WRITTEN with incredible brevity, the autobiography of the economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Home in the World: A Memoir, published by Allen Lane in July 2021, is a linear and an extraordinary storyline of his universal life journey of the first 30 years (1933-1963).
His crisp, simple, yet penetrating use of English is extraordinary given that Sen says English is only his third language after his mother tongue of Bengali and India's ancient classical language, Sanskrit.
Sen's narrative starts with the astute opening statement "… remembering the past, even from long ago can also be enjoyable, bringing one back to happy events, engaging reflections and challenging dilemmas".
Thus, the mental recapitulation and narration of his life journey and the exceptional achievements made during Sen's first 30 years in multiple "homes" constitute an unusual and fascinating life voyage.
The memoirs recount his amazing early achievements despite the devastating handicap he had — he'd been diagnosed with cancer at the age of 18. Sen's initial intellectual metamorphosis was largely shaped through his immediate and extended family and their wide circle of intimate friends; fellow students and teachers both at Santiniketan (Bengal) and Calcutta; as well as the fast-emerging Bengali intelligentsia, a community endowed with an insightful and critical knowledge of literature, philosophy, music and politics.
Sen also developed a strong and enduring bond, as he says, through a "broaden umbrella of love" with a wide circle of friends and engrossed himself in engaging intellectual conversation with some of them at Calcutta "bookshops, coffee houses, cinemas, theatres, musical, and academic gatherings".
Mentally, Sen was traumatised by two of the major events he experienced as a youth. Firstly, the 1943 Bengal Famine that scourged and devastated over two million human lives,; a famine triggered by Imperial Britain's inhuman war policy; and secondly, the horrors of post-Partition India, with its sectarian hostility and riots. All these experiences and the teaching of the Buddha went on to deeply influence as well as enrich and mature Sen intellectually, philosophically, and morally earlier in life.
FORMATIVE YEARS
Sen was born in 1933 in Santiniketan(Bengal), in the household of his maternal grandparents, then on the periphery of Imperial Britain. Santiniketan was the home base, as well as the cultural, philosophical, literary, and intellectual Mecca of India's foremost nationalist poet and the first Indian Nobel laureate in Literature, Rabindranath Tagore.
Sen's own maternal grandfather, Kshiti Mohan, taught, researched and closely collaborated with Tagore at Santiniketan. The author of the popular Penguin book on Hinduism was both his mentor and a great influence on his early upbringing.
Sen was raised and educated until his first undergraduate degree in economics in the midst of the vibrant and diverse intelligentsia of Dhaka (now capital of Bangladesh), Mandalay (Burma, now Myanmar), Santiniketan and Calcutta (now Kolkata).
For Sen, in Santiniketan, schooling took place in a progressive and co-educational system without walls and outdoor classes. He says it "was fun in a way he had never imagined a school could be. There was so much freedom in deciding what to do, so many intellectual classmates to chat with, so many friendly teachers to approach to ask questions unrelated to the curriculum, and most importantly, so little enforced discipline with complete absence of any form of harsh punishment."
He completed his undergraduate degree in economics with distinction at colonial India's prestigious Presidency College of Calcutta, with the other two Presidency Colleges being at Madras (Chennai) and Bombay (Mumbai).
These elite and exclusive colleges were established following the famous 1835 article Minutes on Education by Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), a British parliamentarian and Legal Member of the Council of India to educate the upper echelon of Indian society to be "Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in person, in morals, and in intellect."
By the time Sen graduated from the Presidency College, he was deeply rooted and immersed in both India's and Bengal's rich indigenous culture and tradition in philosophy, which was spearheaded by Tagore, and the close circle of Bengali intelligentsia, as well as an initial exposure to the Eurocentric intellectual and academic foundations in economics, politics, philosophy, mathematics, and physics.
Sen, by then a staunch democrat and atheist in his persuasion, arrived in 1953 at Cambridge's renowned Trinity College to further pursue his study in economics. Trinity College was an institution where world renowned luminaries like Isaac Newton, Jawaharlal Nehru, Ramanujam, and Francis Bacon preceded him.
LIFE IN CAMBRIDGE
At Cambridge, both his burgeoning academic character, his gregarious intellectual curiosity and his cultivation of a wide circle of social and intellectual friends from the Indian sub-continent and the wider world, were to be the main contributors to his continued remarkable transformation and splendid achievements by his mid-20s.
With some of his South Asian and international contemporaries at Cambridge, Sen was to establish a lifelong friendship. In a few cases, the combination of lifelong friendship and affection developed into "a shared commitment that extended his reach in economic thinking".
On the academic front, Sen encountered quickly raging battle lines drawn among Cambridge economist. The contest was between the mainstream neo-classical conservatives and the marginally left-wing "neo-Keynesian" economists. The exception was Maurice Dobb, the distinguished Marxist economic historian and member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Before coming to Cambridge, Sen was already familiar with Dobb's classic 1938 study on the Political Economy and Capitalism with its focus on Marx's argument around labour as a key factor of production, as well as the book's theorisation of the category of "objective illusion" as the fundamental reason for the "deceptive failure of the workers in an unequal society that demonstrated the nature of their exploitation".
The other famous Cambridge economist whose work Sen was familiar with before arriving at Trinity was that of Joan Robinson's The Economics of Imperfect Competition. It was the text every undergraduate in economics had to read in the 1940s to the 1960s.
The first useful advice Sen received at Cambridge was from the renowned economist and director of studies, Piero Sraffa, (author of the book Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities), that he had to navigate through "a minefield of slogans in Cambridge economics".
However, Sen found his teachers at Trinity College to be very fine economists; each one original and inspiring in their own distinctive ways, despite not agreeing with each other. No wonder economics still continues to be a nebulous "science", and when England's Queen Elizabeth visited the London School of Economics in 2008, one of the world's Mecca of economics, and asked why no professors had anticipated the financial crisis, none of them had an answer.
Not surprisingly, Sen, together with his Bangladesh contemporary at Cambridge, Mahbub ul Haq (who in 1990 launched the pioneering Human Development Report), "grumbled about mainstream economists' lack of interest in the lives of human beings".
NAVIGATING THROUGH THE MINEFIELD
Apart from being a world-renowned elite university, Cambridge was then also a bastion of racism and imperialistic intellectualism. Enoch Powell, one of the foremost purveyors of British racism, was an alumnus of Trinity College, the college Sen was enrolled in.
Powell gained notoriety through his highly evocative speech in 1968 — River of Blood — at the British Parliament. Juxtaposed into a totally different racial, social, and cultural milieu, Sen encountered his first brush with racism.
During his first year at Trinity College, Sen had to lodge with an English landlady who'd never met a non-white person before except for seeing them in the train and on the street. Sen wrote that his landlady, "Mrs Hanger's fear of coloured people had some rational basis based on her understanding of science."
She wondered if the colour of his skin might come off in the bath. Despite all the odds students from the colonies faced in Britain then and now, Sen's brilliance and his well-endowed cross-cultural academic talents were to be the main driving force behind his extraordinary achievements over the next decade, both at Cambridge and beyond.
At Cambridge, he embarked on an impressive academic career by skilfully navigating through the minefield of Cambridge economic slogans and completing his two-year undergraduate degree, before going on to complete his doctoral thesis on the The Choice of Techniques (social choice theory) in two years.
A year ahead of Cambridge's three-year programme, his outstanding academic achievements won him a Prize Fellowship at Trinity followed by a lectureship and a position as a staff fellow. Thus, Sen ended up staying at Cambridge for a period of 10 years (1953-1963).
During this 10-year sojourn, Sen went to Calcutta to establish the Department of Economics at the newly established Jadavpur University, before subsequently becoming a professor at the Delhi School of Economics and to MIT to teach a joint course with one of the foremost gurus of mathematical and neoliberal economics, as well as the author of the premier textbook Economics since 1948, Paul Samuelson, a Nobel laureate too.
While remaining at Trinity College, Sen contributed important and well-received papers on social choice theory — essentially an analysis of how individual preferences are combined in order to reach a collective decision.
PRESTIGE AND LEGACY
Even though he left Trinity college in 1963, it remained his base whenever he returned to Cambridge. However, 45 years later, Sen, still an Indian citizen, was to return to Trinity College as the first Asian to be bestowed the honour of the prestigious position of Master of Trinity College, Cambridge by the Queen of England.
Sen's main thrust in economics has, and continues to, revolve around the critical areas of social spending, social justice, and human capability building, and in doing so, contending with the neo-liberal model of deregulation, private enterprise and free market economics.
The latter model is being peddled by the dominant international aid agencies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) who coerce many countries of the global south to emulate the model as the only viable development dogma and panacea for their economic growth and long-term prosperity. A model that is being emulated by the current Narendra Modi government of India. For Sen, this neo-liberal and free market ideology is unsustainable and unjust.
Before his retirement, Viswanathan Selvaratnam taught at the University of Malaya and briefly at the National University of Singapore as well as served as a Higher Education Specialist at the World Bank in Washington, DC.
Home in the World: A Memoir
Author: Amartya Sen
Published by: Allen Lane
Pages: 322
Where available: MPH, Kinokuniya, Amazon (RM145).