Rabindranath Tagore was not at home in this world. In the Vedantic tradition, he expressed profound ontological dysphoria- the quality which attracted Radhakrishnan to his thought- without however ceasing to work for the benefit of others. It is often forgotten that Tagore first engaged with Rural Reconstruction- he even sent his son to train in Agricultural Science in America- before setting up Shantiniketan so as to foster education in the Fine Arts and Humanities. Thus, Sriniketan, which adjoins Shantiniketan, was working to improve the lives of the common people while students at Shantiniketan were becoming acquainted with the great thoughts and noble deeds of the wider world.
Amartya Sen was born and partially educated at Shantiniketan. He well knew the ethos of Sriniketan. Yet he pretended- for some paltry academic purpose- that Sriniketan's log books reflected market clearing wage rates when they clearly did not. Sriniketan was philanthropic and received money from Quakers and so forth. Moreover, Sen should have been able to see for himself that there was always some payment in kind for agricultural workers.
Sen didn't understand that Tagore's not being at home in the world- his condition of being a wanderer for whom home was where night fell on the path (prithvim sarvam yatra sayamgrho munih) was the condition for his being able to create a place where the World could make a home in a single nest- yatra visvam bhavatyekanidam.
It is because there is some goal to life beyond life that this is a journey in which all may rest together. As the Bible says- Can two walk together except they be agreed? Perhaps, there was a brief moment- in the shadow of a mushroom cloud which kept growing exponentially- when this life seemed more precious than anything which might come after it. But this life could have no dynamics because such dynamics as obtained were of thermo-nuclear annihilation. Thus the oikonomia associated with the katechon- i.e. the 'invisible hand' which coordinated coexistence and which kept doomsday at bay- became, like the Buddhist momentary Universe, the one period economy of the mathematical economists or the one shot Social Contract of political philosophers.
Thus the RAND corporation publishes Arrow's theorem- which essentially says that we should take everything which is Social out of Social Choice- while, a little later, the more theologically inclined Rawls thinks artificially eliminating, by means of a Veil of ignorance, what Maynard Smith called 'uncorrelated asymmetries' and their associated 'bourgeois strategies', would yield a type of Justice as Fairness as reconstitutive of 'diakonia'- the mission of the virtuous to the poor and vulnerable- as that brought on by terror of imminent apocalypse- the word means rending of the Veil.
Sen, who taught a course with Arrow and Rawls at the end of the Sixties, will go down in history as sandwiched between them precisely because his work is wholly ahistorical. It is a fly in amber just as much as the work of Nirad Chaudhuri.
This was by no means inevitable. Rawls and Arrow had been rendered irrelevant by developments in mathematics and jurisprudence during the Sixties and Seventies. Sen had already been judged and found wanting as a development economist- this was because Indians could see with their own eyes that the more mathematical an economist, the worse policy advise he gave- and had emigrated so as to serve two exploded academic availability cascades which have hypertrophied senselessly.
Abhrajyoti Chakraborty, in a rather poetic review of Sen's memoir for the Guardian, highlights his struggle with cancer which, it may be, inclined him to live in the now, rather than dwell on they mysterious manner in which all things change.
Amartya Sen was 18 when he diagnosed his own cancer. Not long after he had moved to Calcutta for college, he noticed a lump growing inside his mouth. He consulted two doctors but they laughed away his suspicions, so Sen, then a student of economics and mathematics, looked up a couple of books on cancer from a medical library. He identified the tumour – a “squamous cell carcinoma” – and later when a biopsy confirmed his verdict he wondered if there were in effect two people with his name: a patient who had just been told he had cancer, but also the “agent” responsible for the diagnosis. “I must not let the agent in me go away,” Sen decided, “and could not – absolutely could not – let the patient take over completely.”
Sen was 18. He should have switched to Medicine, or- if he didn't have the grades- he should have specialized in Medical Statistics or Public Health or something of that sort.
It appears he was a good patient- he underwent a painful course of treatment. But was he a good agent? Unlike Tagore, he did no first order good. True, his work could be considered second order good- i.e. we could read him as saying 'please provide more first order goods'. But anyone can demand that! Indeed, in India, second order good crowds out first order good. Demanding things is cheaper than doing things.
This self-division
actually, Sen always starts by making what appears to be a meaningful distinction which, however, soon turns out to be nonsense. In the sentence 'Sen is a cancer patient', cancer is the agent. Of course if Sen had discovered a cure for cancer then we would say 'Cancer was defeated by Sen' and cancer would be the patient and Sen the agent. However, Sen's work can't be said to have contributed to any such thing.
is characteristic of Home in the World – “world” being here no more than the university campuses Sen has lived in all his life – and places it in the tradition of CLR James’s Beyond a Boundary and Nirad C Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian: books that, in their primacy of thought over feeling, reflect the psychic extent of the colonial encounter.
Chaudhuri and James had experienced a racialist colonialism. Sen was four years old when Bengal came to be ruled by an elected Bengali Premier. Had Sen's father sent him to America rather than Britain (which still had a big Empire in the Fifties) then Sen would have never had any first hand knowledge of the 'psychic' effect of 'the colonial encounter'. Tagore sent his son to America to study agriculture. He returned in 1909 and played a leading part in Shantiniketan till he ran off with someone else's wife.
It is revealing that Chakraborty mentions Nirad Chaudhuri's autobiography. Nirad made it plain that Bengalis were beastly creatures. He ended his book by demanding that Whitey- any type of Whitey- return and take control of Bengal. It appears Chakraborty accepts that Sen is 'anti-national' in the same blind and bigoted way that Nirad was anti-Bengali.
The empire loomed early in Sen’s life, though he was born and schooled in Santiniketan, the idyllic campus set up by the poet Rabindranath Tagore in rural Bengal. There were the uncles locked up under “preventive detention” (a law still used in India to imprison dissenters without trial).
This is false. The Preventive Detention Act currently in use was passed in 1950. It is for a maximum of 3 months after which Judges have to agree to its being extended to a maximum of one year. There is no provision under the act to imprison 'dissenters'. Only if there is a prima facie risk of the person acting in a manner prejudicial to defense, public order or the maintenance of essential supplies and services can it be triggered.
On the other hand, it is certainly true that widespread use of preventive detention would have prevented the loss of millions of lives during Partition.
There was the Bengal famine of 1943, which Sen witnessed when he was 10 years old;
but which he failed to understand and which he misrepresented in a mischievous and shameful manner
and the partition that forced his parents to leave their ancestral house in Dhaka.
Partition did not force Muslims to leave their ancestral homes in West Bengal. A Bangladeshi Muslim, writing in the NYT, asserts that there was only economic migration, not ethnic cleansing, of Muslims there.
Sen’s account of his childhood is more attuned to the ideas he imbibed and the times he lived through. The inner life is eschewed for the world outside.
Ideas are imbibed through 'the inner life'. 'Times lived through' are represented by the development of that 'inner life'. What Charkaborty is actually saying is that Sen's memoir does not recapitulate his mental development. Rather he is applying ideas from a later phase of his life to such early memories as he still retains.
A remark on female classmates will trigger Sen to reflect on gender inequality in India, instead of, say, memories of playground pranks and crushes.
So this deeply boring man is merely stringing together all the silly things he has asserted over the last few decades and tying them to his own life-story.
The portraits of his parents and grandparents are persuasive about their accomplishments and political opinions, not so much about their private hopes and regrets.
A ghost writer would have done a better job.
Whatever Sen lacks in emotional intricacies, he more than makes up for with his scholarly reveries and social insights
But those reveries are foolish and the insights imbecilic.
But then again, to expect the pleasures of a memoir from this early intellectual autobiography is perhaps misguided.
It is misguided to expect pleasure or instruction from a vainglorious pedant.
The rise and fall of prices in Calcutta’s fish markets can make little Sen reconsider conventional theories of demand and supply.
No they can't. Conventional theories of demand and supply are studied at University using mathematical techniques unknown to 'little Sens'.
His mother’s afternoon chitchat about Bengali Muslims being deprived of land ownership can lead him to a new understanding of class differences and sectarian discontent.
Bengali Muslims weren't deprived of land ownership. Thanks to Fazl ul Haq's reforms, their position was improving. Of course, ethnic cleansing would help in this matter to a much greater extent. But that had to wait till the Brits departed.
A typical Sen paragraph might start off by discussing similarities between Gandhi’s and Wittgenstein’s views,
There are no such similarities. Wittgenstein did read Tagore out to a bemused Vienna circle. One could say that there is a family resemblance between Brouwer, Wittlesstein and Tagore. One can't say that of Gandhi. Why? Gandhi believed in reincarnation. There is a 'Truth' world where univocity prevails. Mahatmas have a head start in getting there.
then move on to readings of ancient Indian texts – the Vedas, the plays of Kalidasa and Shudraka, the mathematical writings of Aryabhata and Bhaskara – before ending with a wistful flourish: “I have often wondered why I have been so deeply moved by the Buddha.”
Coz he was famous and lots of foreigners liked him.
Is there another intellectual alive who can pull off the following sentence and make the reader believe in his excitement: “I would have given anything for a ticket to ancient Greece so that I could go and invade the privacy of Euclid”?
But Euclid lived in Egypt not 'ancient Greece'. Is there any genuine 'intellectual' alive who doesn't know this?
The word “precocious” doesn’t begin to describe the future Nobel laureate’s schooldays. This is a boy who picks up Sanskrit before English, thanks to his maternal grandfather.
This is a cretin who says 'Niti'- which means policy- actually means 'Justice'. The guy should pick up a dictionary not blame his grandpa for his imbecility.
When taken to meet his incarcerated uncles, he probes them on the difference between socialists and communists.
Had they been communists they would have been released the moment Hitler attacked Stalin.
During his treatment for cancer, he reads Coriolanus in the radiation room.
Something could be made of this. Coriolanus refused to show off his wounds to win his people's favor. Sen may well have kept quiet about his cancer treatment and thus won the respect of his peers.
In college he wonders why a professor with remarkable “creative talent” is reluctant to pursue his own research –
This was a good question whose answer was that the 'opportunity cost' of 'pure research' was much higher in a very poor country capable of rapid 'catch up' growth. Interestingly, mathematical econ and O.R gained greatly by pressure to be useful to the war-effort or the 'over-fulfilment' of the 5 year plan etc, etc. Wealthy countries are welcome to gas on about Social Choice & Rawlsian Justice & the Capabilities approach and so forth.
unlike Sen himself, who would go on to pursue advanced degrees in economics and philosophy, and publish academic articles and books on epistemology, ethics, public health, political philosophy, social choice theory, game theory, Indian identity and classical literature.
All of which was either false, foolish or downright mischievous.
The chapters become less digressive once Sen moves from Calcutta to Cambridge in 1953. For once, we glimpse scenes: the journey on a ship from Bombay to London, where Sen fancies himself a clueless Columbus.
Columbus thought he had reached India.
Then, Sen’s ordeals as an immigrant, when porters struggle to pronounce his name and a landlady wonders if the colour of his skin might come off in the bath.
But Sen is easy to pronounce. Cambridge land-ladies had 'collective knowledge' of brown students going back a century. Sen may well be confabulating- or else he may simply misunderstand jokes.
Here is the Indian historian Romila Thapar, caught as a young woman on deck with a talent for ballroom dancing: “Ours were different worlds,” Sen writes.
She was more Lefty because she was richer. Sen knew what he was talking about.
Or the novelist EM Forster whiling away his Sunday evenings alone in a university chapel.
Forster's homosexuality was a great theme for Indian gossip.
On his first day, when Sen walks through the Great Gate of Trinity College, he is aware not just of the hallowed names who have preceded him – Isaac Newton, Jawaharlal Nehru, Francis Bacon – but also of the incongruities of his position.
He had chosen to study Econ- his father was paying his fees- in a country whose relative economic position had already declined. Alfred Marshall had urged Indian students to study in America, not England, almost 40 years previously.
After all, he has switched over from a “firmly co-educational” college in Calcutta to an all-male setup (Trinity’s first female student was admitted n in 1976)
Britain was behind America in more ways than one.
and moved from a country wrecked by post-partition riots to a continent still recovering from two long wars.
Only Muslim majority provinces were affected.
Battle lines were drawn as well among the economists at Cambridge. Sen found it difficult to choose between conservative professors who espoused the principles of mainstream economics and the slightly leftwing “neo-Keynesians,” who were in theory sceptical of capitalism, but curiously cold to issues Sen considered important: inequality, exploitation, poverty.
India had much more of these things than England. Sen should have stayed at home to study these things- if that is really what he wanted to do.
At the university’s socialist club, he was surprised to discover that many British Marxists didn’t seem to have quite read Marx’s work.
Because they are shit. However, Marxist economics had quite good mathematical representations. I believe Kolmagorov & Kantorovich's work was becoming known around this time.
His attempts to work on welfare economics were rebuffed,
Welfare Econ has to be linked to Public Finance theory in order to achieve anything. Sen didn't go in this direction because he didn't want to.
but the precocious boy in him cleared up a space by finishing his doctoral thesis two years ahead of schedule
by writing stupid shite
and travelling back to India to teach and pursue his actual research interests. By his mid-20s, he was married to the writer Nabaneeta Dev, and lecturing at MIT and Stanford. Sen again avoids the specifics of his personal life – How did he meet Dev? What did they talk about? – except to note blandly that they had two children before getting divorced.
Good for him. There used to be some gossip about this but gossip dies down if you ignore it.
Those familiar with Sen’s career will relish the foreshadowing of themes.
Those familiar with his oeuvre will suspect him of confabulation or outright mendacity.
The Idea of Justice, for instance, has its origins in his childhood reading of an old Indian play where a judge decides to free his own prospective killer.
Judges have to free 'prospective killers' if there is no evidence against them. After all, everybody is a 'prospective killer'.
Poverty and Famines would probably never have been written if Sen hadn’t seen entire families scavenging for leftovers during the Bengal famine.
It would never have been written if Sen hadn't wanted to show he could find a 'counter-intuitive' result. But he did so by suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. This was shameful and mischievous.
To read Sen is to steer clear of contemporary economists’ obsession with balance sheets and trade deals and GDP.
I know of no such obsession. Manmohan Singh, it is true, was an International Trade maven. He greatly helped India. Sen did not. Bhagwati says he harmed India. Most Indians agree with Bhagwati.
(“If trade gets people together,” he asserts at one point, “then so does the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment.”)
Trade does not get people together- the thing can be done over the internet. Sex does get people together as do things which sublimate sexual urges or which promote rent seeking.
There are throwaway reflections in these pages – on Europe, Marx, the pre-colonial history of Calcutta – that would by themselves suffice as material for future books.
They are the detritus of past books- thriftily recycled.
Despite his dizzying influences, Sen’s sensibility still seems Tagorean.
though Tagore did first order good whereas Sen thought that 'second order good' was equally valuable.
There is the same affinity for freedom and imagination,
Tagore enabled young people to have more freedom and to better exercise their imagination. Sen was a sterile pedant of a worthless academic availability cascade.
a similar commitment to the vulnerable and the downtrodden,
Tagore and his family used their own resources and talents to directly help 'the vulnerable and downtrodden'.
but most of all a shared sense that we don’t yet know all there is to know about the world.
In which case the Capabilities approach is useless as is Sen's 'idea of Justice'.
Sen also inherited from Tagore a distaste for narrow identities.
But Tagore lived and died as votary and role-model of his father's Brahmo sect.
In his 2006 book Identity and Violence, he wrote that a rigid sense of belonging to a single group can carry with it the “perception of distance and divergence from other groups”.
His people had to run away from East Pakistan.
These days in Modi’s India, Muslims are routinely beaten up,
Whereas, when Nehru became P.M they were slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands.
even lynched, and Sen’s criticism of the country’s Hindu supremacist policies has made him an unwelcome figure.
Because he is clearly just a virtue signaling hypocrite. He won't denounce Muslim ethnic cleansing of Hindus- e.g. in Kashmir valley. It may be that his jaundiced view of India hurt Manmohan Singh. But Sen's bile against Modi is ineffective because Indians hate Sen. He is a useless tosser. We needed economists who would have insisted India do what China did. We didn't need cretins who pretended that things like Right to Education would magically create Education.
In 2016, he was forced out of a university he helped revive
He resigned in February 2015. But then he had threatened to resign in February 2014, thus embarrassing Manmohan, unless the Ministry rubber-stamped the stupid decisions of his useless VC.
– not far from Tagore’s Santiniketan.
Not far? It is a 500 km journey which takes 14 hours by train!
Some years ago, Indian censors refused to clear a documentary on Sen for theatrical release, unless words such as “Hindu,” “Hindutva” and “cow” were bleeped out.
It was cleared in 2018.
Repeated fabrications about his finances and affiliations have dented his public image.
The problem with telling stupid lies is that even more stupid people can tell stupid lies about you. What is sauce for the goose- etc. Thus if Sen says 'Godhra' Modi bhakts say 'you looted Nalanda'. As a secular Indian, I feel- and I speak as a person who has visited the ruins of Nalanda for himself- that Muslims should not be accused of destroying this great institution. It was Amartya who looted and robbed it and razed its foundations. He used the vast wealth he gained by this evil act to build a 'Trinity College' in Engyland. Also he was helping create a Haravard in Amrika.
He has been deemed an “anti-national” because of his pluralist stance.
No. He has been deemed 'anti-national' because his ideas and opinions have harmed the country.
Sixty years ago, while teaching a class in Delhi, Sen was happy to find in his students an inchoate feeling for those suffering at home and abroad.
Forty years ago, while teaching a class in London, Sen was deeply unhappy to find me in his class. I had an inchoate feeling that Social Choice theory was bollocks and said as much. This didn't alleviate the suffering of anybody at home or abroad but did cause Sen to get the fuck away from me as fast as his stubby little legs could carry him.
It is shattering to think now that in Sen’s own country, children aren’t being told to look up to him.
This man's mind has clearly been shattered. He doesn't even know that Euclid of Alexandria could only be found in Alexandria not Greece.
Sen & Spivak had the chutzpah to pass themselves off as serious thinkers who, by reason of intellectual affirmative action, should be elevated above their peers. After all, they came from a shithole but had made a career out of shitting in whatever Chair Ivy League offered them.
Go thou and do likewise Charkoborty! Fly, little bird, fly!
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