The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity (review)

It is now agreed that the voice from the third world is urgent and has a role to perform in the articulations of knowledge arising in European and American academies, as also within wider public discourse in the first world. Indeed, there is a commitment of which the increasing stress on cultural specificity within the disciplines of the arts and humanities is a principle symptom. It is, however, curious that the discourses of post-colonialism and cultural studies, where the concern with the third-world subject gained prominence and has been pursued with commitment, have inadvertently either polarized localisms and nativisms, or stressed dialogic engagement largely in relation to the colonial encounter. Consequently, we are left with a partial view of the complex global interactions embedded within the third world experience, which is neither homogenous, nor variegated in simple arithmetic terms. At a time when societies in the West are increasingly debating the scope of "multiculturalism," a whole historical tradition that we may encounter elsewhere, outside the West, which may serve to contribute in honing the notions of cultural interactions, is completely bypassed, depriving us of some necessary groundwork that has been usefully attempted, if not fully accomplished.

In Amartya Sen's new text, The Argumentative Indian, we encounter a very reasoned, incisive and critical posture that is the much-needed antidote, presenting before us the possibility for some historical corrections that will contribute in contending the third world on more provocative, interrogative and reflexive terms than interpretive or ascribed notions of, say, cultural hybridization, multiculturalism or cultural specificity would allow us. As the title suggests, the scope of Sen's text is the subcontinent that he evokes comprehensively from a decisive position. Sen's contention is that the dialectical or dialogic tradition is central to Indian thought; it can be traced to the earliest historical and philosophical Indian scriptures and texts and is sustained through the history of the subcontinent in response to crucial social, political and cultural stimuli at principal historical junctures.

Sen's work in the fields of social choice theory has often been commented upon as attending to deep philosophical crises. It is no surprise that Sen commences The Argumentative Indian evoking and appreciating the multiple and argumentative positionalities from the rather philosophically difficult territories of the Mahabharata and the Upanishads. Reminiscing the irresolvable moral debate between Krishna and Arjuna (at the cusp of the great war) that culminated in the discourse of the Bhagvad Gita, Sen then plots features of the Indian construction such as democracy and secularism, foregrounding the heterodox tradition and "reasoned skepticism" within Indian thought. He raises moments of cultural interactions, such as the medieval mystical poetic traditions of the Sufis and bhaktas, the historical ties of intellectual and theological exchange between India and China, right up to the most profound confrontation in recent Indian history, between the towering modern figures of Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

The dialogical imperative has, of course, been asserted in the Marxist tradition(s) of historicization in the subcontinent. What Sen's argument allows is the possibility to derive from that history, situating it in conversational terms: one, across disciplines be they political, economic or cultural; and, two, across the familiar first- and third-world categorizations, in the bargain disturbing our faith in those divisions as being neat or contained. In this measure Sen's scholarship assumes value not only within the Western academy, where it serves to situate third-world and subaltern subjectivity in historically competing terms; within the national context, too, it serves to depart from strict and narrow national agendas that assert nativism in rather limited terms. The philosophical and esoteric edge of his text complements the reason and rigor of the intercultural exchanges he presents. Strategically, however, Sen avoids slipping into idealist...