality.

Sen`s revolutionary contribution to development economics and social indicators is the concept of `capability.` Realizing that top-down development will always trump human rights as long as the definition of terms remains in doubt (is a `right` something that must be provided or something that simply cannot be taken away?), Sen argues that governments should be measured against the concrete capabilities of their citizens. For instance, in the United States citizens have a hypothetical ``right`` to vote. To Sen, this concept is fairly empty. He would ask whether all the requisite conditions are met so that the citizen has the capability to vote. These conditions can range from the very broad, such as the availability of education, to the very specific, such as transportation to the polls. Only when such barriers are removed can the citizen truly be said to act out of personal choice. It is up to the individual society to make the list of minimum capabilities guaranteed by that society. For an example of the `capabilities approach` in practice, see Martha Nussbaum`s Women and Human Development.

He wrote a controversial article in the New York Review of Books entitled More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing, analyzing the mortality impact of unequal rights between the genders in the developing world, particularly Asia. Other studies, such as one by Emily Oster, have argued that this is an overestimation.

Sen was a ground-breaker among late twentieth-century economists in his insistence on asking questions of value, long removed from ``serious`` economic consideration. He mounted one of the few major challenges to the economic model that posited self-interest as the prime motivating factor of human activity. While his line of thinking remains peripheral, there is no question that his work helped to re-prioritize a significant sector of economists and development workers, even the policies of the United Nations.

[edit]
Personal Life
His first wife was Nabaneeta Dev, with whom he has two children: Antara and Nandana. Their marriage broke up shortly after they went to London in 1971. His second wife was Eva Colorni, with whom he lived from 1973 onwards. She died from stomach cancer quite suddenly in 1985. They had two children Indrani and Kabir. His present wife is Emma Rothschild.

[edit]
Quotes
The absurdity of public-choice theory is captured by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in the following little scenario: ``Can you direct me to the railway station?`` asks the stranger. ``Certainly,`` says the local, pointing in the opposite direction, towards the post office, ``and would you post this letter for me on your way?`` ``Certainly,`` says the stranger, resolving to open it to see if it contains anything worth stealing.
--Linda McQuaig, All You Can Eat
When referring to sanctions against Burma: they ``are more likely to be effective there than almost anywhere else I can imagine`` — provided other countries join in.
Reducing corruption in developing countries by opening markets would be reason enough to liberalize, even if no other economic benefits materialized.
-- Handbook of Economic Freedom
No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.
--Democracy as a Universal Value, Journal of Democracy 10.3 (1999) 3-17
[edit]
List of main publications
Sen, Amartya, On Economic Inequality, New York, Norton, 1973
Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famines : An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982
Sen, Amartya, Choice, Welfare and Measurement, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982
Sen, Amartya, Food Economics and Entitlements, Helsinki, Wider Working Paper 1, 1986
Sen, Amartya, On Ethics and Economics, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987
Drèze, Jean and Sen, Amartya, Hunger and Public Action. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1989.
Sen, Amartya, More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing. New York Review of Books, 1990.
Sen, Amartya, Inequality Reexamined, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992
Nussbaum, Martha, and Sen, Amartya. The Quality of Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993
Sen, Amartya, Development as Freedom, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999
Sen, Amartya, The Argumentative Indian, London: Allen Lane, 2005. review another review
See Google Scholar for more

The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1998
Presentation Speech by Professor Robert Erikson of the Royal Academy of Sciences, December 10, 1998.

Translation of the Swedish text.


Your Majesties, Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen,

How are we best to determine whether a society is developing for the better or the worse? This is a question which has occupied philosophers and social scientists for centuries. In a democracy, all answers to this question must contain some rule, which enables us to aggregate the social values, held by each and every member of society into one common value - a social preference.

The traditional theory of social choice, postulated that each individual is able to rank different social alternatives, according to the utility they represent for him or her. However, the theory did not postulate that it is possible to compare one person`s evaluation of a particular social alternative with that of another person. By not making interpersonal comparisons, a difficult philosophical issue is avoided, but it unfortunately makes it impossible to draw any interesting conclusions about inequality. As a basis for the aggregation of individual values to social preferences, this is a considerable drawback, since all social-ethical considerations worth the name, presuppose equality of some kind between people. Amartya Sen opened up a new field within the theory of social choice when he demonstrated how the possibility of identifying consistent social preferences, is affected by the assumptions we make about the kinds of interpersonal comparison that can be made. In doing this, he reintroduced the issue of distribution into the analysis. He also demonstrated which assumptions about individual preferences and their comparability we actually make when we apply established principles of moral philosophy. According to a utilitarian principle, for example, the best social state is the one which offers the highest average welfare. If we wish to apply this principle, we must be able to compare the differences among individuals in the personal utility offered by two social alternatives, in order to be able to determine which one of the two social states is the superior.

If we wish to compare the level of welfare in a number of countries, or look at the way it has changed over time in one specific country, we have to construct measures of welfare. Since social states can differ from each other in so many dimensions, we have to find ways of aggregating them in a consistent fashion. Amartya Sen`s results from his studies of the theory of social choice, have found an important application here. On the basis of his analysis of the comparability of individual welfare, he has proposed indicators for welfare, income inequality and poverty, which have since been put to extensive use. By deducing these indicators from a small number of reasonable axioms, he has made it easier to evaluate differing social states - if the axiom behind the indicator appears to be reasonable then the ranking according to the indicator will also be reasonable.

In its most extreme form, poverty leads to hunger, a problem which Amartya Sen has addressed in his extensive studies of the origins of famine. In these studies, he paved the way for a new view of famine and starvation, by modifying the usual assumption that famines are always linked to a reduction in the supply of food. Central to Sen`s analysis is that ``the poor`` should not be regarded as an undifferentiated mass, but that one should rather identify particular groups which have been struck by a catastrophic imbalance between needs and resources. Smallholders, farm labourers, tenant farmers and herdsmen may well all be poor, but the ways in which they are affected by famine can differ greatly. The severe drought in the Sahel region south of the Sahara in the early 1970s, undoubtedly reduced the food supply as a whole. However, the nomadic cattleherds were affected much more severely than were the non-nomadic farmers. The cattleherds live mainly off grain, which they buy with the money they make from selling their cattle. Even though many cattle died as a result of the drought, the price of cattle fell in relation to the price of grain, which left the nomads in a highly vulnerable situation and led to many deaths. Amartya Sen`s research has created a better basis for developing measures aiming at preventing and combating famine.


Dear Professor Sen,

You have applied a consistent approach in your studies of social choice, welfare measurement, and poverty. In theoretical and empirical work, you have deepened the understanding of these issues, making fundamental contributions to welfare economics. It is a great honour and privilege for me to convey to you, on behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, our warmest congratulations. I now ask you to receive the Prize from His Majesty the King.

The Guardian Profile: Amartya Sen

---

Food for thought

As a child, he was deeply affected by an encounter with famine victims. Now an Oxbridge academic and Nobel prize winner, he has spent a lifetime fighting poverty with analysis rather than activism. Known in his native India as the Mother Teresa of economics, his ideas have had a global impact. Jonathan Steele reports

Saturday March 31, 2001
The Guardian

Amartya Sen went to a school in Bengal which promoted curiosity rather than exam results, and he has never forgotten how one of his teachers summed up a classmate: ``She is quite a serious thinker even though her grades are very good.`` In Sen`s own case, the epigram needs re-phrasing. Even though he is high up in the world league of serious thinkers - a Nobel laureate in economics who could also have won the prize for philosophy if the committee recognised the subject - he has achieved something.

Article continues

---

---

Sen is a rare example of an intellectual who has had a major effect on politics. His work on the causes of famine changed public perceptions by showing why thousands might starve even when a country`s food production has not diminished, and his analysis of poverty has been enormously influential. Arguing that simple measures of GNP were not enough to assess the standard of living, he helped to create the United Nations` Human Development Index, which has become the most authoritative international source of welfare comparisons between countries.
As Master of Trinity College, Cambridge since January 1998, and the first Asian to head an Oxbridge college, Sen is also deeply immersed in the debate over globalisation. He has given lectures to senior executives of the World Bank but has also shown his commitment to reform from below by becoming honorary president of Oxfam. Most recently, he courted controversy by criticising the Runnymede report on multi-ethnicity in Britain, chaired by fellow-Asian Lord Parekh, for saying that Britain should be seen as a loose federation of cultures held together by common bonds of interest. Though this was meant to be a modern liberal vision, Sen feels it devalues individual identity, risks lumping people into ``communities`` they may not want to be part of, and interferes with a person`s freedom to make her own choices. (Among his many contributions to development economics, Sen has produced pioneering studies of gender inequality, so he always takes care to write ``her`` rather than ``his`` when referring to an abstract person).

He also jumped into the argument over human rights and ``Asian values``, taking strong issue with Singapore`s former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, for claiming that liberalism was a Western export unsuited to Asia. But Sen`s line was not the conventional view that individual liberty is a western invention which needs to have universal application. Rather, he argued that ``the championing of democracy and political freedom in the modern sense cannot be found in the pre-enlightenment tradition in any part of the world, west or east``. However, separate components of this progressive idea - from religious tolerance to egalitarianism and support for a climate of debate - have come and gone in many different cultures at various historical times.

As he sits in the bay window of his elegant rooms looking out over Trinity`s Great Court, dressed in baggy corduroys and a well worn tweed jacket, he looks the part of a man who is completely captivated by the seductive mix of social comfort, institutional prestige and intellectual challenge which academia at its best can provide. His carefully qualified answers and detailed recall of the themes and sub-themes of his books and articles, as well as their exact publication dates, reveal a mind and memory as sharp as his manner is gentle.

The strongest features of his work, joining his economics and philosophy together, are ethics and a sense of common humanity. ``He`s very concerned about justice``, says Sudhir Anand, professor of economics at Oxford. ``He`s made major contributions not only in measuring poverty but understanding it. To him, poverty is the lack of capability to function, so reducing it is related to positive freedom. What`s important to people is to be able to do and be.``

Sen`s fellow economists love the way he has given the subject a friendlier image ,yet he was not awarded the Nobel prize for his more accessible work in development economics, but for ``social choice theory``, the philosophical foundation backed by mathematics which supports all his writings.

The only surprise with his Nobel prize was that it came so late. ``It was only political reasons which prevented him getting it earlier,`` says his old friend, the historian Eric Hobsbawm. ``Ever since the mid-70s the Swedish committee has been strongly committed to free-market theory, until it took a real punch in the midriff in 97/98 with the Asian crisis.``

Though he has strong political views, Sen has generally avoided political statements in public. He is primarily an academic who wants his ideas to cascade through the institutions by virtue of their intellectual force, and then flow into general circulation as the new wisdom. ``He`s peculiarly shy about talking politics publicly. It`s a kind of self-denial,`` says Meghnad Desai, director of the centre for the study of global governance at the LSE. ``It`s also a generational thing. Good economists, when he started out, didn`t get into politics. So he prefers to be subversive in a technical way.``

This abstinence, as well as his soft-spoken manner, are the main reasons why Sen is relatively little-known outside the academic arena in Britain and the United States, the two countries where he has spent most of his time. Only in his native India is he a star, and when he won the Nobel prize in 1998 he was dubbed the Mother Theresa of Economics as crowds followed him around - ``wanting to touch his fountain pen,`` in Hobsbawm`s words. ``The fact that he had made it in Britain gave him tremendous cachet in India, particularly among the 200,000 or so English-speakers who still run the country,`` he adds.

Among academics Sen`s reputation is almost unrivalled. He has served as a full-time or visiting professor at a dozen of the world`s most prestigious universities, and must hold the record for the highest number of honorary degrees (53 according to his CV). He conscientiously turns up to receive each one and is usually asked to give a speech, winning himself the family nickname: Amartya Commencement Sen.

``He has a mind like a searchlight, yet he works at Mozartian speed. His output is staggering in its volume,`` comments Robert Cassen, an economist at the LSE.

``Sen has made fundamental contributions to at least four fields: social choice theory, welfare economics, economic measurement, and development economics,`` says Sudhir Anand. ``The pre-eminence that he has achieved in each of these different fields is remarkable for any scholar: that he has achieved pre-eminence in so many is utterly extraordinary. He is held in enormously high respect by theoretical, empirical and policy economists alike - to say nothing of philosophers and political theorists.``

Sen has spent almost his entire adult life on various university campuses, and was even born on one. His father taught chemistry at Dhaka University (now in Bangladesh) but Amartya came into the world in 1933 at Santiniketan, just north of Calcutta, on the campus of a small, progressive co-ed school and college founded by the writer, philosopher and poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore was a close friend of Sen`s maternal grandfather who taught Sanskrit at Santiniketan. Tagore helped to choose the baby`s name, which means ``immortal`` in Sanskrit. Sen`s mother was a writer who performed in many of the dance-dramas which Tagore wrote. She still edits a literary magazine in Bengal.

``Tagore founded Santiniketan with the idea of creating something different from the English-language Raj kind of school,`` says Sen. ``It also differed from the Indian nationalist school. The teaching language was Bengali, and the place was very self-consciously international, with a sense of global culture. The existence of a Europe outside Britain was more easily conceded in Santiniketan than happened in the rest of the Raj.``

But the school was not for the poor, and when Sen was still only nine, he underwent a profound experience. ``One day a chap came wandering in, very obviously deranged. Some of the nastier boys were being unpleasant to him and some of us felt we had to do something to help. I got chatting to the man and it became quite clear he hadn`t eaten for about 40 days. But then one, 10, it seemed like about 100,000 people came walking through the campus on the way to Calcutta to find some charities which might help them.``

Until this shock Sen was blissfully unaware of suffering. No one in his family, which he calls lower middle-class, nor any of his friends` families, were affected by the famine. ``I was upset by what I saw. My grandfather gave me a small cigarette tin, and said I could fill it with rice and give it to the starving, but only one tinful per family,`` he explains. The famine was clearly class-dependent. Only people on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, such as landless rural labourers, were hungry, and the memory stayed with Sen, prompting him several decades later to do his study of that famine and several others in the Sahel, Ethiopia and China.

The opening lines of his study are typical of his lapidary style: ``Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.`` After examining the records, he found that overall food output in Bengal in 1943 was not lower than in 1941, when there was no famine. The real problem was that the wages paid to farm labourers in 1942 had not kept up with the rising price of food caused by inflation in Calcutta, which was going through a boom as the Raj put money into war production. This resulted in what Sen called a shift in ``entitlements``: labourers had suffered a reduction in their ability to command power over food.

As he was entering his teens, Sen had what he calls another ``devastating`` political experience. The ``idea of India``, with its rich cultural heterogeneity, which he had learned at Santiniketan, collapsed into a welter of sectarian identities when people started to define themselves as Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs, and went on killing sprees. One afternoon at the family home in Dhaka a man rushed through the gate, screaming and bleeding. Sen`s father took him to hospital. The man was a Muslim labourer who had been set upon by Hindu thugs after looking for work in a Hindu area because his family was short of food. The episode turned him against the idea of prioritising communal identity, and gave him another graphic lesson in the way economic unfreedom can make people prey to serious violations of their rights.

By then Sen was already bent on an academic career. He knew he wanted to be a teacher or researcher of some sort, though his interests wavered. ``I seriously flirted in turn with Sanskrit, mathematics and physics, before settling on the eccentric charms of economics,`` he says.

He went to the Presidency College in Calcutta and was soon thrown into the hotbed of political coffee-house debate. His family belonged to the Bengali intellectual elite, and Bengal itself was the most vibrant and politically active city in India. Most of its luminaries were well to the left of Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru. One of Sen`s uncles, who belonged to the Congress Socialist Party, was put into preventive detention by the British and spent six years in prison without trial. Another cousin, in the Communist party, was also in gaol.

Although Sen eagerly joined in the arguments, he says: ``I could not develop enough enthusiasm to join any political party.`` It was an early sign of his detachment from collective action, as well as the pragmatic caution which have stayed with him, in spite of his moral engagement and intellectual boldness. In the early 60s, when he was at Trinity College, Cambridge, as director of studies, his then wife, Nabaneeta Dev, went on the Aldermaston ban-the-bomb marches led by Bertrand Russell. Sen did not. It was partly pressure of work, he says, but ``I had also developed more scepticism of what could be achieved by activism without necessarily weakening on the importance of the cause``.

Sen still calls himself a person of the left, but he says he felt something disturbing about the standard leftwing politics of his student days. Most of his friends were Stalinists. He liked their egalitarian commitment but felt they were not open to political pluralism and that they even saw political tolerance as a ``weakness of will``. ``I thought it was a major defect of the Stalinist left not to recognise that establishing democracy in India had been an enormous step forward. There was a temptation to call this sham or bourgeois democracy. The left didn`t take seriously enough the disastrous lack of democracy in Communist countries,`` he recalls.

This point was to stay with him in his famine studies, when he enunciated the view that no famine has ever occurred in a country with a free press and regular elections. He compared China and India. Although by most indicators, from life expectancy to literacy, Mao`s China was ahead of Nehru`s India, China had had a catastrophic famine between 1958 and 1961 in which up to 30m people starved to death. There was no free press or alternative political parties to give early warning. In democratic India, free from the Raj, this could not have happened.

But Sen did not go overboard in his praise of democracy. He pointed out in his 1984 book, Resources, Values, and Democracy, that while there was no famine in India, a third of the population went to bed hungry every night. ``The quiet presence of non-acute, endemic hunger leads to no newspaper turmoil, no political agitation, no riots in the Indian parliament. The system takes it in his stride,`` he wrote.

When Sen arrived in Cambridge at the age of 19 to study economics at Trinity, he found the college ``a bit of an oasis``. The major debates in political economy in the university were raging between neo-classicists and followers of Keynes. Trinity was an unusual model of tolerance ,with the Marxist, Maurice Dobb, doing joint seminars with the conservative, Dennis Robertson. Sen found that this suited his style. He has always rejected any simplistic labelling of people, and his work is constantly peppered with references to earlier economists whom he respects for their views, regardless of the ideological camps which form around them. He takes examples from Adam Smith, as well as Marx, without being a Smithian or a Marxist.

In 1960, Sen married Nabaneeta Dev, whom he first got to know when she was a student of comparative literature and he was a young professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. He met her off the boat train when she came to England in 1959. He proposed soon afterwards and they had two daughters. Antara, 37, became a journalist and edits a political, cultural, and literary magazine, called The Little Magazine, in Delhi. Nandana, 33, is an actress and film director, and lives in New York and Bombay.

In 1970, S en`s path-breaking book, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, attempted to rescue welfare economics from the pessimism of free-marketeers, who argued that there was no point in government intervention, and that individuals should be left to choose whatever the market made available in response to their choices, and statists, who concluded that authoritarian choices had to be made by governments on other people`s behalf. Sen argued that perfection in social decision-mak ing is unnecessary. Partial comparisons between people can help and majority decisions do carry weight, as long as the interests of the less assertive citizens are not ignored.

His own life, meanwhile, had its periods of turmoil and tragedy. While an undergraduate, he developed cancer of the mouth and he was treated with massive doses of radiation. It whittled away his palate and could have proved fatal: he was unable to eat solid food for three months and doctors said he only had a 15% chance of survival. In 1971 there were fears that the cancer had recurred but, after a while, the diagnosis proved wrong.

That same year, Sen left Dev. She had followed him around the various campuses where his work took him, and developed her own academic career in a very different intellectual area. (By the time of the divorce, she was well-known in Bengal as a a writer and professor of literature, and the separation caused a storm there.) He describes her generously ``as one of the best-known literary names in Bengal, a leading poet and novelist``. She has described him as ``a good economist but a bad money manager``, and ``a clumsy father until the children grew old enough to be his students``.

Sen later started to go out with Eva Colorni, a brilliant Italian economist from a distinguished anti-fascist family, whom he had met some years earlier. The couple married in 1978, but Colorni died of cancer in 1985, leaving Sen with a 10-year-old daughter, Indrani, and eight-year-old son, Kabir.

Partly in search of a change of scene, and partly because he needed a higher salary as a single father of two young children, he left Britain for Harvard. (His first two children stayed with Dev.) In the United States he renewed contact with an old student friend, the brilliant Pakistani economist, Mahbub ul Haq, who persuaded him to join in elaborating the Human Development Index as a rival to the World Bank`s system of ranking countries by classical macroeconomic criteria such as savings rates and GNP.

``Amartya gave it intellectual depth and credibility. Before that people thought it was just flaky, feelgood stuff,`` says Richard Jolly, who worked for the United Nations Children`s Fund and is writing a history of the UN. ``I`m struck by the way he has made so many contributions to the UN over the last three decades.``

Despite his advice for the UN, Sen has been coy about working for individual governments. He turned down numerous invitations to advise the Indian government. In Britain he has given a talk at one of Gordon Brown`s regular economic seminars at 11 Downing Street, but he politely avoids any public comment on New Labour and the Third Way.

Sen`s empirical work has occasionally been criticised on points of detail, or for not going far enough. Alex de Waal, the author of Famine Crimes, a book which looked at how democracy prevents famine, says the mere fact of democracy is not enough. He also says the main cause of famine is epidemic disease rather than starvation. But he describes Sen`s work as ``seminal``.

An article Sen wrote in the British Medical Journal, which appeared in the New York Review of Books with the headline, ``More than a Hundred Million Women are Missing``, was picked apart by some demographers. Sen had examined the disturbing fact that while female mortality is generally lower than male mortality at all age-groups in most cultures, this is not the case in India. Because of massive gender inequality, girls have less food and are taken to doctors less than boys. Sen accepts that that criticism of his ``ballpark figure`` was legitimate, but says his main point about inequality cannot be challenged.

More substantial criticisms revolve round his role in the current globalisation debate. Richard Jolly, while being an enormous admirer, says: ``On the issue of liberalisation and the opening up of economies, Amartya has been rather mainstream. He hasn`t raised very deep questions about the whole process and of globalisation in general. He`s more of a mainstream economist than many people realise.``

Meghnad Desai sees a double problem. One is the issue of accessibility. Desai cites Sen`s latest book, Development as Freedom, which is based on a set of lectures he gave the World Bank in 1996. Desai describes it as written for the converted, as well as being too dense. (Even though advertised as the work of a Nobel laureate, the book sold less than 3,000 copies in hardback.) ``Amartya won`t admit it but he`s very badly hurt if he`s criticised . . . He can`t let go of this armour of the technical thing. He can`t write a tract, or doesn`t want to,`` he says.

Desai also feels Sen has failed to come clean on a major change of mind. ``He used to be anti-market and very sympathetic to the Nehru line. Then he found a clever way round it. During the past 20 years he`s finally made his peace with the market, though on his own terms and without going all-out for a free market. It`s a higher form of reconciliation,`` he argues.

TN Srinavasan, economics professor at Yale and a long-time colleague, says: ``Many of us were trained in the 50s to believe that states should be active in planning the economy. Sen did not give up that idea until later than some others. He still hasn`t added his voice to the call for more privatisation of the Indian economy and the removal of the old Gandhian protection of small-scale producers.``

Sen gets quite heated by the suggestion that he has changed his line on the market. ``Nothing I`ve ever written was anti-market. Being against the market is like being against conversation. It`s a form of exchange,`` he snaps. ``But I was just as hostile in the past to giving any privileges to the market as I am now. Besides, those who are great advocates of the market don`t always make it easier for people to have access to the market through basic education, credit or whatever.``

He is also stung by the charge that he is middle of the road. ``That depends on how you define the road. There is a road which you can define in which I am in the middle, but part of my problem is to argue that people should be on a different road. I`m really trying to change the road. My frustration is that I have not being very successful in changing the focus of the debate,`` he says.

Even in trying to change the road, Sen`s line on globalisation is relatively soft. ``Opponents may see globalisation as a new folly, but it is neither particularly new or a folly,`` he says. He supports the ``themes`` raised by anti-capitalist and environmental protesters at Seattle, Prague and Davos, but not their ``theses``, which he finds too simple. He says the problem is not free trade, but the inequality of global power. He strongly welcomes the rise of the NGO movement, which combines with media coverage to produce the beginning of some ``countervailing power`` to the larger corporations and the traditional policies of first world governments.

But he also attaches blame to many third-world governments for not undertaking domestic reform. He argues that the United Nations has to be saved from insolvency and given a greater leadership role which escapes from the asymmetry caused by the veto power of the five richest and/or largest countries. ``There needs to be a watchdog institution which is concerned with inequality and fair trade, asks why the USA and Europe are so restrictive to products from the third world, and raises questions about the pricing policy of the drug companies,`` he says.

For the past 10 years, Sen has been married to the economic historian, Emma Rothschild, an expert on Adam Smith and Fellow of King`s. The two children he brought up on his own have done well. Indrani is a journalist in New York and Kabir teaches music at a school in Boston, and has a rock band called Uncle Trouble.

Sen usually spends the winter holidays in India, where he likes to go on long bike rides, and maintains a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he and Emma spend the spring and long vacations. Asked how he relaxes, he replies: ``I read a lot and like arguing with people.``

As well as his global interests, he has taken up one local goal. He wants to raise the proportion of state school pupils getting into Trinity. There has been progress, and for the first time last year, the college made more than half (53%) of its offers to state-school pupils. Sen, however, acknowledges there is still a gap, since nationally 65% of students with three A-levels are from state schools.

``This is not a personal initiative,`` he insists. ``The council was already doing it before my time, and the undergraduates on the access committee who visit sixth forms are very keen to explain we are not unfriendly to state schools. My reputation would be mud if I seemed to be trying to take the credit.`` A lifelong believer in equality, in this, as in all his other contributions, he feels the main thing is to reach the correct analysis. He is not a crusader. Others must implement the solutions.

Life at a glance: Amartya Kumar Sen

Born: Santiniketan, Bengal, November 3 1933

Education: Presidency College, Calcutta; Trinity College, Cambridge

Married: Nabaneeta Dev, 1960-71, (two daughters, Antara and Nandana); Eva Colorni, 1978 (died 1985), a daughter, Indrani, and son, Kabir; Emma Rothschild,1991.

Some books: Choice of Techniques, 1960; Collective Choice and Social Welfare, 1970; On Economic Inequality, 1973; Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, 1981; Hunger and Public Action, jointly edited with Jean Dreze, 1989; India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, with Jean Dreze, 1995; Development as Freedom, 1999.

Indiatogether.org

---

Reflections of an economist
David Barsamian of Alternative Radio talks to Amartya Sen on various influences on his life and his take on issues like globalization.

Amartya Sen was born in Santiniketan, India, and studied at Presidency College, Calcutta, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, UK. He is Professor Emeritus at Harvard and honorary president of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (OXFAM). He has taught at the London School of Economics, Oxford University, and Delhi University. His research has ranged over a number of fields in economics and philosophy. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in development economics. His best-known work, Poverty and Famines, causally investigates a number of major famines including the Bangladesh famine of 1974 and other catastrophes in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. In this study, Sen challenged the view that a shortage of food is the main explanation for famine and proved that a more profound analysis of complex economic and social mechanisms is needed to understand and avert thesed evastating events. His most recent book is Development as Freedom. Sen was interviewed by David Barsamian, producer and director of Alternative Radio.

---

Part 1 | Part 2

Tell me about your family background.

My maternal grandfather Kshiti Mohan Sen was also called Sen, as it happened. He was professor of Sanskrit in Santiniketan. In India, the first child was often born in the mother`s parental home. So I was born at their house. My parents lived in Dhaka. My father was a professor of chemistry there. My paternal grandfather was a judge, a lawyer. So there was a very spread-out background. My mother, who is close to 90, edits a literary magazine in Bengali. She was also a dancer and played the lead role in several of Rabindranath Tagore`s(1861-1941) dance dramas in Calcutta. It was relatively uncommon,for middle-class women to actually dance on the stage. She was quite good at it.

When did Tagore establish the school at Santiniketan?

It was established in the very beginning of the twentieth century. My mother was a student there. I have one sister, Supurna, who now lives in Santiniketan and she also went to school there. We`ve all been there.

Would it be fair to say in the shadow of Tagore?

To some extent. He was clearly the strongest influence. Later on,thinking about it, I thought that I agreed much more with Tagore than I recognized then, because his presence was so strong there. There wasn`t enough contrast. But only when I was thinking about other people who influenced my thinking, like Mahatma Gandhi, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and Adam Smith, I did think that Tagore had a very particular role which I wasn`t fully aware of at that time.

He was not only a Nobel Prize winner but a Renaissance man, a musician, a writer, a playwright. He did so many things.

A great essayist, too. A visionary man in addition to being extremely talented. And his painting, which was originally thought to have just been a hobby, of course now is very highly prized.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1913. He was celebrated in the West. Then he went into a bit of an eclipse a few decades later.

The appreciation of Tagore was very peculiarly slanted in England and through England else where in the West. It emphasized his religious side. It overemphasized his mystical side, which was not all that strong in reality, and underemphasized his secularism and his interest in science, reason and social equity. It made him into more of a guru figure from the East than he could be fairly described as. While Gitanjali, the book that won the Nobel Prize, is a very fine collection of poetry, many people wouldn`t regard that as being his best work in any sense. Those poems are quite often written in a religious style, but in many of them there was a great deal of ambiguity as to whether the addressee is God or a lover.

That`s true of much of Tagore`s love poetry, either it`s a gentle love poem or a devotional poem. That ambiguity is very important because the language is used in a way that transcends that. It`s part of one of the schools of Hindu thought that the relation with God is like the relation to a lover. That`s certainly not a Christian thought. It`s part of the Bhakti movement and the Bauls. The Bauls are kind of the wandering minstrels of Bengal. They are strongly influenced by the Islamic Sufi tradition. But in the rigid hands of W.B. Yeats, possibly the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, Tagore`s poems took something of a turn. Yeats was pretty merciless in eliminating all those ambiguities as much as possible and making Gitanjali distinctly mystical and devotional. To a Bengali reader something was lost because ambiguity is a very important part of that poetry. The religious was only one aspect of one side of Tagore. Another aspect was this rather mystical experience with God rather than the fearless, warm friendship; that is a characteristic feature of his religious thought and is also absent. There`s no God-fearing devotion there. There isn`t very much in Gitanjali either. But some of the affectionate closeness with God is gone. I say that with some hesitation as a non-religious person. It`s an intellectual subject one can react to. Something of Tagore`s religion is also reduced. He gave a wonderful set of lectures called ``Religion of Man`` at Oxford in 1930. He also made use of a lot of Baul and Bhakti poetry, from a collection that my grandfather K.M.Sen put together. He was a great collector of songs. I think he did the first modern collection of Kabir`s and Dadoo`s songs. Kabir and Dadoo were mystics who combined elements from Hinduism and Islam, from the Sufi and Bhakti movement. Tagore used that extensively in his Oxford lectures.

What was your personal contact with Tagore?

I was very young. Up to the age of three I was in India, mainly in Dhaka. Then we moved to Burma. My father taught at the Agricultural College in Mandalay. During that period when I was in Mandalay, we went to Santiniketan regularly in my father`s vacations. During those visits, I must have been four or five then, my grandfather thought that the time had come when I should not only speak Bengali but also start doing a little bit of Sanskrit. I was very grateful that I was introduced to a classical language very early in my life. But I didn`t start doing that very seriously until at the age of six I cameback to Dhaka. For about a year I was a student at St. Gregory`s School in Dhaka. Then I went to Santiniketan. But by the time I got there in 1941, Tagore had just died. I had met him a number of times as a child, but I didn`t have any real communication with him. I remember him as a benign, friendly presence.

There was an interesting split between Tagore and Gandhi. It`s kind of ironic, because it was Tagore who popularized the term Mahatma, ``great soul.``

Faith was more important for Gandhi. Reason was more important for Tagore. That`s one contrast. Being free to determine what you want to do rather than being guided by tradition, received wisdom, was much more important to Tagore than it was for Gandhi. These are matters of somewhat fine distinction. In some ways Gandhi was also interested in reason and freedom, indeed, much of his life was concerned with that. But there was more constraint on what is an appropriate field of reason for Gandhi than for Tagore. Emperor Akbar, whom I cited in the New York Review piece I did called ``Reach of Reason,`` said that there`s nothing that we can accept without first reasoning about it. To some extent that was true of Tagore, even though he wouldn`t deny the immediate role of raw sentiments and unexamined affection. But the point comes when you have to decide what you want to do.

In his novel The Home and the World, there`s a very sharp division on the issue of the swadeshi movement. Tagore had strong opinions about that.

That`s the third distinction vis-à-vis Gandhi, other than the greater focus on reason and freedom, and not unconnected with that. Tagore was very keen on traditional Indian culture. He also felt that the civilization of every country was a personal inheritance from which he himself had benefited, and so does everyone. He insisted that any idea or any cultural contribution which I enjoy instantly becomes mine for that reason, no matter where it has its origin. I don`t think that would have been Gandhi`s attitude. There was a clear distinction between the nation, its own contribution, and other nations. He was respectful of other nations. He was very tolerant of diversity in the world, but there wasn`t a great pride in world civilization as such, even though he himself was influenced by Tolstoy and by English legal thinking, Ruskin, as well as Thoreau and Emerson. The concept of the Other was much less sharp in the case of Tagore. There`s a kind of seamless wholeness to world civilization. And I grew up in that culture.

Didn`t Tagore feel that the burning of British-made clothes would exacerbate communal feeling, particularly in Bengal?

There were two things here. He thought that burning any useful product seemed a negative and basically unattractive gesture. One could say that Tagore was not being sufficiently political. Gandhi was capturing the high ground of politics by burning British made clothing by showing how it had brought about the decimation of the Indian textile industry. I think Gandhi was making his point, which Tagore, being not such a political person, may not have attached importance to and could actually have missed. But there`s a second aspect of it connected with your question, namely that it so happens that a number of people involved in the cotton trade were Muslims, so that the burning of these cloths would be particularly detrimental to the interests of that community. Tagore foresees in The Home and the World that the Muslim traders` resistance to the swadeshi movement and reluctance to join it, for which they had good economic interests, would actually exacerbate tension between Hindus and Muslims, which in effect it did. Here Tagore was being a more far-seeing statesman than the followers of Gandhi who are portrayed in the novel. Tagore was careful not to make it a criticism of Gandhi himself, and I think that`s fair.

What impact did the first partition of Bengal have in the early 1900s?

The partition was clearly politically motivated. Like any decision you take, there are several reasons. But one of them was the political agitation. Bengal was certainly the hotbed of political revolt at that time. Virtually all of what the British would say were terrorist activities at that time was coming from Bengal. Throughout the nineteenth century the British found the Bengalis particularly difficult to control. A distinguished member of my college, Macaulay, was very explicit on the failings of the Bengalis. In Kipling`s stories there is often the caricature of the Bengali babu. Hence there is often the dislike of Bengal, which was resisting British rule more and more. Oddly enough, much of the administration of the British Indian Empire was basically based in Bengal and the capital was in Calcutta until past the 1905 partition. The Bengalis had produced a new urban middle class to a great extent connected with the Raj. They served as the junior boys in the administration, but by the middle of the nineteenth century the rebellious element is beginning to get strong. By the beginning of the twentieth century it had become very strong. That political consideration must have played a part in the thinking of the Viceroy Lord Curzon and others involved in that partition.

And the shifting of the capital from Calcutta to New Delhi, to build a new imperial city in 1911, what was that about?

There are at least three good reasons for moving it. First of all, Delhi had been the capital of Mughal India for a long time and therefore held a position such that even when there was a rebellion against the East India Company and British rule in 1857 in the so-called Sepoy Mutiny, while the British headquarters remained in Calcutta, the rebels wanted to have their headquarters in Delhi. Second, Delhi offered a much greater opportunity of expansion, more open land than Calcutta could offer. A place like New Delhi, which was built as it were almost like the ninth city of Delhi. There were seven Islamic cities, and then there was an earlier Indian city, near Hastinapur, and at last comes the British city. The third reason was that Delhi was much more central in the days before partition, as it no longer now is because it`s so close to the Pakistan border. At that time it was very central. On top of that, the irritation of the occasionally sharp-shooting Bengali must have been quite strong also at that time. All these contributed to that. I don`t want to insist on a purely political (narrowsense) explanation. But it would have been a matter of relief for the British that they were moving out of Calcutta to safer ground elsewhere.

Today the position that Gandhi and Tagore occupy in the Indian imagination, some people have said they have been deified. They`re icons. The content of their work has largely been vacuumed out.

To a certain extent that is true. That statement is often made, and you can see why. They are both respectfully remembered, Gandhi more and much more often than Tagore, and yet Gandhi was very concerned that his model of self-sufficient village economy, his opposition to technology, his skepticism of international trade, these have not really survived in today`s India. But after having said that, one also has to recognize that this cannot be a just criticism of modern India, partly because many of Gandhi`s ideas were very difficult to relate to a program of economic and social development. I don`t just mean things like opposition to big dams. It`s not clear exactly what Gandhi`s position on that was. Certainly it was less clear than Nehru`s. But these are not issues that seemed that big. Dams looked very good in Nehru`s time, too. At that time the analysis seemed to indicate that that would raise living standards, like the Tennessee Valley Project. They looked promising, but they often proved to be creating more problems than they solved. But the general hostility to modern technology and to modernity as such wasn`t such an easy thing to deal with. Gandhi was opposed to railroads. He was opposed to modern medicine. One of his children suffered from illness and infact died without getting the benefit of modern medicine. There are many aspects of Gandhi which are not the reasons we remember him. We remember him because of his message to love humanity, because of his perfecting of the technique of nonviolence, because he was able to show that to fight evil you don`t have to be evil yourself. You can fight evil with good. All these are major thoughts. Those, too, are often not remembered sufficiently. That I would complain about. But the neglect of some of his other ideas, including the self-sufficient village economy, opposition to railways and other modern technologies and modern medicine, that I don`t lament.

There are more thoughts needed about his attitude about our position in the world. I am very opposed to the Indian nuclearization.There is something to be learned from Gandhi here, since he was soopposed to militarism. But at the same time, I don`t think there the analysis has to be primarily Gandhi-oriented. We have to see what India gets from the nuclear bomb. All Indians lose by insecurity and diversion of resources. Rational economic and political analyses show that we have good reason to reject militarization. There Tagore has more to offer. That`s Tagore`s territory. You ask yourself why you are doing it, what do you get out of it. You ask yourself, Am I being sufficiently self-critical? Am I asking the right questions? Is this right for me? What will it do to other people, because we also belong to a world community? What do we owe to others and what do others owe to us? How do we relate to each other? One could say that Tagore`s ideas, not so much ideas but techniques of analysis are more relevant than Gandhi, who was less concerned with reason in a very broad sense. To take into account affection and sentiments and emotions but at the same time subject them all to reasoned scrutiny. That is quintessential Tagore territory.

Tagore had been knighted by the British. After the Jallianwala Baghmassacre in Punjab in 1919, he renounced his knighthood. What kind of impact did that have on the nationalist struggle?

He denounced the British action and that made dramatic headlines. As a political act it drew attention to his renouncing an honor that the Rajhad given to him, and that was quite important. The beastliness of that massacre was so great that it would have been very hard for somebody as sympathetic to humanity in general to live quietly with the kind of distinction that the Raj had offered him in the form of the knighthood. So it was a natural act to undertake. I don`t think Tagore undertook it as a political action. Gandhiji, who was much more a political person, would have probably seen the political consequences much more clearly than Tagore. For him it was a gut reaction. He did not want to associate with murderers. But it so happened that it was a politically important step. I personally don`t think he thought of it as a political step at all, but it proved to be one.

Tagore is the only composer in the world who wrote the national anthems of two countries, India and Bangladesh.

I mentioned that in my New York Review article. I kept on thinking and searching to see whether there was anybody else who might have that distinction, but I didn`t find any. I think it`s remarkable. Both the Indian anthem ``Jana Gana Mana`` an the Bangladesh anthem ``Amar Sonar Bangla`` are not only poems of Tagore, but they had been very well-known poems before they were adopted in the two countries as the national anthem. I have a very strong association with Bangladesh myself. I come from there and to a great extent grew up in Dhaka. If somebody asked me where is my home I would have to say Dhaka and go more deeply into the village in the Dhaka district where I come from, Manikganj, and a small village called Matto, that sense of belonging is very strong. I`ve visited it recently also. Given that sense of attachment, it`s particularly pleasing for me that somebody whom I knew, namely Tagore, who also happened to have given me my name, is also remembered in Bangladesh not just through his rich artistic output, but also in having one of his poems as its national anthem. The other one is similarly a very powerful song on India and its diversity. That`s what the song is about, a celebration of India`s diversity. Nevertheless there is an attempt to stick together. That`s the main theme of the Indian national anthem. That comes through very well. The two songs are in a very different spirit, but they both work respectively, one for a large federal country like India, and the other as a culturally integrated country like Bangladesh. Both nations chose their anthems very well.

Part 1 | Part 2

You had an early childhood experience in Dhaka involving a man named Kader Mia. Can you tell that story and the influence it had on you?

I was very small then. I think it happened when I was ten. I was playing alone in the garden of our home in Dhaka, ``Jagat Kutir,`` which means world cottage. I was suddenly made aware of the presence of somebody. I looked up and there was a person profusely bleeding from his stomach. He had clearly been knifed. He came through the door wanting help and some water. I had never seen somebody knifed like that before. I shouted for help while trying to make him lie down on the ground. There was a little cement seat where I helped to place him. While my father, who was upstairs, came down, I brought him a glass of water. I was chatting with him. He was a Muslim daily laborer who had come for work in this largely Hindu area called Wari. He had come despite knowing that these were troubled times, where in Hindu areas Muslims were getting butchered and in Muslim areas Hindus were getting butchered. He came with great reluctance, but he was poor. His family had very little to eat. He wanted to come and earn some income. He was offered a job. He was on his way there when he was knifed. He kept on telling me then, as well as when I went to the hospital with my father in the car, that his wife had said not to go to such a dangerous area. But he felt economically compelled to do so in order to have an income. The penalty of that economic unfreedom proved to be death. It had a tremendous impact on me. First of all, it was incredible to me that members of one community could be killing members of another community not for anything personal that they hold against the person other than the identity of the person as a member of another community. That`s a very difficult thought. People get used to it because of experiencing that kind of event so often. It`s still a hard thought for a human mind to comprehend, why you should try to take the life of someone who has done you no harm, whom you don`t even know, just because he belongs to some group. I found that terrifying and utterly perplexing, both from an ethical point of view and intellectually. What kind of thought process can lead to such an act? Secondly, it also had the impact of making me deeply skeptical of community-base identities. Even to this day, I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics. Part of that hostility is based on some analyses, which I`ve tried to present in my writings. But I think the instinctive revulsion is connected with having seen some of the ugly sides of community identity. That was a very strong thing. I knew that there were riots going on, but until I held somebody in my own arms who was bleeding to death, and he did finally die in the hospital, it wasn`t as real to me. I think nothing could have made it as real as an experience of that kind. Thirdly, of course, what he told me, and that he particularly told me about his decision to risk it, which was the second sentence after I had given him some water. He said that his wife had told him not to come. It`s difficult for me even to recollect those moments now. The lack of freedom in his life, if he was to be a good father and feed his children, he had to take every opportunity that came his way, even at great personal risk. He took the risk and lost his life and the earning power for his family. I was overwhelmed even to think about it. It also made me take a view that I`ve tried to develop in my book Development as Freedom. Different kinds of freedoms interrelate, lack of economic freedom, could be avery major reason for loss of liberty, in this case, liberty of life. The fact that freedom of different kinds interrelate was a central notion for me. The beginning of that idea was those moments. It stayed with me in my student days in Santiniketen and at Presidency College in Calcutta, where I was politically quite active, and later at Tr