Letter from Kolkata
Listening to Amartya Sen
To be or not to be…a Nationalist!
Reaching Netaji Bhavan in Kolkata at 6:00 pm sharp on a smoggy December evening can be an impossible mission given the bad Kolkata traffic with Ambassadors running as grim reminders to the city's vulnerability to soot, and with me gritting my teeth praying for redemption.
But I am headed to listen to Professor Amartya Sen speak in person, in Kolkata. His book Identity and Violence (Penguin, 2006) had gotten me thinking: Who was the man? Was he indeed the man that he wrote he was? Was theory a tool that gave him gratification in Massachusetts?
By the time I and a friend reached Netaji Bhavan we had missed ten minutes of his talk. Women in shawls and men in suits were crowding the outdoor space. On the stage were the ex-MP Krishna Bose, Professor Sugata Bose (Gardiner Professor of History at Harvard and a grand-nephew of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose), the Governor of West Bengal Gopal Krishna Gandhi, and, of course, the Nobel laureate himself. Clad in a blue suit over a grey sweater, Amartya Sen looked every bit the global citizen. By the time we made our way to the second last row, he was already into his 'Nationalism: curse or boon?'
For Amartya Sen, identity has always been a gallery of co-existence out of which we prioritize our choices - choosing ones we accidentally discover, or are forced to adapt to. His book had argued that history and background should not be the only way of looking at ourselves. A human being belonged to various categories and had multiple identities of being an Asian, an Indian, 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 defender of gay and lesbian rights, a Hindu with a non-religious lifestyle, a non-Brahmin, and a non-believer in an afterlife. Yet all these identities, according to him, may tragically evaporate under communal pressure into a reductive single identity.
His talk was also about choosing from the different compartments of identity and judging if nationalism was the best one to opt for. Professor Sen's focus was on the perspectives and on convincing his audience on how nationalism benefits one and condemns the other. In the process he made references to the Germans, British and French, pointing out how their overwhelming Christianity could not help them avert war and yet how their common European-ness had overtaken their alleged national priorities. At this point, Sen was critical of European policies of 'multiculturalism'- terming it as a "federation of religious identities"- which treated each ethnic/religious community as a separate group and created further divisions.
Throughout his talk, he frequently referred to Bangladesh. That Bangladeshis had chosen language over religion in 1971 was an issue of interest to him. In the book's last chapter, Sen had written of a certain Kader Mia, a Muslim who had possessed no other identity at all for the "vicious Hindu thugs" who confronted him in a riot. He had discussed the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war to say that identity divisions then were "along the lines of language and politics, not religion, with Muslim soldiers from West Pakistan brutalizing and killing - mainly Muslim dissenters." Sen's Kader Mia died a victimized Muslim, but he was also a poor laborer who was out in the street desperately seeking work. "In the Hindu-Muslim riots," Sen says, "Hindu thugs killed poor Muslim underdogs with ease, while Muslim thugs assassinated impoverished Hindu victims with abandon." Sen, in resisting reductivism, quoted Derek Walcott and imagined a universe in which he, Kader Mia, "the goldsmith from Benares", "the stone cutter from Canton" (Derek Walcott, Names) can jointly affirm their common identities.
Through out the one-and-a-half-hour long lecture, Sen emphasized a single point: if nationalism is to breed violence and divisiveness, then there's no further need to be a nationalist. Nationalism, as per Amartya Sen, cannot be brutal.
Professor Sen recollected his years in Trinity College, Cambridge where the walls on campus were filled with the names of the dead soldiers. He paused to quote Wilfrid Owen's use of the famous lines from Horace: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" - which was termed "The old Lie" and "a desperate glory" by Owen. Susan Owen wrote to Tagore after the death of her son, telling him that he had died with a diary on him which had the following Geetanjali lines written on it:
'Jabar diney ei kawthati boley jeno jai -
Ja dekhechi, ja peyechi tulona tar nai' - (When I leave, let these be my parting words: what my eyes have seen, what my life received, are unsurpassable.) He spoke of the Bengal famine, driving home the point that in spite of the British taking pride in the fact that they brought 'good governance' and 'rule of law' to India, in spite of all the alleged misrule of the Indian rulers of pre-British era, there was no historical record of any major famine in Bengal prior to the colonizers arrival there. When he was finishing off with the concept of economic redistribution and who we would share our food with when confronted with the harsh realities of life, the news of Benazir Bhutto's assassination came. A silence fell over the audience and Professor Bose quickly began taking questions. Came the obvious question on terrorism: where does it stem from? Does it start with "bad" nationalism that becomes flammable and engineers violence? Amartya Sen, clearly shaken by the news, replied by again referring to Owen: All a poet can do is warn. He referred to brutal terrorism, saying that people should not be goaded into acquiring identities and that membership in each of the categories or groups of identities should be voluntary. After he concluded by referring to the Gita, that great example of the argumentative tradition with Arjuna asking questions to Krishna, a young man from the audience wondered whether Sen was overlooking "good nationalism" that sprang from democratic resistance. I asked questions too. True, Professor, while terrorists put 'Nationalism' to shame, aren't there other sides to reckon with as well? Where would 'independence' be sans nationalism? Where would we be without 1971? True, that for a nationalist, victory of the other side is never the official history for the defeated, but arguments of the defeated still find a place in the dialogue. What is it that spoils nationalism? My questions were answered by Governor G K Gandhi, who pointed out the two most crucial elements: iconism and emotion, that despoil nationalism. True, Governor Gandhi, politics in our lands follow the musical pattern of arahan (ascent) and the abarahan (descent) and truer still, that worship in our lands turns to hatred in no time, but what it truer is that our leaders are the ones who encourage us to turn acknowledgements into adulation; adulation into veneration, and veneration into worship. Can there not be an idol without idolatry? Can there not be a nationalist without militarism? Can there not be emotions without malice? Can there not be lands without leaders like ours? The evening ended with Prof Sen taking more questions, and later on my way back home I wondered once again whether there ever was a single truth, anywhere and at any point of time. Rubana is a poet doing her Phd at Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
Ja dekhechi, ja peyechi tulona tar nai' - (When I leave, let these be my parting words: what my eyes have seen, what my life received, are unsurpassable.) He spoke of the Bengal famine, driving home the point that in spite of the British taking pride in the fact that they brought 'good governance' and 'rule of law' to India, in spite of all the alleged misrule of the Indian rulers of pre-British era, there was no historical record of any major famine in Bengal prior to the colonizers arrival there. When he was finishing off with the concept of economic redistribution and who we would share our food with when confronted with the harsh realities of life, the news of Benazir Bhutto's assassination came. A silence fell over the audience and Professor Bose quickly began taking questions. Came the obvious question on terrorism: where does it stem from? Does it start with "bad" nationalism that becomes flammable and engineers violence? Amartya Sen, clearly shaken by the news, replied by again referring to Owen: All a poet can do is warn. He referred to brutal terrorism, saying that people should not be goaded into acquiring identities and that membership in each of the categories or groups of identities should be voluntary. After he concluded by referring to the Gita, that great example of the argumentative tradition with Arjuna asking questions to Krishna, a young man from the audience wondered whether Sen was overlooking "good nationalism" that sprang from democratic resistance. I asked questions too. True, Professor, while terrorists put 'Nationalism' to shame, aren't there other sides to reckon with as well? Where would 'independence' be sans nationalism? Where would we be without 1971? True, that for a nationalist, victory of the other side is never the official history for the defeated, but arguments of the defeated still find a place in the dialogue. What is it that spoils nationalism? My questions were answered by Governor G K Gandhi, who pointed out the two most crucial elements: iconism and emotion, that despoil nationalism. True, Governor Gandhi, politics in our lands follow the musical pattern of arahan (ascent) and the abarahan (descent) and truer still, that worship in our lands turns to hatred in no time, but what it truer is that our leaders are the ones who encourage us to turn acknowledgements into adulation; adulation into veneration, and veneration into worship. Can there not be an idol without idolatry? Can there not be a nationalist without militarism? Can there not be emotions without malice? Can there not be lands without leaders like ours? The evening ended with Prof Sen taking more questions, and later on my way back home I wondered once again whether there ever was a single truth, anywhere and at any point of time. Rubana is a poet doing her Phd at Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
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