Tryst with Destiny: Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge 447

Tryst with Destiny: Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge 447 cosmopolitan Hindu family, Amartya Sen grew up amid the horrors of Chapter XVIII the Bengal famine, communal violence, the collapse of British rule, and partition. As a brilliant student and campus agitator in Calcutta, he over came a near-lethal bout of cancer, bested one hundred thousand other Tryst with Destiny: exam takers, and won admission to the college of Isaac Newton, G. H. Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge Hardy, and the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, Trinity College in Cambridge. Since 1970, Sen has lived mostly in England and America, but his thoughts have never strayed far from India. Drawing on his own There haven't been many folk songs written for capitalism, but experiences, a lifelong study of the disenfranchised, and a deep knowledge there have been many composed for soc.ial justice. of Eastern and Western philosophy, Sen has questioned every facet of contemporary economic thought. Challenging traditional assumptions It is mainly an attempt to see development as a process of about what is meant by social welfare and how to measure progress, he has expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. In this approach, helped restore "an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic expansion of freedom is viewed as both (1) the primary end and problems:' 3 He is a public intellectual, engaged by issues, from famines (2) the principal means of development. and premature female mortality, to multiculturalism and nuclear prolif ~Amartya Sen 1 eration. His inspiring journey from impoverished Calcutta in newly inde pendent India to the ivory towers of Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts-and back again-is a triumph of reason, empathy, and a very human determination to overcome incredible odds. In January 2002, India's Hindu nationalist government of the Joan Robinson wound up her talk at the Delhi School of Economics Bharatiya Janata Party threw a three-day celebration for India's far clutching a copy of Mao's "red book:' It was the late 1960s. Her topic was flung diaspora in Delhi. In a gesture that revealed both how far he had the dismal state of Western economics, but mostly she talked about China traveled-and how close he had remained to his roots--Sen left that gath and the Cultural Revolution. The audience was in rapture. vVhen the wild ering to address an outdoor "hunger hearing" with several hundred peas applause faded at last, a willowy young man asked a question. His tone ants and laborers in a chilly dirt field on the far side of town. implied the mildest and most polite skepticism. Robinson rebuffed him One by one, members of the audience went up to the microphone. A soundly but "with affection:' 2 They were, after all, the best of enemies, for scrawny fourteen-year-old from Delhi spoke about going hungry after she mer professor and favorite student. At Cambridge, she had cultivated stu lost her dishwashing job. A dark-skinned man from Orissa described how dents from the third world. One of the most gifted was Amartya Sen, but three members of his family had died after a local drought the previous Sen's interest in human rights and the immediate amelioration of poverty year. fifty years after independence, a larger fraction of India's population dashed with Robinson's enthusiasm for the Soviet model of industrializa- suffered from chronic malnutrition than in any other part of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa. Yet India's government kept food prices tion. Amartya means "destined for immortality:' Born into a scholarly and high via agricultural price supports and had accumulated the biggest food GRAND PURSUIT Tryst with Destiny: Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge 449 stockpile in the world, a third of which was rotting in rat-infested govern-· as "an adventurous man" who got a PhD in chemistry at London Univer ment granaries. sity and fell in love with an English Quaker. After returning home to an When Sen stood up, shivering in his baggy cords and rumpled jacket, arranged marriage, he became head of the agricultural chemistry depart he spoke less about the "interest of consumers being sacrificed to farmers" ment at Dacca University. The Sens lived in a typical Dhaka house, fifty or and more about "profoundly lonely deaths." Addressing an audience that sixty feet long, narrow in the front, "the middle being a courtyard open to seemed plainly awestruck, he conveyed sympathy and encouragement. the sky;' with plenty of room for servants and relatives.6 "Without protests like these," he said, "the deaths would be much more. Sen began his education at an English missionary school in 1939. Two If there had been something like this, the Bengal famine could have been years later, as the Japanese advanced toward British India, he was sent to prevented." Their willingness to speak out, he told them approvingly, was live with his maternal grandparents in Santiniketan, just north of Calcutta, "democracy in action:' "to keep me safe from the bombs." Santiniketan has special connotations for Bengalis-indeed for all Indians-because of its association with Sen is Bengali. Like saying that an American is a southerner, that has very Rabindranath Tagore, the poet. After winning the Nobel Prize for literature specific connotations. Bengal is a river delta; fish is the mainstay of the in 1913, Tagore used his prize money to expand the Visva Bharati school Bengali diet; dhoti, chappals, and panjabi are the traditional garb. All Ben in Santiniketan, where he tried to apply his ideas about education and galis, Sen says, are great talkers, as he is. The worst thing about dying, Ben his notions of merging Eastern spirituality with Western science. Gandhi galis like to joke, is the thought that the people will keep talking and that visited Santiniketan in 1940, and for years India's nationalist elite, includ you won't be able to answer back. ing Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, sent their children to study there. The Bengali word for public intellectual is bhadralok, and Bengal has Sen's maternal grandfather, Kshitimohan Sen, a distinguished San a long tradition, going back at least two centuries, of learned men with skrit scholar, was on the faculty of Visva Bharati. Sen attended classes in cosmopolitan outlooks who battled social evils such as untouchability Tagore's coeducational school under the eucalyptus trees. His free time and suttee. Sen is part of that tradition. His family is from the old part of was spent mostly with his grandfather. "Everyone found him formidable;' Dhaka, an ancient river city 240 kilometers as the crow flies from Calcutta, Sen recalled. "He woke at four. He knew all the stars. He talked with me now the capital of Muslim Bangladesh. In Jane Austen's day, Dhaka was about the connections between Greek and Sanskrit. I was the only one of "a big, bustling place of first-rate importance:' famous the world over for his grandchildren who had a sense of academic vocation. I was going to be its fine muslins (called bafta hawa, or "woven air").4 Competition from the one who carried the mantle." Manchester brought decline. By 1900, Dhaka's population had shrunk by If Santiniketan was a tranquil oasis, it hardly escaped the upheavals of two-thirds, and, according to a contemporary travel guide, "all round the the time. At the time of his death in 1941, Tagore was deeply disenchanted present city are ruins of good houses, mosques, and temples, smothered in by the West, professing to see little difference between the Allied and Axis jungle." 5 Thirty-odd years later, when Sen was born, in 1933, Dhaka had powers. The war accelerated the final break with Britain. After Gandhi regained some of its former importance by becoming a regional adminis launched the "Quit India'' movement in 1942, the British arrested sixty trative center for the British Raj. thousand Congress Socialist Party supporters, including Amartya Sen's Sen was born into that class of English-speaking academics and civil uncle; by end of that year, over one thousand people had been killed in servants who helped run British India. He describes his father, Ashutosh, anti-British riots. "My uncle was in preventive detention for a very long GRAND PURSUIT Tryst with Destiny: Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge time," Sen recalled. "Several other 'uncles' also were jailed, including one to seek work. The realization that "extreme poverty can make a person a who died in prison. I grew up feeling the injustice of this." helpless prey;' Sen said, was to inspire his philosophical inquiry into the The 1943 Bengal famine--the consequence of wartime inflation, cen conflict between necessity and freedom. 8 A more immediate effect, how sorship, and imperial indifference rather than crop failures-destroyed ever, was a strong distaste for all forms of religious fanaticism and cultural the last remnant of respect for the British. The new viceroy, Lord Wavell, nationalism. wrote to Churchill, the "Bengal famine was one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and damage to our reputa Presidency College, one of the most elite institutions of higher education tion here both among Indians and foreigners in India is incalculable:' 7 Sen in India, looks today much as it did in 1951, when Sen enrolled there, and, later estimated that 3 million people, mostly p~or fishermen and landless for that matter, much as it did in 1817 when British expats and Indian laborers, perished from starvation and disease. notables founded the Hindu College. Its faded pink stucco fa~ade with At the time, for the boy of ten, the famine meant a steady stream of peeling green shutters, the black plaques identifying the different rooms, starving villagers who passed through Santiniketan in a desperate attempt the dim interiors with their ceiling fans and row upon row of long wooden to reach Calcutta.

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