Argumentative Indian - by Amartya Sen
ISBN: 9780312426026Date read: 2025-12-25
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Famous analysis of India’s intellectual and political heritage, quite against Hindu nationalism. I learned a lot. I’d happily read ten more books like this.
my notes
When taking a view of Indian civilization, don’t forget the period preceding the Muslim conquest.
Muslim Arab traders settled in India from the eighth century.
India was not a ‘Hindu country’ even before the arrival of Islam.
Buddhism was the dominant religion in India for nearly a millennium.
The Chinese in the first millennium CE standardly referred to India as ‘the Buddhist kingdom’.
The roots of scepticism in India go back a long way, and it would be hard to understand the history of Indian culture if scepticism were to be jettisoned.
There’s a long tradition of accepted heterodoxy in India.
See how much heterodoxy there has been in Indian thoughts and beliefs from very early days.
Not only did Buddhists, Jains, agnostics and atheists compete with each other and with adherents of what we now call Hinduism (a much later term) in the India of the first millennium BCE, but also the dominant religion in India was Buddhism for nearly a thousand years.
Bhagavad Gītā presents a tussle between two contrary moral positions:
1. Krishna’s emphasis on doing one’s duty
2. Arjuna’s focus on avoiding bad consequences (and generating good ones)
…
Arjuna questions whether it is right to be concerned only with one’s duty to promote a just cause and be indifferent to the misery and the slaughter that the war itself would undoubtedly cause.
Krishna argues against Arjuna. His response takes the form of articulating principles of action – based on the priority of doing one’s duty – which have been repeated again and again in Indian philosophy. Krishna insists on Arjuna’s duty to fight, irrespective of his evaluation of the consequences. It is a just cause, and, as a warrior and a general on whom his side must rely, Arjuna cannot waver from his obligations, no matter what the consequences are.
Krishna’s view is the form of an admonishment: ‘And do not think of the fruit of action. / Fare forward.’
The univocal message of the Gītā requires supplementation by the broader argumentative wisdom of the Mahābhārata, of which the Gītā is only one small part.
India was the first country in the non-Western world to choose a resolutely democratic constitution.
World-conquering Alexander received some political lecturing as he roamed around north-west India in the fourth century BCE.
For example, when Alexander asked a group of Jain philosophers why they were paying so little attention to the great conqueror, he got the following – broadly anti-imperial – reply (as reported by Arrian):
“King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’s surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, travelling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others! … You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of the earth as will suffice to bury you.”
The secular demand that the state be ‘equidistant’ from different religions.
The inclusiveness of India made it easy for Christians, Jews, Parsees and other immigrants to settle in India to lead ‘their own lives’, coming from places where they had been persecuted,
Relations between Bangladesh and India demand much subtlety of perception, linked as the two countries are not only by history, but also by language and literature (Bengali culture flourishes on both sides of the border), religion (the Muslim minority in India constitutes about the same proportion of the Indian population as the Hindu minority does of the Bangladeshi population),
The important thing about a man is his dharma [roughly, the personal basis of behaviour], not necessarily his religion.’
Following the electoral victory of coalitions led by the BJP in 1998 and 1999, various arms of the government of India were mobilized in the task of arranging ‘appropriate’ rewritings of Indian history.
The rapidly reorganized National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) became busy, from shortly after the BJP’s assumption of office, not only in producing fresh textbooks for Indian school children, but also in deleting sections from books produced earlier by NCERT itself (under pre-BJP management), written by reputed Indian historians. The ‘reorganization’ of NCERT was accompanied by an ‘overhaul’ of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), with new officers being appointed and a new agenda chosen for both, mainly in line with the priorities of the Hindutva movement.
Rabindranath Tagore, who died in 1941 at the age of 80, is a towering figure in the millennium-old literature of Bengal.
His poetry as well as his novels, short stories and essays and songs.
Tagore did come from a Hindu family in what is now Bangladesh.
The newly independent Bangladesh choose one of Tagore’s songs as its national anthem.
India chose a song of Tagore’s (‘Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka’) as its national anthem.
He may be the only one ever to have written the national anthems of two different countries.
Tagore popularized the term ‘Mahatma’ – great soul – as a description of Gandhi.
Schopenhauer argued that the New Testament “must somehow be of Indian origin: this is attested by its completely Indian ethics, which transforms morals into asceticism.”
Fling away your promise if it is found to be wrong.
The works of Satyajit Ray (1921–92): his Pather Panchali – the profound movie that immediately made him a front-ranking film-maker in the world – was directly influenced by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves.
Using natural locations and unknown actors.
Chili was brought to India by the Portuguese.
Tandoori came from the Middle East.