Meeting Amartya Sen, and musings/rant on language and identity

With Amartya Sen. 

Recently, GSAS organized a gathering of people who had received a fellowship (supported by the government of India) in Amartya Sen's honor. I was one of the fortunate few to receive this fellowship back in my first year at Harvard, and I was really glad that I was in Boston at the time they organized this meeting. 

Amartya Sen is certainly an interesting figure. For those who do not know, he's an Indian-origin (and actually, he is still an Indian national) Nobel prize-winning economist and philosopher. As an economist, he has written extensively on social choice theory, the economics of welfare policies, especially food distribution, and on the need for reform in the Indian healthcare and education sectors. As a philosopher, he has made important contributions to the theory of justice. In particular, he has argued strongly for a change in the discourse on the philosophy of justice from a purely academic angle of describing what are perfect/just societies and institutions to a more practical, yet equally rational angle of developing methods to compare justices and injustices in societies and further, to develop ways of improving the process of justice in these societies. His contributions have had an impact on India's social-welfare policies and also the UN's human development index that ranks countries on a more holistic developmental scale. 

Amartya Sen is also a somewhat controversial figure because he has, since I can remember, vehemently opposed the BJP and the RSS. For his criticisms, he has drawn the ire of many people. I remember when he got awarded India's highest civilian honor (Bharat Ratna) some 10-15 years ago, a year after he won the Nobel prize, a bunch of people made a huge hue and cry about him not deserving the award for being a `westernized Indian', whatever that means. 

So how did the conversation go?

I don't quite remember how the conversation started but it sort of got down to him describing his early childhood in Dhaka, which is now the capital of Bangladesh. So I asked him if he identified more with Bangladesh than with India. He had a simple response; he said he identifies with many things, cultures, nationalities, India, Bangladesh, the UK, America, and that there is no contradiction in such a belief. I certainly agree with this but I still took this as a cue to slyly put in the question that I was dying to ask him from the very beginning---I asked him," but certainly one has to be careful about identities, because identities are also associated with culture, and heritage, and language, and if one does not identify strongly enough then cultures and languages are bound to perish. Is that not sad? Do you think that we are not doing enough to protect Indian languages?"

I admit, and people have now started noticing this (friends, family etc.) that I have, what they would call, a huge fetish for the idea of  `saving' Hindi. For me, this is not a fetish, and it has to be taken as a matter of concern for India and Indian people. There are many friends of mine who are of the view that languages should be left to fend for themselves against English and if these languages die, then what does it matter? I understand and appreciate the line of reasoning of these people but it makes me uncomfortable because I am attached to the language I speak natively, I am attached to its poetry, I am attached to way I use it to speak to my grand-parents and I yearn for it to be relevant in situations involving all kinds of discourse. I want Hindi literature to flourish again. And part of me is upset that as India changes and gravitates towards English more and more everyday, I am losing an integral part of my heritage. Note that I would not be upset today if I could have a technical discussion on any topic in Hindi as fluently as I can in English.

Let us get back to Sen. The first thing he said in reply to my question was that such a discussion did not apply to him directly because English was, in fact, a 4th language to him (although he is obviously capable of conversing perfectly in English); he had learnt Bengali, Sanskrit, Hindi and then English, in that order. He mentioned then about how his Bharat Ratna was criticized by one Swapan Dasgupta because of him being a 'westernized indian'. (Honestly, Swapan is a pretty decent political journalist and he has fairly reasonable opinions so I was pretty shocked that he had written in such a way about Sen.) He told us that he sent a telegram (or mail, was it?) to Swapan inviting him to join him for a conversation about how Indian he was or wasn't, with the only requirement being that they speak exclusively in Sanskrit for the full hour they meet. 

He then came to answer my original question in a way that wasn't very satisfactory, to me at least. He said that he thought that we aren't doing enough to protect Indian languages, but he wasn't sure of how it could be fixed, because he felt that languages are bound to over-power other languages. At this point, I asked, "do you think it would be good to encourage schools in India to at least have the medium of education, up until high school, in the native language?". At this point, and I wouldn't say I did not expect it, a person came in strongly with,"Are you serious? That's just horrible". And I thought, well, would you believe, how insane of me to think that a country should encourage schools to at least keep primary and secondary instruction in the native language of the kids. And they added,"you know, the Germans who come here have such trouble learning the English words". For one, this is simply not true, and second, this is a classic example of misplaced priorities---does this person really think that a whole country's language needs should be tailored to those few who travel abroad to seek education? I understand that English is important, but how can we let our language rot to the extent where parents don't even want their kids to study in "Hindi-medium" schools at the primary level! 

This is also a matter of class-bias, as Sen also mentioned, and this is what upsets me. Do these people not appreciate that poor kids who do not have parents already well-versed in English cannot go to such `English-medium' schools as the rest of us and that this creates such a segregated class-obsessed society? Did they ever think if learning basic logic (and subtraction/addition and such) in a language that is foreign to you could hamper the development of young children, or that they may be put off of education early on by the learning curve of reading everything in a foreign language? It was no surprise to me that the person who raised the objection so strongly to my suggestion was a girl; I cannot help but generalize in this matter. English has become the language of the middle and upper classes in India and everyone else wants to see themselves rise up the social ladder by learning English. Women especially use English as a way to weed out men---if a guy doesn't know English well, he's obviously 'unparh, gavaar' (uneducated, illiterate); no matter that most of these women themselves speak a horribly mangled version of the English language. But let us also ask why organizations like Vogue India think that an ad promoting feminism should be made exclusively in English---are the poor women (and men!) in the villages of India not meant to be part of this changing India?

So, as I said, the reaction to my suggestion was entirely expected. I could see "hindu male-chauvinistic pig" flash in this person's eyes right away when I put up the suggestion. Sen was more welcoming of the suggestion, and reminded us that he completed all his education in Bengali and that he could teach me all of economics in Bengali if I wanted him to. He said that no matter how well he came to understand English, Bengali poetry always spoke to him at a level no other language could. At this moment, I told him that I enjoy Urdu poetry very much and, personally, for me it would be very sad if our generations to come lost this language. (Lo and behold, I could see this same girl bobble her head sideways and let out a slight, "oh", and suddenly I felt as if I was relieved of my impolite `hindu-ness', but certainly not the male-chauvinist tag. And of course, I could care less.) Sen said my point about Urdu and its incessant cleansing off of Persian words in India was well-taken. Sen ended by saying that one cannot really control the fate of languages, which I conceded was possibly the harsh truth everyone has to accept. 

Indeed, languages have always overpowered other languages. Let's keep in mind that Khadi-Boli, the language of Western U.P. was first mixed with Persian to form Hindi (or then, Hindustani) when Amir Khusrow tried to compose poetry that would appeal to both the locals and the Mughal rulers. Indeed, there is still a very rich tradition of Persian poetry called the Hindi school of poetry which is supposed to be amongst the most articulate and abstract traditions in Persian poetry; many Iranian friends of mine have told me about this. In some sense, in those days, Persian words fed into and replaced the Sanskrit-based words of Khadi-Boli. Today, `Hindi words' are being replaced by English words. I'm not against this, but what I would like is for someone to set up an institution like "Oxford's english dictionary" that keeps track of these changes in a professional way.

Note that I also do not mind re-introduction of Sanskrit words into Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani---anything that enriches the culture and background of a language is a plus for me. In the same spirit, I dislike the removal of Persian words from Hindi. This happens in mild but very insidious ways in India. For instance, in school we were made to read the Hindi novel, "Suraj ka Saatva Ghoda" (which, for what it's worth, is an excellent choice; it takes a very interesting approach to discussing society and marxist socialism---through the eyes of a man who becomes affectionate with three women of different backgrounds at different stages of his life), but not Prem-chand's "Shatranj ke Khiladi", for instance, as my parents' and grand-parents' generation had read---the reason being Prem-chand used Persian-origin words in Hindi far too freely for the liking of the modern Indian state. 

It is not just Hindi, though. Take Punjabi, for instance. The typical reaction to someone speaking in Punjabi amongst Punjabis is `pendu' (punjabi slang for villager). I could not help but laugh when a Pakistani-punjabi girl told me that they use exactly the same word for exactly the same purpose in Pakistan. (Note, I do not care so much for Punjabi, because, as far as I know, the last association I have to Punjab/Haryana is through my mom's grand-parents who had factories there; my grandmother was born in Lahore, now capital of Pakistani Punjab. Although, I am told that Agarwal, or Agrawal more precisely implies a person from Agroha, a city in the undivided British-Punjab.)

But coming back to Hindi, I think it deserves more institutional support, and I think these things can be done. One thing that I feel will strongly help Hindi survive is if we switch from the Devnagari script (which is a great script in its own right, as discussed below) to the latin script. We can't change keyboards, and we can't change the internet and Latin alphabets are here to stay. I think we must adopt them if we want Hindi to survive.

OK, enough of my thoughts on language. After we moved on from this topic, the conversation got dirty and nosedived into a territory that I would have liked to simply avoid. Someone asked Sen about his thoughts on the current BJP government and then Sen started (although I have noticed that he has softened up to Modi recently)... and went on for a bit. I've realized I simply do not enjoy discussions on politics at this surface-level anymore. There is a simple realization in my mind that none of the bickering over political parties does anything to address the real problems people face in India. And so to feel so agitatedly about something like this just annoys me. 

I will remark though that Sen's criticism of the BJP and RSS also puzzles me because when I read his books, it seems to me like he's made of the same material as any educated BJP supporter is made of. He cares about his lingual (both Bengali and also Sanskrit) and religious identity (he calls himself an atheist-hindu, of the Lokayata school); at least, he is not ready to disown them like many other people. You read his texts and he draws so heavily from Hindu philosophy. For instance, in The idea of justice, which I recently started reading again diligently, he tries to bring to a European audience, a lot of discourse that already exists in Sanskirt on the topic of justice. He believes that the European Enlightenment focussed far too heavily on the notions of just institutions/social contracts without discussing the implications and comparative benefits of these philosophies and he believes that a relevant discussion on this originates in the sanskrit text manu-smriti. [He also comments on Gita as being a text that tries to discuss these two sides of the coin via a philosophical discourse between Arjun (the consequentialist) and Krishna (the deontologist) although he disagrees with the conclusion in the Gita which converges to Krishna's deontological view. Incidentally, the Gita's views on justice and correct moral action are almost directly adopted by Immanuel Kant/Rawls/Jean-Jacques Rosseau school of philosophers and this conclusion is what Sen disagrees with.]

Sen is also a whiny guy. But I understand where he comes from. It is not easy to live in a society where your heritage typically evokes only negative perception. For instance, he writes/whines "Kautilya, the ancient Indian writer on political strategy and political economy, has sometimes been described in the modern literature, when he has been noticed at all, as ‘the Indian Machiavelli’. This is unsurprising in some respects, since there are some similarities in their ideas on strategies and tactics (despite profound differences in many other – often more important – areas), but it is amusing that an Indian political analyst from the fourth century BC has to be introduced as a local version of an European writer born in the fifteenth century."

This whininess is not uncommon to Indians settled in the US. Just recently, when Manjul Bhargava (an Indian-origin American) won the Fields Medal, he made a point to comment on how, the Pythagoras theorem, the solution to quadratic equation, the Fibonacci series, general theory on recursion relations, a primitive form of the Gauss decomposition theorem etc. were all discovered and written down in detail in Sanskrit in 2nd century texts (by Aryabhatta, Hemachandra and others), before they were discussed by Europeans. He made a point to talk about how Sanskrit, the origin of all Indo-European languages still has the most scientific way of organizing the alphabet among all languages---on the basis of where the sound comes from in your throat, stress, etc. 

I must admit, I occasionally find myself being bothered by these things. For instance, when I read about how surgery was invented in some French or Greek or god-knows-what place. I think, why do these people ignore that there's a Sanskrit text from 6th century BC called the Sushruta Samhita that has this---"Sushruta Samhita, in its extant form, in 184 chapters contains descriptions of 1,120 illnesses, 700 medicinal plants, 64 preparations from mineral sources and 57 preparations based on animal sources. The text discusses surgical techniques of making incisions, probing, extraction of foreign bodies, alkali and thermal cauterization, tooth extraction, excisions, and trocars for draining abscess, draining hydrocele and ascitic fluid, the removal of the prostate gland, urethral stricture dilatation...."

Indeed, if one looks away for a moment from the modern mess, an explosive cocktail of poverty and over-population that is India (a lot of which is down to a millennium of occupation by Persians and then the British; the Persians stagnated Indian science but contributed handsomely to art and culture and also adopted the land of India as their own; the British, well, they simply plundered), how can one not expect a land with 4000+ years of documented history of being under one civilization after the other (and much older, if you count the Harappa civilization) not have such a body of works that could benefit human thought? Perhaps the greatest reason for this lack of familiarity of non-Western texts amongst Western society, and in Western education, is just that---a lack of familiarity. 

Sometimes, I feel it is easier to think of oneself as simply a citizen of the world, and a specimen of humanity, because life is certainly somewhat short to waste pondering over such triflings and moreover, what does whining precisely achieve? Does it help the poor kid on the street in India who has nothing to eat? That is bothersome. That is worry. That must be changed. My botherations are fairly inane, I must admit, and some are simply self-inflicted. Perhaps my special attachment to identity is born out of the fact that I traveled so much as a child and it made me question identity more than others. I don't know. 

But even when one tries to shed the baggage of language and identity, there are times, when one is reminded that considering oneself a citizen of the world is not always possible. For instance, when I returned from Italy last time (a place I absolutely enjoyed, I have to say, I could go there again and again), after a harrowing flying experience complete with delays and what not, and wanting to simply reach a place I could call home, I was met at the New York JFK airport by a border security guard who asked,"Why does Harvard hire people like you? What can you do that an American cannot?". My helplessness (owing to the fact that he could, yet, deny me entry into America) made me respond with,"I'm not sure" and look away. It upsets you a little, but then you remind yourself of the countless-many good people who do not think in such a way at all and you move on. 

Language and identity are difficult things, but, when we can, we must shed this unnecessary baggage, and so that we can move on, as we are, and only as we are, and keep in mind the things that truly matter.