The Passion Of Amartya Sen

IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE: THE ILLUSIONS OF DESTINY
by Amartya Sen
Penguin 2006
215 pages; Rs 295

Passion isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Amartya Sen. His is a measured, reasonable, persuasive voice, that marshals evidence, lays out a case, and constructs an edifice of ideas through logical steps, causal connections, elegant equations, and statistical and empirical data. That’s what people who win Nobel prizes for economics are usually expected to do.

But in Identity and Violence, what you come to grips with is—to put it in Biblical terms—‘The Passion of Amartya Sen’. In nine interwoven essays, Sen takes on the violence and threats to peace and intellectual liberty that spring from unexamined assumptions about culture and identity in the contemporary world. In doing so, Sen reveals the degree to which he feels angry, sad, joyous, irritated, pleased, hopeful, sometimes all at once. We hear him chuckle, complain, get exasperated, and occasionally, sigh. Sen revisits several of the debates from his earlier collection, The Argumentative Indian. He returns to them elliptically, sometimes repetitively, but always with a passionate, almost obdurate, intensity. As if the tasks he had set himself are unravelling before his eyes, and are in need of constant, repetitive acts of nurture.

Can the measured path of reason (which Sen invokes in the words of Emperor Akbar as rah-e-aql) be touched and ruddied by the warmth of sentiment? A close reading of Sen’s unfolding career as a moral philosopher and as a peripatetic public intellectual would suggest it can.

Sen the moral philosopher is a companionable interlocutor to Sen the economist, and Sen the sceptical intellectual is an interesting counterpoint to Sen the sentimental Bengali. And I mean sentimental not pejoratively but as a recognition of a certain depth and intensity of feeling. This reasoned depth and intensity is the basis of his principal intervention in this book.

Sen’s arguments can be read as an exercise in the contemplation of sympathy as a social force. For him, it is that which produces the feelings of identity with those we consider to be like ourselves, and which generates resonances with the feeling of people we might designate as ‘others’. Sen argues that our affiliations are in fact plural, and that we can be more than one kind of person, given a plurality of contexts. Thus, a person may be at the same time "an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in the rights of gay and lesbian people, with a non-religious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin and a non-believer in the afterlife".

The person whose portrait this is (can it be anyone but Sen?) is not a being without identity or a man without qualities, but one who engages different aspects of his self when encountering different kinds of people, situations or choices. His ‘sympathies’ are neither monochromatic nor monotonous. They articulate a broad spectrum of possibilities that need not add up to a consistent or even harmonious monad. As Sen says, with some poetry and much conviction, the horizons of the self are multiplied, not halved by history and circumstance.

Following Sen, we could say that it is precisely this matrix of complex ‘sympathetic’ resonances between different aspects of different selves that makes for the web we have come to think of as society. To think of any one of them as cardinal is to enter the trap of the illusion that we are destined to be one thing over all others. The refusal to entertain the ‘illusion of destiny’ entails a recognition that we choose to be who we are rather than who we are condemned to be.

The placing of people in boxes that designate one identity to the exclusion of others leads necessarily to impoverished, ‘miniaturised’ selves and stunted social possibilities. This impoverished self is what Sen designates as being under the sign of a ‘solitarist’ conception of identity.
This ‘solitarist’ notion of identity creates guided missiles of the self that keep hitting the same target. Thus, the contemporary Muslim or Hindu or Christian is shorn (by others and in many cases by himself) of any possibilities other than those underwritten by what Sen calls ‘Civilisational Incarceration’. She is condemned to become a shade of what she could be simply on the basis of a received idea of what it means to be Muslim, or Hindu, or Christian, or whatever. Sen demonstrates this process of the ‘impoverishment’ of a series of identities, be they configured as ‘Muslim’ or ‘colonised’ or ‘Western’ subjects, with an array of arresting examples and contrapuntal histories that span India, China, Ireland, Africa, the Arab and Islamic world. He patiently argues a case for an appreciation of the Islamic world’s contribution to science, technology, doubt, the freedom of thought and reason as a necessary countermeasure to the univocal registers of the theses of the ‘Clash’ and ‘Dialogue’ of Civilisations. He shows how uncritical ‘multiculturalism’ may very easily devolve into a set of plural ‘monocultures’. He argues for an acknowledgment of the debts the West owes the East, and vice versa. He searches for room in the difficult but vitally necessary intellectual space that is neither an elegy nor a dirge for the long history of globalisation. He is able to see the validity of the critique of immiserisation that many ‘anti-globalisation’ activists articulate and is also able to state (though not as convincingly) that the operation of global market forces can have a variety of consequences when qualified and attenuated by wider social choices and decisions about democracy, gender relations, health and education.

While reading Identity and Violence, I also read a remarkable testament to the violence of identification: a set of twin blogs in Hindi and English that documented the destruction of one of Delhi’s most alive and hospitable neighbourhoods—Nangla Machi—on the banks of the Yamuna, flanking the Ring Road as it arcs past Pragati Maidan. Thousands of hard-working, peaceable people were made homeless last week by bulldozers and riot police acting under the orders of the judicial apparatus, to the accompaniment of a deafening near-silence in the media. Accounts of wardrobe malfunctions at fashion shows took precedence over news of demolitions and the relentless violence of an unaccountable judiciary. The bloggers, young media practitioners who lived in Nangla Machi and some of their interlocutors, speak of a world of everyday sympathies and solidarities, of the complex map of identities that is embodied and lived in a working class neighbourhood in a city like Delhi.

Ironically, it was the residents’ inability to furnish proof of their ‘identities’ and documents, a grave failing in the face of a state mandated demand for ‘solitarist’ inscription as ‘legal’ inhabitants, that led to a shift in their status as trespassers over their claims to humanity and habitation in a city. This is what eventually contributed to the continuing violence of their eviction. It’s those who refuse to be identified, or those who sometimes cannot be adequately identified, who also bear the harshest brunt when the violence of identification comes calling astride a bulldozer armed with a court order. Underlying it is a total negation of any ‘sympathy’ on the part of the judge who writes the eviction notice towards those to be evicted. For him, there can’t be any point of intersection or resonance between their humanity and his eminence.After all, he reasons, they defecate by the road, and he purges in his chamber. A clear demarcation of identities between the judge and the judged, between the elite and the urban subaltern, is the necessary prelude to the role played by the foundational violence of the state in the process of the reconfiguring the city.

Reading Sen on violence and identity is an occasion that might help us find ways in which to think about this fact with precision and with sympathy, and consider ways of ensuring that it happens less often.

By SHUDDHABRATA SENGUPTA, Co-founder of Sarai

From Outlookindia.com