Amartya Sen: Tagore's final combination with economics

Home in the World / by Amartya Sen / 2021

Leave it at that/text

In 1951, Amartya Sen, an 18-year-old Indian-Bengali youth, came to Kolkata to begin his undergraduate studies. This year, the American economist Kenneth Arrow had just published his famous book "Social Choice and Personal Value". A friend who read economics with Mori borrowed the new book from the bookstore and lent it to Mori for a few hours, only to be "completely fascinated." In his newly published memoirs, Sen writes that he and his classmates were enthusiastically discussing Arrow's conclusions—"What does Arrow's theorem mean for democratic politics and synthetic social judgments?" Since then, Sen has been thinking about the solution to Arrow's impossibility theorem—the "negation of negation" of it in the Hegelian sense.

That same year, 18-year-old Amartya Sen found herself with a hard lump growing in her mouth, and the hard lump was growing. He went to the hospital several times, and the doctors thought it was just a small problem. But Sen nervously flipped through the papers and immediately thought he had oral cancer. Eventually, at a new cancer hospital in Canada, the youth's concerns became a reality — test results showed he had cancer.

In 2021, Amartya Sen published her memoir, Home in the World. It took a lot of ink to recall his first year in Calcutta, a year when he met the economic theory he would spend his life studying, and a time when doctors predicted that his chances of survival in the next five years were worrying. That winter, at the Cancer Hospital in Kasang, Sen tried radiation therapy, which was something new at the time—sitting in a chair in the treatment room for many days in a row, letting the rays shine on his affected area for five hours at a time. While in his treatment, he read Thomas Mann's novel while looking out the window from a small window—there was a tree there, which gave him a little solace. The treatment reminded him of the radiation patients left behind in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the stories of his uncles in dark prisons after they were arrested for anti-British activities.

The name "Amartya" was given by the great poet Tagore. Amartya Sen's mother, a rare independent woman of her time, was born into a Sanskrit family in West Bengal and joined the modern dance company founded by Tagore. In Sanskrit, "Amartya" means "immortal." Perhaps the name hinted at life, and the radiotherapy, which had made a huge bet, was so successful that he was able to continue his studies and then go to Cambridge for further studies — although the treatment left an irreversible wound in his mouth, leaving the economist with obvious difficulties in pronunciation in future speech.

On the cover of her memoir, Amartya Sen, a teenager, wears glasses and a trademark smile on her mouth, looks out the window with several childhood friends. This photograph was taken in the village of Lonely Garden, where Tagore founded the International University. This is also the main scene of the first half of the memoir – the now 88-year-old Nobel laureate in economics gushing back to the story of nearly a century ago: the connection between childhood in the countryside of Bengal, in the "classroom" under the shade of trees, and the whole world.

Amartya Sen's story begins in the sea world of the Bay of Bengal. His father's ancestral home is in what is now Dhaka, Bangladesh. Before World War II, it was a land that was extremely connected to the rest of the world. The regional capital, Kolkata, is a metropolis and a global node throughout Southeast Asia. The British, Bengalis, West Indians, Burmese and Cantonese Hakkas live here. Sen's family followed the chemist's father's teaching changes and continued to cross the Bay of Bengal, moving from one city to another – Dhaka, Mandalay, Membe, Calcutta. In his description, a life of constant relocation has given him an unusually rich understanding of the world — he learned some Burmese, became familiar with the different accents of East and West Bengal, and had many experiences with water, rivers and oceans. He also liked Kipling's poetry for this reason— although he also pointed out that Kipling's imagination of the East was often based on the places he had never been to.

With such a life experience, with "Home in the World" as the title, is it Amartya Sen who wants to embody warmth and reflect his world citizenship? Maybe. However, the title is also a tribute to Tagore's dark tragic novel The World and home. The novel, published in 1916, portrays the struggles of Bangladeshi intellectuals through a love triangle – how do they simultaneously confront the Western culture in which they are deeply immersed in it and the colonial rule that they deeply dislike? How to try to save India from colonial rule while facing the superstition, violence and irrationality of the independence movement? In the novel, this contradiction lies between two Indian-Bengali intellectuals and the women they love together. At the end, the protagonist, unable to resolve this contradiction, chooses death.

Is Amartya Sen implying that the "immortal" self is trapped in such a contradiction? Although he does not explicitly state it, the important theme in the memoir echoes this contradiction – how to understand Tagore? Sen used tagore's contradictions to convey his views on the relationship between "home" and "world".

Sen spent almost his entire childhood with Tagore. His family was closely linked to Tagore. The poet's last speech before his death in 1941 was read to the public by Sen's maternal grandfather, Gosti Mohan. Drawing on Tagore's global friendship and the fame of Asia's first Nobel Laureate in Literature, the childhood Sen met one Indian and other world figures from India and around the world at Tagore's school – Mahatma Gandhi, Mrs. Roosevelt... There was even Chiang Kai-shek and his wife. Among his classmates were friends from India and around the world, sen recalled that he and Tan Li, the son of Tan Yunshan, a Chinese scholar who went to India to teach, maintained a friendship for more than half a century. These are the whole "world" that Tagore and the flourishing Bengali literary and artistic circles have brought to Sen.

Yet this "world" is also constantly struggling on the verge of being sought after and not understood. At that time, Tagore went to the world to give speeches, and was praised with mixed reviews. The English philosopher Bertrand Russell insisted that the poet was a god stick, so he was mysterious.

Sen draws the reader's attention to a fierce dispute between Tagore and Gandhi — in 1934, the Great Bihar earthquake, and Gandhi, who was advocating for the rights of dalits, immediately pointed out that this was a heavenly condemnation of the "untouchable" untouchable system imposed on Indians. Tagore strongly opposed this formulation, arguing that even if it would help abolish the inaccessibility system, it would encourage more irrationality. With the help of Gandhi's conflict with Tagore, Sen strives to "justify" Tagore, pulling back to reality a representative of oriental metaphysics and spiritual culture, and restoring his more rational and thoughtful personal image as a twentieth-century intellectual.

Tagore did love mysticism and value psychological experience outside of consciousness, but this was not necessarily his Indian side, after all, he was also deeply influenced by the Viennese "Art Nouveau" and even Freud psychoanalytic theory, and integrated the latter into modern art. At the same time, he placed great emphasis on rational analysis and criticism, whether it was a critique of British colonial rule, Japanese expansion in Asia, and even a vigilance against India's own nationalism and ethnic politics. This rationality gave Tagore an extremely pessimistic undertone in his later years. And the Irish poet Yeats, who emphasized the most "spiritual" part of Tagore's poetry as the antidote to Western civilization in his mind, Sen's understanding was that Tagore silently accepted such a "human design" and did not overly justify anything.

Tagore represented Sen's "home.". This is the high point of the "Bengal Renaissance" that originated in Kolkata. Beginning in the early 19th century, Bengali intellectuals in Calcutta continued to dabble in British and Western cultures— linguistics, religion. They wrote poems, novels, and plays on the basis of which they reconstructed their discourse on Indian history and culture. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bengal intellectuals were the first to introduce Picasso's Cubism and Kandinsky's avant-garde paintings, and were the first to create feature films. Against this backdrop, we can understand why Amartya Sen was able to become the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Economics— in the 1940s at the Lonely Garden school, teachers and students discussed Shaw and Lenin; in the early 1950s, in the co-op café on College Street in Calcutta, Sen and his friends debated the economic propositions of Marx and Keynes. These were so natural to Sen that he arrived in Cambridge with no intellectual discomfort or communion.

Like many Bengali intellectuals, Sen not only received a complete Western-style education, but also did not interrupt the "tradition" of Indian classical culture. His maternal grandfather was a teacher of Sanskrit and Classical Studies at Silent Garden School. Sen recalls that when he was a child, he was familiar with classical Sanskrit and dabbled in Sanskrit drama and great epics, so much so that when he found that he loved mathematics, he could not let go of his dedication to Sanskrit. Unlike tradition, Sen's maternal grandfather was also a modernist, trying to re-read Sanskrit texts with new-wave ideas—he sought the meaning of human liberation in Shudraga's play "The Little Mud Cart", and re-translated and interpreted the creations of the poet GebilDas in the devotional movement to emphasize the historical interaction between Hindus and Muslims, and to deal with the increasingly cruel sectarian conflicts of the 1940s. Even Sen's atheistic beliefs were connected to Indian philosophy—when he told his grandfather that he was an atheist, he immediately found the Indian tradition of atheism in classical Indian philosophy—the secularist materialist philosophy that influenced Buddhist thought.

An entire generation of such Bangladeshi intellectuals is proud of this "East-West" education and culture. Sen's classmate at Silent Garden School, the famous Indian director Satyajit Rey, proudly describes himself as "a combination of East and West". In post-independence India, commerce and population movement in the Bay of Bengal were cut off by the borders of newly independent countries, and even Bengal was divided into east and west, which were divided into India and Pakistan. Sen spends an entire chapter trying to convince readers that Bangladesh, today's borders are broken, is still a whole —whether Hindu or Muslim, whether it's West Ben or Bangladesh today. But unlike Sen's insistence, history is irreversible, and Amartya Sen will probably be the last descendant of tagore's golden age of "Golden Bengal" that we can see.

For Amartya Sen, however, the "homeland" is not just a confluence of East and West, but also a collection of pains and dilemmas. The impact of the social realities he saw in his childhood environment was an important motivator for his academic interests and career direction. After all, just "connecting things", or the vigorous injection of literature and art, is obviously not enough to make Sen a well-known master of economics.

In 1943, after the Japanese occupation of Burma, they approached the mountainous areas of the Indo-Burmese border, accompanied by the Japanese army was Subas Chandra Bose, a Bengali-born Hindu nationalist activist. He led the "Indian National Army" he formed, trying to achieve India's independence through the Japanese offensive. At the same time in Bangladesh, the British mobilized a large number of troops and laborers to build fortifications, and the economy of Bangladesh was extremely prosperous due to large-scale procurement during the war. But just then, a super famine broke out, and in 1942, regional food prices began to soar. Throughout 1943, Sen saw hordes of rural starving victims walking from the main road to Calcutta in search of relief. Later historians estimated that more than 2 million people died of starvation in Bangladesh that year. The economy was booming that year, there was no shortage of food, and so many people died of starvation. Such contradictions deeply shocked and confused Sen and became the subject of economics that he studied for the rest of his life. In 1989, Sen published his book Poverty and Famine, which devoted a chapter to the analysis of the causes of the 1943 Famine in Bengal— the famine was not due to a lack of food, but to the systemic problems of wartime economic regulation, the rationing system that only cared for cities, and the colonial system, which together led to the tragedy of history.

For Sen, just as important as hunger is the vendetta and violence that comes with India's partition politics. These topics are also reflected in his career in professional research. From "Identity and Violence" to "The Strifeed Indian", the propositions brought to him by his early years in Bengal's "homeland" can be seen everywhere. These writings can also be seen as Sen's answer to the many controversies involved in recent years.

Around the time of the 2014 Indian election, two prominent Indian economists fought a pen war in the media. On one side is Sen, and on the other is the famous Indian-American economist, Professor at Columbia University and free trade expert Jagdish Bhagwati. They argue about how India will develop – Bhagwati believes that priority should be given to stimulating growth, and social welfare, health care and education must wait until substantial growth is taken into account; Amartya Sen opposes excessive attention to growth, arguing that societies lacking social welfare, basic health care and education are not only unlikely to achieve stable growth, but ultimately lead to a further widening and inequity of the gap between rich and poor.

At a time when right-wing leader Modi, known for his economic growth, is running for prime minister, the economists' firing is interpreted as a struggle between India's two political lines. Sen is seen as india's economic representative of the 1947 independence line that combined state planning, trade protection and social engineering, while Bhagwati endorsed Modi's "Gujarat model" of manufacturing and finance in the western Indian state of Gujarat, which began in 2001.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the hometowns of Sen and Bhagwati also represent two different paths of dialogue between India and the West. Unlike Amartya Sen, a Bengali, Bhagwati is a Mumbai-born Gujarat. His growth trajectory did not include "alternative education" institutions such as Silent Garden, but elite institutions along the way. In India around independence, he attended Sydenham College, the first british business school in Asia. After that, he completed his undergraduate studies at St John's College in Cambridge and then went on to graduate school at MIT, where he completed his doctoral dissertation. After graduation, Bhagwati naturally stayed in the United States to work. On this trajectory, the role of "hometown" is much smaller than that of the "world" from London to New York. Bhagwati is more like a pure Western scholar than Sen.

In the face of Sen's "east-west combination" of modernization path and economic thinking, Bhagwati can be said to be disdainful in his heart. In his manifesto work Why Growth Matters, which he and another economist, Arvind Panagariya, Bhagwati attributes the simplification of East Asian economies' take-off patterns to a combination of several universal factors, such as free markets and open trade. As for India's poverty problem, he also holds a rather different attitude from Sen. Sen still agrees with the state apparatus' redistribution of income and universal social welfare to reduce poverty, while Bhagwati has pointedly stated that he has no belief that India's state bureaucracy is still efficient. In his view, this "formal" path could no longer be used to achieve poverty reduction, and development could only be achieved if, on the one hand, it stimulated growth and raised income levels, and on the other hand, the forces that relied on poverty reduction tools with international standards, such as non-governmental organizations, crossed the Indian Government to realize the vision.

Sen, as the "successor" of Arrow, clearly holds a more complex attitude between the government and economic growth. Arrow's impossibility theorem states in mathematical terms that society cannot achieve perfect "common will" with a set of personal preferences that have nothing to do with each other. This means that the political philosophy of free-market economics assumes that the sum of individual freedoms is the greatest good— will create problems when put into practice. Bhagwati remains a believer in the market. But Sen's long-standing job has been to reconcile the enormous complexities—to reconcile government, markets, the public sector, and the private sector under a system that mathematical inferences have proven to be impossible and not truly perfect, to look for the "still possible" parts of the "Arrow impossible." The philosophical paths of the two men are very different.

It may be said that the economics that Sen advocated, which was also deeply rooted in the education and enlightenment given to him by his "homeland", was a kind of "Bengali modernism" economics, or simply the economics of Tagore. What he seeks is maximum inclusivity, a balance of reality and ideals, less conservative and less radical, both traditional and modern. In Home in the World, Sen constantly emphasizes that such ideals are possible—for example, at Trinity College in the 1960s, conservative economist Dennis Robertson and Marxist economist Maurice Dob maintained extremely polite and tolerant colleague-friend relationships. So much so that Sen said marxist economists and neoclassical economists were "more likely to be friends" than the latter and Keynesian economists.

But it is this reverence for inclusivity, and his lost Bengal homeland, that has made it increasingly difficult for Amartya Sen to please an increasingly polarized populace in recent years. In India, he is seen as a relic of the old times and repulsed by both Hindu nationalists and radical advocates of economic reform. And he is not a person who is good at catching people's attention with fierce excitement in theory and opinion, and his exposure in the media is decreasing. Amartya Sen does have a very close side to India's mainstream politics. In his memoirs, his criticism of The Founding Father of Pakistan, Jinnah," for "splitting" India and his constant attacks on ethnic conflicts, all have the flavor of Indian official propaganda from the 1960s. In post-independence India, the position of Bengali intellectuals is also declining, and for Amartya Sen, is "Home in the World" not a kind of remembrance of the lost world and the lost homeland?