The Argumentative Indian

The Argumentative Indian
by Amartya Sen

Is mankind free to speak his mind? Does differing opinion add value to civilized society? The argument begins millennia ago with creation. It finds only argument on these questions with no real value placed on either side. Oddly enough at the root of much of the debate is religion where the same balance goes with the need or not, to subscribe to any religious orthodoxy; hence heterodoxy best describes the Argumentative Indian. By page four I found argument with Sen. Having read the Bhagavad-Gita I came away with a different scenario on allegorical portrayal of a principle. That of non attachment to the physical world is central to the Gita, I was impressed that it was Arjuna making the argument for fate. It was Krishna doubting the reason for war. It was Arjuna rationalizing on the separation of body and soul, making material outcomes not important. Oddly enough My argument is only technical in merit an so, why should I argue. None the less, surely I the reader must make way to the well studied author; a modest degree of skepticism shadowed my reading of this book. When you think of it do not skepticism and argument find them selves bookends to leaves of theories put to the test of debate.

Basically the book is a collection of essays that Sen has written over the course of his career as an author, amongst many other accomplishments, including a Nobel Prize. His main thrust is that giving man the power to freely debate his views is the reason for hope in a future for man kind. He makes clear that fertile ground for debate is democracy. The reader becomes keenly aware that India is now the world’s largest democracy. To make sure the reader appreciates this Sen demonstrates that democracy is intimately connected with public discussion and interactive reasoning where Indian history is rich with evidence. Lesson learned; traditions of public discussion exist across the world, not just in the West. And to the extent that such a tradition can be drawn on, democracy is easier to institute and also to preserve. As I read through this book I was always looking for a that evidence supporting a general theme and characteristic in Sen’s argument. Upon entering my last foot note I landed on it. This last foot note is an example of Sens many posed arguments, where he sites two antonym notions and finds congruency in the application of their outcomes. Just when you have caught on to one side of an argument he would reverse the strategy. It paints a complex picture, where there is always room for two winning sides of an argument and therefore unity through politics.

Hinduvta having roots in Hindu is a recent movement, relatively speaking, in what appears to be an effort to attach a religious identity to India. Accidentally or on purpose, Hindu’s characteristics in doctrine are one that brings unity to people by accepting all walks of life. Hinduvta is actually a heterodoxy faith and the root of Indian Democracy. To qualify Sen’s views one must appreciate that he is Bengali, a culture with strong Muslim influence. Yet he himself is a secularist with acceptance of all and at the same time no real attachment to any religion. Ironically, a prime tenant of Hindu is non attachment. The aforementioned makes Hindi a religion different from the major religions, yet it does practice a belief in one god.

Sen makes a lengthy argument against the Hindutva movement basically because of his secular orientation. He advocates heterodoxy separate from a Hindu policy which seems to me superfluous. Why argue about things that don’t need argument. I wrap with one anecdotal question on this. His argument lay with the fact that there are many religions comprising India today and Hindu is simply the majority. He continuously argues for equal distance the Indian government must maintain, which is different from separation of church and state here in the United States. As a secularist and in conjunction with the coincidence that he is a native Bengali he makes a strong argument that Hindu is not a religion of the same unity as Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Hindi are a people that by their doctrine embrace all religions not just their own. So I am a bit puzzled by Sen's concern with Hindutva. It appears that Hindutva is the solution to found a multi-religious state around Hindi doctrine. Sen speaks to the secular Carvaka system and went further and suggested the need for methodological scrutiny of knowledge that is services - directly or indirectly from perception. I suggest he take that same approach in his argument with the Hinduvta movement. I could say in a with all due respect yet as an American, what is his beef?

Enfolded within Sen’s argument he uses the phrase "homogenize to ‘hegemonize’". He associates that with the violence foisted on the people by some policy of the State of India. While I see numerous intervening steps here in America, I can surely see through the departure from 150 years constitutional interpretation, Roosevelt ushered a slippery run of Federal hegemony over the individual States of our Republic. Obama has done it with Obamacare, his law suit against the State of Arizona and his deployment of funds to support his position against the Governor of Wisconsin. Franklin D. Roosevelt was accused of much the same maneuvering in the 1930s. History will remember Obama the same way. These draw ominous parallel to Hitler's consolidation of power from 1932 to 1936, In America the protests may be of agitated spirit but rarely of violent nature to the degree found in India. I can only suspect that as economics improve, India’s people will be become less desperate and therefore less violent towards one another. In this ominous parallel I find fertile ground for Sen’s concern. The safeguard both governments have is term limits in power.

With regard to India’s culture front through literature Sen first talks on the author, lecturer and educator, Tagore in an essay aimed and literature in India. with it's influence on diversity. He follows with an essay on Satyajit Ray and the film industry's influence on India. The theme of Tagore is mostly introspective. Ray drives home the notion of India's cosmopolitan nature; one that while embracing Asian borne diversity, there is not much that convinces me on the reception of this in the Western ways. While received thru force, I am not convinced Western culture runs very deep in India. In saying this I am also suspect that India does not require Western culture. In fact they may receive it but like two year olds playing next to each other, it is not essential to share their toys to have a relationship. Hence a deep India-Western relationship may be rare for a reason. And then when I read about the abject indifference the wealthy have on their surrounding poor, I suspect perhaps there is some common ground in capitalistic democracy. Ironically right after I made this note, Sen deals with this under the headings of External Sources and Modernity, The Elusive 'Asian Values'. He answers it directly in his concluding paragraph under the section title Ours and Theirs: The essences of his conclusion that so much parallel the ideology of the United States :

The difficulties of communication across cultures are real, as are the judgmental issues raised by the importance of cultural differences. But these recognitions do not lead us to accept the standard distinctions between ‘our culture” and ‘their culture’. Nor do they give us cause to overlook the demands of practical reason and of political and social relevance in contemporary India, in favor of faithfulness so alleged historical contrasts….

The celebration of these differences – the ‘dizzying contrasts’ – is far from what can be found in the labored generalizations about ‘our culture’ and the vigorous pleas, increasingly vocal, to keep ‘our culture’, ‘our modernity’ distinctly unique and immune from the influence of ‘their culture’, ‘their modernity’. In our heterogeneity and in our openness lies our pride, not our disgrace. Satyajit Ray taught us this, and that lesson is profoundly important to India. And for Asia and for the world.


Sen illustrates many cases in Indian literary history in making the argument that public discussion (argument) is a tradition much older in India than the West. At high level we are familiar with the phrase, “never talk religion and politics in family discussion”. Well think of a people that transitioned from Buddhism to Hindu, while mixing in home grown Jainism and Sihk and importing Islam, Christianity, Judaism and a few others all having equal distance from the government. And Sen is careful to distinguish the ideas of “equal distant from religion” from “separation of church and State” Just the analysis of the two phrases suggest India’s diverse religious beginnings where even in conquest, the conquerors adopted or embraced the religions of the conquered. These are described in events centuries before America’s rooted in a Judeo-Christian/Greco-Roman foundation. Sens key word through the book is heterodoxy: the inclusion of religion as opposed to the separation from religion

Sen delves into the popular subjects on India such as Class, India’s international positioning, and calendars. I have captured the high points in the notes section of this review. What I most appreciated were Sens views on the subject of Reason. After three hundred or so pages of reading his rationale, brought forth in an ‘argumentative setting’, Sen comes out with his views on Reason. Sen attempts to excuse those who cling to Cast by saying: “Attacks on ethics based on reason have come recently from several different directions. Apart from the claim that the ‘Enlightenment view of human psychology’ neglects many human responses (as Glover argues), we also hear the claim that to rely primarily on reasoning in the ethics of human behavior involves neglect of culture specific influences on values and conduct. People’s thoughts and identities are fairly comprehensively determined, according to this claim, by the tradition and culture in which they are reared rather than by analytical reasoning.” He adds “Indeed, the importance of instinctive psychology and sympathetic response should be adequately recognized, and Glover is also right in believing that our hope for the future must, to a considerable extent, depend on the sympathy and respect with which we respond to things happening to others. To this I say: How about calling a person out for mindless adherence to tradition. How about simply telling a Brahman that systematically denigrating those of lower class only adds to the weight of the anchor on the Indian economy? To Sen’s credit his agreement is seemingly balanced in the end, so much so that if there is a point to be made, it is obscured by the balance beam of justice leaving lady justice so blind that a way forward becomes something that you must feel for.

This book will certainly add to ones ability the appreciation for eloquent argument. It grapples with many difficult topics. And in the end Sen leaves it open for argument. If you want to survive a cocktail party and be well recognized as being well versed in controversy this book is worth your time. India has yet to master, though may be on the verge of it, an Indian-ness of democracy that could one day master the world. As debate would have it, the jury is still out. However I believe that on Sen’s ring of keys, one of them is the master key to success. The key is placing it in the correct box. So there are two options accept argument as essential to agreement or if your are not up to the argument, find some value in perspective and simply say to another’s opinion….aaaahhh I see.



Notes:

Page 16 Ashoka tried to codify and propagate what must have been the
earliest formulations of rules for public discussion- a kind of ancient
version of the nineteenth century 'Roberts Rules E
of Order'....Even when in arguing 'other sects should be duly honored
in every way on all occasions'

Page 26: the Carvaka system went further and suggested the need for
methodological scrutiny of knowledge that is services - directly or in
directly from perception.

My comment: this can only be made from the assumption that non
interactive minds are just that, virtually dead and un able to draw
from that kernel that produces judgment. When judgment is based on
the survival of the body one direction is taken in the assembly of
knowledge. If one can transcend the body, at least in thought, a
different perception allows of a different assembly of knowledge.
Hence the need for Carvaka skepticism to be rooted in the original and
possibly "born again" thought. The key is transcending the paradigm
of time being a linier phenomena to one where time is vertical.

Page 27: Buddhaghosa, a Buddist philosopher in fifth- century India,
thought that even though Lokayata can literally interpreted as the
discipline that bases knowledge only on the “material world", it
could perhaps be better described as the 'discipline of arguments and
disputes'. In this respect, the rationale of the Lokayata approach is
quite close to the methodological that Francis Bacon would make with
compelling clarity in 1605 in his treaties The Advancement of Learning

My comment: India was 1100 years ahead of the west.

In the chapter India Large and Small, Sen makes numerous arguement
against the notion that India is not a Hindu country. He diluted the
over all 4/5 Hindu majority using a series of sub classifications. Then he challenged history to site Buddhism as the first religion of India. He attempts to make a case that Hindi and Islam share equally in India's history. As he defends Islam he becomes much like the inverse of what he accuses the Hindutva of; rewriting history to make his argument. I find this fare play, given the title of the book. In his argument on the Muslim population he uses a comparison of Muslim India to countries out side India. I find this delusionary on statistical basis due to the fact that India is One Billion people. When you pro-rate one country the other India is still 4/5 Hinduism. Sen's conclusion makes the argument that while Hindu is 4/5 that even Hindu doctrine promotes doubt and skepticism as a means to heterodoxy or more-so Sen, being non-aligned with any religion, would promote non-religious secularism. In contrasting America's "separation of church and state" doctrine where the concept of exclusion prevails to the idea of inclusion through heterodoxy; I find strong agreement to the positive spirit of inclusion.

Sen begins the book two by contrasting Tagore and Gandhi. And Tagore's view on Nationalism and Colonialism

Page 40: The features of India’s unity vary greatly with the context. Some of them are more often recollected than others, though they all have their specific relevance. Consider, for example, the emergence, far less often discussed than it should be, the city Ujjain, in early centrist of the first millennium CE, as the location of the ‘principal meridian’ for Indian calendars, serving fro Indian astronomers as something like and Indian Greenwich. As discussed in Essay 15, it is still the base of Indian standard time today…

Page 44: Of course, it is impossible to foresee the future turn of event. In politics and history, perhaps in everything, that unknown power the ancients call Fate is always at work. Without forgetting this, I must add that, in politics as well as in private life, the surest method for resolving conflicts, however slowly, is dialogue.

Page 56 While the statistics of Hindu majority are indeed correct, the use of statistical argument for seeing India as a pre-eminently Hindu country is based on conceptual confusion: our religious is not our only identity, no necessarily the identity to which we attach the greatest importance.

My comment: this is clearly Sens opinion of which he finds much argument.

Page 69 Despite the veritable flood of religious practices in India, there is also resilient undercurrent of conviction across the country that religious beliefs, while personally significant, are socially unimportant and should politically in consequential. Ignoring the importance and reach – of this underlying conviction has the effect of systematic overestimating the role of religion in Indian society.

Page 70: It is important to understand the hold of the skeptical tradition in India, despite the manifest presence of religions all across the country. In responding to the exploitation of religious demography in the politics of Hindutva, the defenders of secular politics of the take for granted the Indian population would wan religious politics in one form or another.

Page 71: Rabindaranath Tagore thought that the idea of ‘Indian’ itself militates ‘against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others’

Page 93: Given the vast range of his creative achievements, perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the image of Tagore in the West is its narrowness; he is recurrently viewed as ‘the great mystic from the East.’ An image with putative message for the West, which some would welcome, others would still find deeply boring.

Page 104 The two remained deeply divided over their attitudes towards science. However, while Tagore believed that modern science was essential to understanding physical phenomena, his views on epistemology were in interestingly hetrodox. He did not take the simple ‘realist’ position often associated with modern science. The report of his conversation with Einstein, published in the New York Times in 1930, shows how insistent Tagore was on interpreting truth through observation and reflective concepts. To assert something is true or untrue in the absence of anyone to observe or perceive truth, or to, or to form a conception of what it is, appeared to Tagore to be deeply questionable…Truth said Tagore is realized through men.

Page 119: in India, Tagore wrote, 'circumstances almost compel us to learn English, and this lucky accident has given us the opportunity of access into the richest of all poetical literatures of the world.'. There seems to me much more force I'm Rabindranath's argument for clearly distinguishing between the injustice of a serious asymmetry of power (colonialism being a pre example of this) and the importance nevertheless of appraising Western culture in an open minded way...

Rabindrabath insisted on open debate on every issue, and distrusted conclusions based on mechanical formula, no matter how attractive that formula might seem in isolation. The question he persistently asks is whether we have reason enough to want what is being proposed, taking everything in to account.

Page 123: in the Vienna conference on human rights in 1993, the Foreign Minister of Singapore, citing differences between Asian and European traditions, argued that 'universal recognition of the ideal of human rights can be harmful if universalism is used to deny or mask the reality of my diversity

Page 124: There is I think, much wisdom in what we can call his ‘critical openness’, including the valuing of of a dynamic, adaptable world rather than one that is constantly ‘policing’ external influences and fearing ‘invasion” of ideas from elsewhere

Page 127: There is, for example, nothing false about Indian poverty, nor the fact – remarkable to others – that Indians have learned to live normal lives while taking little notice of the surrounding misery.

Page 131: The growing tendency in contemporary India to champion the need for indigenous culture that has ‘resisted’ external influences lacks credibility as well as cogency.

Page 132: Even in matters of day-to-day living, the fact that the chili, a basic ingredient of traditional Indian cooking, was brought to India by the Portuguese from the ‘new world’, does not make current Indian cooking any less Indian….

Given the cultural and intellectual interconnection, the question of what is Western and what is ‘Eastern’ (or Indian) is often hard to decide, and the issue can be discussed only in more dialectical terms. The diagnosis of a thought as purely ‘Western’ or purely Indian can be very illusory. The origin of ideas is no the kind of which ‘purity’ happens easily.

Page 144: Even though Alberuni’s was almost certainly the most impressive of these investigations, there are a great many examples of serious Arabic studies of Indian intellectual traditions around that time. Brahmagupta’s pioneering Sanskrit treatise on astronomy had first been translated into Arabic in the eighth century and several works on medicine, science and philosophy had an Arabic rendering by the ninth century.

Page 147: The invention of the decimal system with placed values and the placed use of zero, now used everywhere, as well as the so called Arabic numerals, are generally known to be Indian developments.

Page 150: Gandhi himself was severely attacked in [Mayo’s] book, but, given his campaign against caste and untouchability, he might have actually welcomed her exaggerations because of its usefully lurid portrayal of caste inequities. But while Gandhi may have been right to value external criticism as a way of inducing people to be self critical, the impact of the ‘magisterical approach’ certainly gives American perceptions of India a very clear slant.

Page 151: There are various other accounts of exotic Indian travels by ancient Greeks. The biography of Apollonius was, we are assured, richly rewarded in India: ‘I have seen men living upon earth and not upon it; defended without walls, having nothing, an yet possessing all things. How such contradictory things can be seen by the same person from the same observational position may not be obvious, but the bewitching charm of all this for the seeker of the exotic can hardly be doubted.

Page 195: While we must give credit where credit is due, Indian democracy has to be judged also by the strength and reach of public reasoning and its actual accomplishments.

Page 202: The remedy for many of eh central failures of Indian society is closely linked to broadening the force and range of political arguments and social demands.

Page 210: Class is neither the only concern, nor an adequate proxy for other forms of inequality, and yet we do need class analysis to see the working and reach of other forms of inequality and differentiation

Page 211: When I come to discuss the issue of what I call “friendly fire”, the role of such manifest concurrence in the lives of the extreme underdogs of society will become particularly relevant. Many of the distributional institutions that exist in India and elsewhere are designed to defend the interests of groups with some deprivation but who are not by any means the absolute underdogs of society. There is the understandable rationale for seeing them as “friendly fire” institutions in the battle of against class divisions. Yet they also have the effect of worsening the deal that the real underdogs get, at the bottom layers of society, the overall impact may be to strengthen class division rather than weaken them.

Page 213: In this context, it is particularly remarkable that India has continued to amass extraordinarily large stocks of food grain…the stocks substantially exceed one tonne of food grain for every family below the poverty line.

Page 217: Effective elementary education has in practice ceased to be free in substantial parts of the country, which of course is a violation of a basic right. All of this seems to be reinforced by a sharp class division between teachers and poorer families. Yet teachers unions – related to the respective parties – sometimes vie with each other in championing the immunity of teachers from discipline.

The Reach of Reason

Page 277: Attacks on ethics based on reason have come recently from several different directions. Apart from the claim that the ‘Enlightenment view of human psychology’ neglects many human responses (as Glover argues), we also hear the claim that to rely primarily on reasoning in the ethics of human behavior involves neglect of culture specific influences on values and conduct. People’s thoughts and identities are fairly comprehensively determined, according to this claim, by the tradition and culture in which they are reared rather than by analytical reasoning.

Page 278: Indeed, the importance of instinctive psychology and sympathetic response should be adequately recognized, and Glover is also right in believing that our hope for the future must, to a considerable extent, depend on the sympathy and respect with which we respond to things happening to others.

My comment: How about calling a person out for mindless adherence to tradition. How about simply telling a Brahman that systematically denigrating those of lower class only adds to the weight of the anchor on the Indian economy?

Page 279: Adam Smith argued that our ‘first perceptions’ of right and wrong ‘cannot be the object of reason, but of immediate sense of feeling’. But even these instinctive reactions to a particular conduct, he argued, rely – if only implicitly – on our reasoned understanding of casual connections between conduct and consequences in a vast majority on instances’. Furthermore, our first perceptions may also change in response to critical examination,….

My comment: Sen’s eloquent way of foisting both sides of an argument to cast a light on a solution.



Page 267: There might have been pleasure in official circles at the success of President Clinton’s visit to India and the asymmetrically favoured treatment he got in that visit vis-à-vis Pakistan, but the tendency to attribute that asymmetry to Indian nuclear adventure, rather than to India’s large size, democratic politics and its growing economy and technology, is difficult to understand.

Page 269: Strengthening of Pakistan’s stability and enhancement of its well-being has prudent importance for India, in addition to its obvious ethical significance. That central connection between moral and the prudential – must be urgently grasped.

Page 284; It is of course easy to find the advocacy of particular aspects of individual liberty in Western classical writings. For example, freedom and tolerance both get support from Aristotle (even though only for free men – not women and slaves). However, we can find championing of tolerance and freedom in non-Western authors as well. A good example is the emperor Ashoka in India, who during the third century BCE covered the country with inscriptions on stone tablets about good behavior and wise governance, including the demand for basic freedoms for all- indeed, he did not exclude women and slaves as Aristotle did…

Page 285: because of Western bias…Different cultures are thus interpreted in ways that reinforce the political conviction that Western civilization is somehow the main, perhaps the only, source of rationalistic and liberal ideas – among the analytical scrutiny, open debate, political tolerance and agreement to differ….

Once established, this view of the West, seen in confrontation with the rest, tends to vindicate itself. Since each civilization contains diverse elements, a non-Western civilization can then be characterized by referring to those tendencies that are most distant from the identified Western traditions and values. These selected elements are then taken to be more authentic or genuinely indigenous that the elements that are relatively similar to what can be found also in the West.

Page 289: When he died in 1605, the Islamic theologian Abdul Haq concluded with some satisfaction that, despite his innovations Akbar had remained a good Muslim. This was indeed so, but Akbar would have also that his religious beliefs came from his own reason and choice, not from blind faith, or from the marshy land of tradition.


My comment: Clearly in this passage Sen defines the traditional Muslim one lost in blind faith and thus you put credit to Ashoka’s good deed to Ashoka before you include Muslim foundation. Yet Sen makes numerous argument elsewhere painting the Muslim culture under Ashoka as part and parcel to the heterodoxy of India.

Secularism and Its Discontents

Page 295: Despite this broad and forceful challenge, secularist intellectuals in India tend to be somewhat reluctant to debate this rather unattractive subject. Reliance is placed instead, usually implicitly, on the well established and unquestioning tradition of seeing secularism as a good and solid political virtue for a pluralist democracy. As an unreformed secularist myself, I understand, and to some extent share, this reluctance, but also believe that addressing these criticisms is important.

Page 295: Secularism in the political – as opposed to ecclesiastical – sense requires the separation of state from any particular religious order. This can be interpreted in at least two different ways. The first view argues that secularism demands that the state be equidistant from all religions – refusing to take sides and having a neutral attitude towards them. The second – more severe – view insists that the state must not have any relation at all with any religion. The equidistance must take the form, then, of being altogether removed from each.

My comment: and here is the fundamental difference between India, adopting the former and the United States adopting the latter view.

Page 310: In fact, seeing Hinduism as a unified religion is a comparatively recent development. The term Hindu was traditionally used mainly as a signifier of location and country, rather than any homogeneous religious belief. The word derives from the river Indus or Sindu (the cradle of the Indus valley civilization which flourished from around 3000bce) and the name of that river is also the source of the word India itself. The Persians and the Greeks saw India as the land around and beyond the Indus and Hindus were the native people of that land.

Page 313: The principle of secularism, in the broader interpretation endorsed in India, demands ( as was discussed earlier) symmetric treatment of different religious communities in politics and in the affairs of the state. It is no tobvious why such symmetric treatment must somehow induce inescapable violence to achieve and sustain ideologies as the new opiates of the masses.


My comment: thru much of the book Sen makes a continuous argument against the Hindutva movement. His argument lay with the fact that there are many religions comprising India today and Hindu is simply the majority. He continuously argues for equal distance the government must maintain, which is different from separation of church and state. As a secularist that Sen is in conjunction with the coincidence that he is a native Bengali (largely Muslim oriented) on page 310 he makes a strong argument Hindu is not a religion of the same Unity as Muslims and Christians. Hindi are a people that by their doctrine embrace all religions. So I am a bit puzzled by Sen's concern with Hindutva. It appears that Hindu is the solution to found a multi-religious state.

On page 313 Sen uses the phrase "homogenize to ‘hegemonize’". He associates that with the violence imposed on the people by the State of India. While I see numerous intervening steps here in America, I can surely see from the departure from 150 years constitutional interpretation, Roosevelt ushered a slippery run of Federal hegemony
over the individual States of our Republic. Our President Obama has done it with Obamacare, his law suit against the State of Arizona, and his recent deployment of funds to support his position against the Governor of Wisconsin. These draw ominous parallel to Hitler's consolidation of power from 1932 to 1936. In this ominous parallel I find fertile ground for Sens concern.



Page 322. My comment: Thru the book and fro other sources of read that Kerala is
one of the more socially advanced States of India. I read on page 322 that Jews fled to Kerala at the fall of Jerusalem. Kerala uses the Judaic Calendar, suggesting a parallel between today's Palestine and Kerala. I find just a thread of a clue. But perhaps the thread is worth testing it's strength in validity. The first question I would ask is why is it that Jews and Kerala’ians live side by side, but Palestinians cannot do the same?

Page 331: Buddhist, Jain, Judaic, Christain, Parsee – were already flourishing in India, along with Hindu calendars, when the Muslim conquest of the north led to influence of the Hijri calendar. Islam’s arrival further enriched the religious – and calendrical diversity of India.



On page 339: It is in particular, important to distinguish between the inclusionary role identity and exclusionary force of separatism. To want to do something in the interest of a country is not the same thing as wanting the country to be distanced from the rest of the world, or to be isolated from it. The sense of identity leaves the issue of appropriate actions and policies entirely open to scrutiny and choice. This applies to science and technology on the one hand and to economic, social and cultural relations on the other. India’s relations with the world may demand significant use of Indianan identity, but they also call for critical scrutiny of specific ends and particular ways and means through which those relations may be appropriately advanced. Since identity politics and communitarian reasoning often have the effect of nurturing and promoting separatism, the distinction is important to seize.

My comment: This last foot note is an example of Sens many posed arguments, where he sites two antonym notions and finds congruency in the application of their outcomes. Just when you have caught on to one side of an argument he would reverse the strategy. It paints a complex picture, where there is always room for two winning sides of an argument and therefore unity through politics.

Complimentary books:

Mahabharata
Bhagavad Gita
Four Quartets, Elliot
India After Ghandi
Ramayana