Home in the World: A Memoir

by Amartya Sen

This belief in reason and freedom underlaid Tagore’s outlook on life in general and education in particular, leading him to insist that education in depth, and for all, is the most important element in the development of a country. In his assessment of Japan’s remarkable economic development, for example, he highlighted the hugely constructive role of good school education – an analysis that would be echoed much later in the economic literature on development, including by the World Bank and the United Nations.

Tagore argued, ‘the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education’. Even if we can think of qualifications to this judgement, it is not hard to see why he thought the transformative role of education was central to economic development and social change.

In a kind of ideological comparison with ancient sites of learning much eulogized in the Upanishads and in the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, Santiniketan was sometimes referred to as an ‘ashram’. Schooling in India’s old ashrams, we have been told, put particular emphasis on fostering curiosity rather than competitive excellence, and this was the focus in Santiniketan too. Any kind of concentration on examination performance and grades was, as I have mentioned, strongly discouraged. This prompted me to read many of Tagore’s essays on education – not just his poems and stories, as I had done earlier.

Tagore liked discussing his educational ideas in the weekly assemblies that were regularly held on Wednesday mornings in term-time at Santiniketan. They took place in what was called ‘Mandir’, which can be literally translated from Sanskrit as a ‘temple’, but the assemblies were not ceremonies of any particular religion. The weekly Mandir served as a regular forum for discussion of issues of gravity that interested the whole Santiniketan community. With its brightly coloured glass walls and translucent blocks of many different tints, the physical structure of the Mandir had some similarity, I later thought, with an old Christian church. There were some non-denominational prayers, but mostly discussions – quite wordy – on religious as well as general subjects with a moral slant.

Rabindranath had heard about Kshiti Mohan from one of his distinguished colleagues, Kali Mohan Ghosh, who was already in Santiniketan, mainly to help Tagore with his work on village reform and rural reconstruction, in addition to contributing to education at Santiniketan School. What Tagore heard about Kshiti Mohan impressed him sufficiently to undertake a kind of a background check. He found out about my grandfather’s scholarship as well as his liberal inclinations and deep involvement with the poorest people in the society, and became adamant that Kshiti Mohan must be persuaded to come to Santiniketan.

The priorities of Kshiti Mohan’s life changed with his evolving convictions. Ten years before he went to Chamba in 1897, when he was just seventeen, he decided to travel across northern and western India to collect and compile the poems and songs of Kabir, Dadu and other similarly inclined proponents (sants) who pursued religion in their own way, with respect for both Muslim and Hindu thought. There were huge territories to visit, since the followers of Kabir and the other sants were spread across many provinces of India.

My son is named Kabir, partly because the ideas of the historical Kabir moved me – and also because his mother Eva Colorni liked the name. Kabir is, of course, a Muslim name, and Eva, who was Jewish, told me that ‘It is just right that the son of a Hindu-origin father and a Jewish-origin mother should have a nice Muslim name.

Tagore disagreed sharply and thought little of Gandhiji’s version of alternative economics. Instead he saw reasons to celebrate, with a few qualifications, the liberating role of modern technology in reducing human drudgery as well as poverty.

He was also deeply sceptical of the argument that diligent spinning with a primitive machine elevates the mind. ‘The charka does not require anyone to think,’ he reminded Gandhiji. ‘One simply turns the wheel of the antiquated invention endlessly, using the minimum of judgement and stamina.’

A modest technological change could make people more productive and more fulfilled and, to follow Rabindranath’s argument, allow them more time for real thinking.

It is indeed possible that we were, in our youthful way, being unfair to Gandhiji – and Rabindranath might have been too. Performing the same tasks that manual labourers constantly do may have had, for Gandhiji, the virtue of acknowledging a togetherness with the underdogs of society, which could be important. The thought of togetherness – the sentiment of being ‘with’ others less fortunate than us – can certainly have a wide resonance. I was surprised – but also very interested – when I found later (after I arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge) how deeply preoccupied Ludwig Wittgenstein had been in wanting to follow the lifestyle of manual labourers. He talked about this a lot, in particular with his friend (and, later, my teacher) Piero Sraffa.

The delusional and destructive power of nationalism is brought out sharply in Tagore’s wonderful, universalist novel The Home and the World, which would later on be made into a beautiful film by Satyajit Ray.

I studied in Santiniketan for ten years, from 1941, when I came from St Gregory’s, until 1951, when I went to Presidency College in Calcutta. My great loves at Santiniketan were mathematics and Sanskrit. In the last two years at the school, I specialized in science, particularly physics and mathematics, which I was preparing to study in Presidency College.

First, Buddha’s approach focuses on reasons to accept one position and reject another, without any appeal to unargued beliefs. True, he also presented a metaphysics of the world, but his championing of particular ethical conclusions – such as the equality of all human beings irrespective of community and caste, the treatment of animals with kindness and the replacement of hatred towards others by universal love – was not conditional on accepting that metaphysics. On the contrary, each ethical conclusion demanded support from reasoning, even if it was sometimes implicit rather than explicit.

Gautama left his princely home in the foothills of the Himalayas in search of enlightenment, he was moved by the sight of mortality, morbidity and disability – concerns he shared with ordinary human beings. What distressed him then continues to worry us today. Unlike with most religious leaders, there was no real distance between him and us. A third feature that made Buddha so attractive was what he was trying to defend. After reading whatever I could get hold of among Buddha’s expositions, I became convinced that he had managed to turn our religious concerns from belief – about God and other existential suppositions – to behaviour and action, to be determined here and now. It was Buddha who changed the religious question from ‘Is there a God?’ to questions such as ‘How should we behave?’

He identifies that it is possible for people to agree on good action without necessarily agreeing on a bigger metaphysical view of the universe. This is, I believe, immensely significant.

Finally, Buddha’s approach to ethics differed substantially from the morality of the ‘social contract’, which appeared forcefully – if intermittently – in Indian thought (for example in the Bhagavadgita) and that has become such a dominant feature of post-Hobbesian and post-Rousseauvian thinking in Western ethics. A social contract takes the form of each contracting party doing specif...

Buddha argued instead that doing good should not be so transactional, that people have a duty to do what they recogniz...

During a literary evening at Santiniketan School, I tried to argue for the superiority of the ethics of ‘unconditional duty’ (shartaheen kartavya) over that of ‘social contract’. I doubt that I persuaded many listeners, though some of my classmates cheered me on.

The perception that human identity does not demand a singular confinement came to me quite powerfully from the ancient classics. Think of Vasantasena, the heroine of Shudraka’s Mricchakatika (‘The Little Clay Cart’) from around the fourth century – a radical and subversive play that offers several distinct, but important, themes. One of them was the need to see a person as having many identities – this was an idea that helped me to resist the imposition of a single, overwhelming identity based on religion or community (including focusing only on Hindu–Muslim divisions), which was becoming more and more common as my schooldays progressed.

To consider a particular application, early Indian legal theorists talked disparagingly of what they called matsyanyaya, ‘justice in the world of fish’, where a big fish can freely devour a small fish. We are warned that avoiding matsyanyaya must be an essential part of justice, and it is crucial to make sure that the awful ‘justice of fish’ is not allowed to invade the world of human beings. The central recognition here is that the realization of justice in the sense of nyaya is not just a matter of judging institutions and rules, but of judging the societies themselves. No matter how proper the established organizations might be – and the rules erected by the society (for example, about punishments) – if a big fish can still devour a small fish at will, it must be considered a patent violation of justice as nyaya. We needed a different – and a better – world, not just to follow old rules and hallowed conventions.