In the month of November, when many linguistic states in India celebrate their birth anniversaries by fortifying their chauvinistic positions and sharpening their exclusionary tongues, reading Amartya Sen’s memoir, Home in the World, is soothing. It offers hope and a model for a much-needed course correction to recognise and recover our diverse cultural inheritances. It also inspires us to take the wider world as our playfield instead of confining ourselves to narrow, restricted corners. This is not a review of the memoir but an appreciation of how the book places the local and the universal, seemingly opposites, on the same plane and demonstrates their splendid interplay all through.
Sen’s memoir that was published a few months ago begins with an interview question: “So, where is your home?” That was what the BBC asked him in 1998, when he was appointed Master of the Trinity College at Cambridge. This was just before he won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Sen had moved from Harvard University, where he was teaching since 1987, to Trinity, where he had been a student earlier. He had taught at various places in India, the UK, the US and Europe before he joined Harvard. Sen was originally from West Bengal, and more particularly from Santiniketan; however, he had spent his early years in Dhaka. His father’s family hailed from Matto in Manikganj district of what is Bangladesh today.
Amidst all these journeys, stations, cities and memories, to ask which one really was his home is a question packed with innocent curiosity. Sen responds to the interviewer by saying: “I have more than one welcoming home, but I don’t share your idea that a home has to be exclusive.” When he offers this rather esoteric answer, the interviewer probes further to extract a definite answer. They ask about his favourite food, with the hope to reveal his true identity because palates often betray us. He mentions a few dishes but includes the hilsa fish ‘cooked in proper Dhaka style with ground mustard’. Again, he qualifies his response by saying: “I would not like to live on any one of them as my only food.” Sen makes it difficult in his memoir to pin him down to a home, a language, a dish, a dialect and a single intellectual tradition. Yet, he comes across as belonging to a place and many places simultaneously. His omnipresence is organic and astonishing.
For a memoir, surprisingly, there is no longing or nostalgia that Sen gets caught up in. There is only a recollection of knowledge and wisdom picked up at different points in time and in different coasts and corners of the world. Interestingly, to point out that his childhood home in Dhaka was called ‘Jagat Kutir’ (world cottage) may symbolically add to the narrative that we are trying to build here. Despite our repeated invocation of the world, Sen is not rootless. It would be outrageous to say so. He is only rootedly cosmopolitan. Something that the best and the grandest traditions of our Indian languages and literatures have represented and celebrated across centuries.
Sen’s somewhat metaphorical insistence on being a river that gently touches and gathers from many banks as it flows (as against being a static pond) should remind us of the poem Aniketana by the 20th century’s great Kannada writer Kuvempu or K V Puttappa (excerpts here from V K Gokak’s translation): “Be unhoused, O my soul! / Only the infinite is your goal./ Leave those myriad forms behind./ Leave the million names that bind … Winnow the chaff of a hundred creeds./ Beyond the systems, hollow as reeds,/ Turn unhorizoned where truth leads,/ To be unhoused, O my soul!” These are lines not very different from Tagore’s aspiration. Sen writes that Tagore “did not like our thoughts being incarcerated within our own communities—religious or otherwise—or being moulded by our nationality … And despite his love of the Bengali language and literature, he did not like being imprisoned within a single literary tradition either, which could lead not only to a kind of bookish patriotism, but also to the neglect of learning from the rest of the world”.
Sen, at different bends in his memoir, tries to explain that he does not find the need for a unique or exclusive identity (an idea he has dealt with elaborately in his earlier book Identity and Violence). With all his international qualifications and appointments, if Sen is thought of as belonging to the anglophone world of Western academia, then this line in chapter six will make us sit up: “Sanskrit was close to being my second language after Bengali, partly because my progress in English was very slow. At St Gregory’s [school] in Dhaka I had resisted education in general, but English in particular, and when I moved to Santiniketan, the medium of instruction was very firmly Bengali. The language of the Raj somehow passed me by—at least for many years.” In fact, Sen in his early years retained a Dhaka dialect of Bengali and his classmates at Santiniketan teased him as ‘Kaibo’, amused by his peculiar choice of words. That is how local he was and is.
The first part of the memoir with six chapters speaks of his roots and the rest is about spreading those roots and reaching the sky to form a distinctive worldview. It is distinctive because his archetype of the universal is formed by a variety of experiences. If one looks at Pandit Taranath, Shivarama Karanth or other renaissance figures in Kannada, each one constructed their own model of the universal while being ‘sons of the soil’. When the Kannada nation was being formed in the 20th century (around the same time the idea of India was being constructed)and Kannada modernity was being ushered in, they mixed Enlightenment values and reason with local idioms. That made the Kannada nation wonderfully inclusive and expansive. There were similar liberal impulses in other languages and ‘sub-nationalist’ cultures. Sadly, there is some depletion in the values cultivated by our visionary founding fathers, and November is a good month to warn ourselves about this.
Sugata Srinivasaraju
Senior journalist and author
(sugata@sugataraju.in)