Sen has come to believe that he knows Sanskrit. Sadly, he remains ignorant of it but, because he has brain-washed himself, he won't look up words in the dictionary to ensure that his memory isn't playing tricks on him.
Consider the following excerpt from his memoir-
The self-indulgence of what is called in Sanskrit smriticharan (‘the grazing of one’s own memory’)
this is a Bengali word which it would be difficult to duplicate in Sanskrit. Ātmasmṛtivihāraḥ is what springs to mind.
may not interest others at all, who may nevertheless be curious about what actually happened and how the experiences and thoughts of another person can be understood – and shared
We may be curious about some new method of sharing experiences- e.g. by using farts rather than words- but are are not curious at all about how Memoirs are written. Will they correspond to the facts or will there be an element of confabulation? In Sen's case, there is a bit of both.
He tells us that, around the age of 30, on returning to India, after teaching in America and visiting other countries, he wandered through the memories of the three continents he had seen, while chewing upon this philosophical cud.
As I found my feet in Delhi, I had time to think a little about my earlier years,
his family, being Hindu, had to flee first Buddhist Burma and then Muslim East Bengal. He had also sojourned in Britain which had ruled Bengal for almost 200 years. Sadly, the Hindu Mahatama asked the Brits to 'Quit India'.
filled with a wide range of experiences. I decided that there were two quite different ways of thinking about the civilizations of the world.
One would say that the Brits should not have been asked to 'quit India' nor the Hindus to quit Burma or Pakistan. The other would say that this was the inevitable result of the collapse of multi-ethnic Empires and the rise of Nation States.
One approach takes the ‘fragmentary’ perspective and sees a variety of features as manifestations of quite distinct civilizations.
For example, looking at the Flag of Pakistan and understanding that it had an Islamic civilization. If you were a kaffir, you'd better scarper sharpish.
This approach, with the additional feature of hostility between the fragments, has come much into vogue recently, threatening a lasting ‘clash of civilizations’.
Fuck did Sen think was happening during his childhood when Bengalis kept telling the Brits to fuck the fuck off?
The other approach is ‘inclusive’, and concentrates on looking for different manifestations of ultimately one civilization – perhaps we should call it a world civilization – which generates different flowers through an interrelated life of roots and branches.
This can be achieved under a World State or Global Empire.
This book is not, of course, an investigation of the nature of civilization, but, as the reader will see, its sympathies are with an inclusive rather than a fragmentary understanding of what the world offers.
In other words, its 'sympathies' are with fantasy or confabulation, not reality.
From the Crusades in the Middle Ages to the Nazi invasions in the last century, from communal clashes to battles between religious politics, there have been tussles between varying convictions, and yet there have also been forces for unity working against the clashes
No we haven't. One side won decisively. The other side lost. The Crusader States collapsed. Islamic rule was reestablished. The Nazis were defeated. Germany was occupied and 'de-Nazified'. India's communal clashes (e.g. Direct Action Day in 1946) led directly to the partition of the country. Sen's parents lost their ancestral homes.
. We can see, if we look, how understanding can spread from one group to another and from one country to the next.
Understanding is not the problem. It is control of resources. Hitler didn't invade Poland because he was having trouble understanding what his Polish plumber was saying to him. He did so because Poland has valuable real estate.
As we move around we cannot escape clues to broader and more integrative stories.
Fair point. Hindus of India have different languages but seem to have come together well enough. Even Bengal is now voting for the BJP. Narendra Modi should get some credit for this 'cluee' to a broader and more integrative story.
Our ability to learn from each other must not be underestimated.
But that learning may be accompanied with the desire to enslave the other.
Being in reflective human company can be an enormously constructive experience. At the end of the tenth century and the beginning of the eleventh, the Iranian mathematician Al-Biruni,
He was the court astrologer of Mahmud Ghazni who invaded India, destroyed temples, and collected lots of slaves.
For Sen, this is a 'constructive experience'.
who spent many years in India, remarked in his book Tarikh al-Hind that learning about each other contributes both to knowledge and to peace.
i.e. the spread of Islam to the conquered country. Islam means 'peace'. Knowledge is useful to a conqueror.
He presents a wonderful account of mathematics, astronomy, sociology, philosophy and medicine in India a thousand years ago, and also shows how human knowledge expands through friendship.
His knowledge and that of other Muslim savants before him had expanded by enslaving savants of other civilizations.
Al-Biruni’s fondness for Indians contributed to his interest
in having Indian slaves?
and expertise in Indian mathematics and science. This fondness did not, however, prevent him from teasing them a little. Indian mathematics is very good, Al-Biruni says, but the most unusual gift Indian intellectuals have is something quite different: it is their ability to talk eloquently on subjects about which they know absolutely nothing.
Sen knows nothing of Al-Biruni's period. He has been senilely repeating this shite for decades.
Would I be proud of that gift if I had it? I don’t know, but perhaps I should begin by talking about things I do know.
You can't admit the truth to yourself- viz. your family had to run away from Buddhists and Muslims. Yet it is only Hindus you hate.
This memoir is a small attempt to do just that, or at least to talk about things I have experienced, whether or not I actually know them.
What Sen experienced was the monotony of academic life on three continents over the course of seven decades.
‘Where do you consider to be your home?’ I was asked by a BBC interviewer in London, as we were getting ready for the recording.
Did Sen- a senior academic- feel more at home in England or America? The polite thing to say would be 'this is my second home though of course it is the little house in rural Bengal where I was born which will always bee my first and true home.
He was looking at some kind of biography about me. ‘You have just moved from one Cambridge to another – and from Harvard to Trinity; you have lived in England for decades but you are still an Indian citizen, with – I presume – a passport full of visas. So, where’s your home?’
Do you own a house in the UK or the US? Owning property suggests permanent domicile.
This was in 1998, just after I had rejoined Trinity College as Master (which was the occasion for the interview). ‘I feel very much at home here right now,’ I said, explaining that I had had a long association with Trinity, having been an undergraduate, a research student, a research fellow and then a teacher there.
Do you own a house there? If not, you are a bird of passage.
But I added that I also felt much at home in our old house near Harvard Square at the other Cambridge, and I very much feel at home in India, particularly at our little house in Santiniketan where I grew up and to which I love going back regularly. ‘So,’ said the man from the BBC, ‘you have no concept of home!’
Either Sen is mis-remembering or the fellow was a cretin. Sen had a concept of home because he said he felt at home in Cambridge. Perhaps, the interviewer wanted to know whether Sen felt he was in the Indian or the English or the American intellectual tradition.
‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘I have more than one welcoming home, but I don’t share your idea that a home has to be exclusive.’
Plenty of people who work for the BBC have second homes. Indeed, it is not uncommon for them to have second or third families.
The BBC interviewer looked completely unconvinced. I have experienced similar defeats in my attempts to respond to other searches for unique identification.
Sen has a unique Social Security or National Insurance number.
‘What is your favourite food?’ they asked.
i.e. what is the supremum of your preference ordering of foods. Either this has a unique answer or Sen has been writing nonsense for seventy years.
There can be many answers to that question, but I generally choose to mumble something like tagliolini con vongole or Szechuan duck, and of course ilish mach – what the English in India used to call ‘hilsha fish’, taking liberty with aspirates. But, I went on to explain, it has to be cooked in proper Dhaka style with ground mustard.
So, Preferences don't have a well defined extension. Thus mathematical social choice theory can have nothing to say about them. Sen has wasted his entire life.
This kind of reply did not satisfy the questioners, who asked: ‘But which is really your favourite food?’ ‘I love them all,’ I said, ‘but I would not like to live on any one of them as my only food.’
Sen loved his first wife but then decided he loved the wife of his best friend more. Living with only one wife may not be one's preference but it is the best most of us can do.
My interlocutors did not generally accept that they had obtained from me a reasonable answer to a good question. However, if I was lucky, I did get a polite nod in the discussion of food – but never, ever when it came to something as serious as ‘home’. ‘Surely, you must have some particular place where you are really at home ?’
Unless you are a 'nowhere man'. This is what Sen was. He knew little of England or America or Bengal but shuttled around the world repeating the same stupid lies decade after decade.
When I was born, Rabindranath persuaded my mother that it was boring to stick to well-used names and he proposed a new name for me. Amartya, by inference, means immortal in Sanskrit:
No. It means 'undying' or immortal in a direct manner.
‘Martya’, which comes from mrityu (one of the several Sanskrit words for ‘death’), is the name for earth
No. That is Bhumi or Prithvi. Martyalok means 'world of mortals'.
where people die, and ‘Amartya’ is someone from a place where people do not die – presumably heaven.
Heaven is where you go after you die, if you've been good. In the Vedas the term Amartya is often paired with Vaishvanara- the Cosmic Man, identified with Agni, the sacred Fire- and the Vaishvanara Vidya, a mystic practice described in the Chandogya Upanishad whereby the devout perceive the entire cosmos as their own physical body and sees the universal self in all things.
I have had to explain this grandiose meaning of the name to many people, but I preferred its more literal – and perhaps more spooky – meaning: ‘unearthly’.
It doesn't mean that. It just means immortal. What is interesting that Sen equates death with what has a place on earth- like one's childhood home- and what is immortal as having no place on earth whatsoever. Perhaps this is the trauma of the refugee he carries with him in exile from his ancestral home in Dacca.
Alternatively, it may be that Sen thought of himself as a very special little boy. Elsewhere in his memoir, he says he was offered a job at the FAO in 1958. He doesn't say 'my relative B.R Sen was appointed head of the FAO in 1956. Either he is suppressing relevant information or he doesn't seem to have 'connected the dots'. The thing must have been a coincidence- right?
Sen is curiously naive. He says he had relatives who were under 'preventive detention'. He doesn't understand that, by 1938, only those disliked by the elected Bengali adminstration were held in that manner. Even hardened revolutionaries were released- provided they weren't against the ruling coalition.
Sen is also unaware of the rampant corruption which led to diversion of food from the public distribution system. This is what determined who starved and who got fed.
I think I was nine in the spring of 1943, when the famine began.
Because of the fungal crop disease (epiphytotic) that devastated winter rice yields in 1942.
It finished by the time I was just turning ten, in November. Yes, there were a number of striking aspects of that. One was, of course, I had never seen people dying in such numbers.
Because this was the first food availability deficit under an elected Bengali administration. If the Brits had been running things, excess mortality would have been much less.
I had not, in fact, even seen people dying anyway. But then in 1943, I suddenly saw hundreds of thousands of people starving and dying. It was naturally a remarkable and a harrowing experience. It seemed incredible that there could be no way of saving them.
It is remarkable that Sen didn't know about the corruption of Suhrawardy & the Ispahani business house. His daddy and his uncles certainly knew the score. Everybody did.
Second, as you say, I was struck by the fact that while so many people—what seemed like millions of people—were roaming the streets, and falling, and perishing, I did not know anyone whatsoever among my circle of friends, or in the school, or anyone connected with the family in any way, who had the slightest difficulty living on.
His grandfather was a judge. His dad was a Professor who did his PhD in London. These were affluent people.
So I was struck by the divisiveness of society—its class character—
religious character. That's why his family ran away from East Bengal.
and the extreme contrast between some people not being able to afford food at all to survive while others were not having any difficulty at all.
This was like the extreme contrast between guys who owned a dozen palaces and other guys who slept on the pavement.
I was beginning to understand a little about class divisions. And it wasn’t class only, in the very broad sense. The divisions were much more detailed and more fine, linked to occupation groups and locations and so on.
But, in the end, only religion mattered.
So later, many years later when I would study famines, that elementary understanding played a big part: that class and occupation groups had to be linked firmly to what one is trying to explain.
The police and the army and the bureaucrats will get fed. Those whose occupations have disappeared- e.g. agricultural labourers at a time when the harvest has been spoiled- may starve unless the Public Distribution System isn't corrupt.
Also, there was the oddity of the extreme suddenness of the famine.
How could a kid living in rural Birbhum have not known about the fungal disease that destroyed the harvest? I suppose, the grown-ups didn't talk about such things in front of the kids.
That was a big surprise. Nothing was being reported, and there were very little discussion of any kind of storm that was coming.
You don't need to read newspapers to know that the farmers in your neighborhood have lost their crop.
Because of censorship that the Raj had imposed over those years,
But it was Fazl ul Haq & then (in April 1943) Nazimuddin who was Home Minister (and Premier). It was they who decided what could be printed and who should be locked up. There were some exceptions, Fazl could protect Sarat Chandra Bose for almost a year and after his brother escaped but as the War situation worsened, he could not prevent his arrest even though he had been appointed as a Minister.
connected mainly with the war, the Indian newspapers were not allowed to print anything disparaging about the Raj which could inflame criticism.
But it was Bengalis who decided what was disparaging.
But the main English paper in Calcutta, The Statesman, a distinguished daily then,
owned by a British firm which got contracts from the Govt. of Bengal.
was left uncensored. It was a British-owned paper, edited by an Englishman called Ian Stephens, who later was a Fellow at Kings, whom I came to know—much later—quite well.
Stephens, in his book 'Monsoon mornings' reveals that he was putting the blame on Civil Servants in Delhi (who had no power over food) while praising Suhrawardy thus pleasing his pay-masters. He also says he was angry that 'Authority' had requisitioned his air-conditioner for use in an Army VD facility!
But at that time, I didn’t even know who the editor of that newspaper was. Ian Stephens initially toed the line in not reporting anything much on the famine. The justification was that the Japanese were in Burma and the war was going on, and they did not want to do anything which would undermine the war effort.
Stephens didn't want to get knifed by one of Suhrawardy's goons if he exposed his corruption.
But it also meant, of course, little notice was taken of—and nothing much was done to save—the millions who perished. But eventually, Ian Stephens could not keep himself silent any longer. This was in October, by which time the famine had gone on for many months. On October 14 and 16 of 1943, The Statesman published agonizing reports and stinging editorials on governmental policy.
Blaming Delhi, not Nazimuddin & Suhrawardy! But the reason Stephens waited till October was because Linlithgow had gone. Wavell was the new Viceroy. Only the army could override the corrupt Bengali administration.
This, of course, immediately got the attention of Parliament, in Britain, in London.
They didn't matter. What mattered was that Wavell took office on October 1.
Within a few weeks, relief began.
The Managing Agencies (British conglomerates) wanted the Army to put an end to a problem which was affecting their own productivity.
And within a month the famine was over. The experience brought out clearly the power of the press, and why public discussion is an enormously important way of promoting justice in the world.
Stephens, like his predecessor, was sacked the moment the new elected government took a dislike to his views.
The idea is not, of course, unrelated to what the UN stands for. That is, if the newspapers in the developed countries took greater interest in what is going on in the developing countries, there might be more involvement.
Or less. There was 'compassion fatigue' with respect to the 1974 Bangladesh famine though earlier there had been a 'concert for Bangladesh'.
Why is Bangladesh no longer vulnerable to famine? The answer is it boosted agricultural production four fold while achieving demographic transition by getting rural women into factory dormitories. It must be said, Bengali Muslims show none of the blinkered stupidity of their buddhijivi cousins.
Sen writes of his friendship with Aung San Suu Kyi but is sharp in his condemnation of her.
Suu Kyi
who was a Burman nationalist like her father
eventually won a victory over the military in 2010 when she was granted a highly constrained but still substantial role in the political leadership of the country.
There was a chance the Army would gradually give her some real power. But, once the West turned against her, she was no use to them. I think sanctions against particular Army officers pushed the country toward civil war.
However, her problems went on increasing, as did those of others in Burma whose misfortunes she perhaps could not – certainly did not – relieve. Indeed, something went terribly wrong in Suu Kyi’s leadership,
she wasn't the leader. Also, as a Burman nationalist, she was sticking with her father's (and the army's) Burmese nationalist line. Sen doesn't seem to understand that the lady was a nationalist just as Indira Gandhi was a nationalist and Srimao Bandarnaike was a nationalist and Benazir Bhutto was a Nationalist. Also, if he likes Bengali speaking Muslims so much, why does he not move to Bangladesh? That is his ancestral home. The truth is, ethnic cleansing in the region is a two way street.
reflected particularly in her unwillingness to help a vulnerable minority community in Burma: the Rohingyas, a Bengali-speaking Muslim minority group.
That vulnerable group has no problem raping and killing Hindus- who are even more vulnerable. The sad thing is that Sen has lived long enough to see the BJP come to power in Calcatta while the Islamist BNP rules in Dacca. Whatever illusions he may have had, nobody now shares them.
Who had been excluded from the list of indigenous people in the 1948 nationality law. They would meet the same fate as other Indians even if their residence in Burma had been longer. I suppose the best solution would have been to exchange populations with the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
Her treatment of other minority groups, of which Burma has many, was not exemplary either. Terrible barbarities committed against the Rohingya community by the military and also by intolerant Buddhist activists have not – at least so far – moved her to do anything substantial to help the victims.
She had no power to do anything for anybody. Sen does not mention the killing of Bengali Hindus by Rohingya Muslims and the forcible abduction of conversion of the better looking women.
If there is a puzzle about Suu Kyi,
there is a puzzle about Nehru. Why did he preside over the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Delhi itself despite being the Prime Minister?
But there is even greater puzzle as to why Amartya Sen did not chop off his own dick even though dicks cause RAPE! Also its totes unfair that women have to sit down to pee.
there is a greater enigma that is even harder to understand, which is particularly disturbing for me: that the Burmese, whose kindness impressed me so much as a young boy, seem to have turned brutally hostile to the Rohingyas,
just as the Muslim Bengalis turned brutally hostile to the Hindus
who have had to endure barbarities, torture and murder in an organized pogrom.
The Pakistani Army did a lot organised rape and killing in Bangladesh. That didn't puzzle anybody.
Aside from being hugely saddened by these events, I also had to question whether my memory of the natural kindness and the outstanding warmth of the Burmese had all been an illusion.
Everything in Sen's life was and is an illusion.
But other observers also had an impression similar to mine of the warm and kindly Burmese. A friend – a dedicated backpack medic from Johns Hopkins, Adam Richards – who worked hard to help those Burmese without health care has written: they are ‘constantly laughing, constantly singing and smiling. To see their dedication and their humor, in the face of all this adversity is truly inspiring.’ These and other accounts chime well with the inexperienced and primitive admiration for the Burmese that I had developed as a young boy. This inevitably makes me ask the question: what has changed?
Perhaps the guys singing and laughing weren't the guys who did the killing. There is such a thing as specialization and the divison of labour.
I can only speculate. What seems to have made the critical difference is the intense propaganda against the Muslim Rohingyas that the military has systematically carried out over recent years.
Did Amnesty International do propaganda against them? It is they who report the Rohingya killing of Hindus. The truth is that a previous Saudi King had given refuge to some Rohingyas who became radicalised. That's why Sheikh Hasina's Bangladesh was wary of them.
The gentle Burmese my family and I knew
were dead or in their eighties
have been trained to become violent haters,
Who trained the people who chased Sen's family out of their ancetral East Bengal? Was it the Muslim League?
and in that conversion the military has played a critically influential role – by poisoning people’s minds and using well-organized racist propaganda and strong-armed bigotry to induce torturing and killing.
The military was the creation of Aung San. He was a Buddhist. He didn't like Muslims, Christians or even Hindus.
There is, in fact, a global lesson here in the possibility of transforming a gentle population.
This is a fantasy of Sen. The fact is India's partition involved great brutality. Who 'transformed' gentle populations? I suppose what Sen means is 'Muslims are violent. That's why there were riots at Partition. But Buddhists are non-violent- right?' Wrong. The reason Burma is Buddhist to the extent that it is is because Burmese people are very good at fighting.
The power of such propaganda can be seen not just in Burma, but in many countries in the world today. What is happening in Burma (or Myanmar, as it is now called, a name championed by the military) is, of course, particularly barbaric, but the effectiveness of agitations against particular minority groups can be seen in many countries in the world – for example against immigrants in Hungary, or the gay community in Poland, or against Gypsies nearly everywhere in Europe.
Sen is not aware that all these things were much greater what he was young.
There is a lesson here which is peculiarly important today in formerly secular India:
It was so Secular, when Nehru took power, that the Muslim population of Delhi fell from one third to five percent.
the religious extremists have been very dedicated – even through governmental policy – in undermining inter-community relations and in threatening the human rights of Muslim minorities
Nehru took away citizenship from Muslims who had fled across the border in panic. That's one reason why he was the supreme Hindu leader while he lived.
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