– The Argumentative Indian

This is a review by Shashi Tharoor (ex-UN Official) of “THE ARGUMENTATIVE INDIAN: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity” by Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen.. He does a good job of bringing out the main points of this interesting book…

Sen’s argument for his idea of India is constructed not just in opposition to Western stereotyping but also to the homegrown Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) movement, which in recent years has sought power on a platform asserting that India is a Hindu nation that ought to be a Hindu state, while defining Hinduism in crudely sectarian terms, both as a religion and as a badge of cultural and political identity. In several of the essays in this collection, Sen demolishes each of these “narrow and bellicose” premises of Hindutva, along with Western religious reductionism. Sen reminds us that even the sacred epic the Ramayana , much beloved of today’s Hindu revivalists, features the skeptic Javali, who advises the god-king Ram that “there is no after-world, nor any religious practice for attaining that. . . . [Religious] injunctions . . . have been laid down in the [scriptures] by clever people, just to rule over [other] people.” India’s skeptical tradition is as old as the Rigveda , composed around 1500 B.C., when most Europeans were clad in animal skins. “Who really knows?” it asks about creation. “Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced?. . . perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not — the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows — or perhaps he does not know.”

I love that final “or perhaps he does not know.” The reach of rationality in Indian thinking goes far; Hinduism is the only major religion with an explicit tradition of agnosticism within it. Equally important is the tradition of secular tolerance practiced by such rulers as the Buddhist Emperor Ashoka and the Muslim Emperor Akbar some 1,800 years apart.

Sen points out that Ashoka’s edicts promoted the human rights of all in the 3rd century before Christ, a time when Aristotle’s writings on freedom explicitly excluded women and slaves, an exception the Indian monarch did not make. At a time when the Catholics of Europe were tyrannizing each other, persecuting Jews with the Inquisition and burning heretics at the stake, Akbar was proclaiming in Delhi that “no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.” Unlike in the West, Indian secularism has tended not to be about the separation of church from state and the prohibition of religious activities but about tolerance of a profusion of religions, none of which is privileged or favored by the state. To Sen, “the Hindutva movement has entered into a confrontation with the idea of India itself.”

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