Book Review
Nobel Laureate Identifies Areas of Gender Inequality in India
By Kulamarva Balakrishna
The Argumentative Indian
Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity
By Amartya Sen
356 pages; Allen Lane, an impint of Penguin Books
Here is a collection of 16 essays on universal Indian and his continuing contribution to world civilization by Amartya Sen, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. In these essays, Prof. Sen gives an insightful analysis of Indians’ global give and take and his inclusiveness from the earliest of times.
Cutting through the algae of myth that Indians were steeped in superstitions and not used to rational thinking, Dr. Sen shows how Indians led great rational and analytical thinking throughout history and made the world richer. India is not all godmen and gurus, he says. It was a cradle of democracy and pluralism, with a long tradition of lively intellectual exchanges between believers, non-believers, skeptics and even atheists.
Among those Sen covers in the book are Mahavira and the Buddha, the founders, respectively, of Jainism and Buddhism, and atheists like Lokayatas and Charvakas. As we all know, both Mahavira and the Buddha are revered as gods, attracting ritualistic homage, by their followers. This practice may have been the source of idol worship among Hindus.
Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and other Indian philosophers saw India's diversity of peoples and religions as its strength. Prof. Sen, likewise, contends that the source of India’s unity, and what gives that unity a profound meaning, is its diversity, even though at times it has resulted in divisiveness on ethnic, racial and gender lines. He dispels the widely held notion of Indianness being a byproduct of British rule and argues that it has been in existence since long before the British Raj. According to him, Indianness and India’s unity are the outcome of its diversity.
The 16 essays in the book are arranged in quartets. There are four parts and each part has four essays. Part One is titled “Voice and Heterodoxy,” Part Two, “Culture and Communication,” Part Three, “Politics and Protest,” and Part Four, “Reason and Identity.” The author is a strong advocate of social, economic and political justice for India. His advocacy is more or less a rephrasing of what is declared in the preamble to the Indian Constitution. His message is similar to what the late V.K. Krishna Menon conveyed to the world half a century ago. But unlike Mr. Menon, who was a fiery and passionate politician, Prof. Sen is a cool, detached academic. He lets facts speak for themselves. Through the 16 essays in the book, he champions the cause of justice for one and all in society, especially those in the developing world. It was for that championing that he won the Nobel Prize.
Drawing on the experience of U.S. food aid to India under Public Law 480 some fifty years ago, he stresses the need for creating conditions for real self-help. He points out how the Grameen Bank (which means the village bank) of Bangladesh released thousands of poor village women of that impoverished country from bondage. The bank was “founded [in 1983] on the principle of trust and solidarity” by Prof. Muhammad Yunus, an American-educated economics professor from the University of Chittagong. It started its activity in a very modest way by distributing loans amounting to the equivalent of 25 U.S. dollars of Dr. Yunus’s own money among 42 basket-weaving women. It has now grown into a mammoth institution, with 1,084 branches and 12,500 employees, serving 2.1 million borrowers in 37,000 villages. Of the borrowers, 94% are women. Amartya Sen recommends the Grameen Bank-type of initiatives for India.
Post-PL480 agricultural revolution in India resulted in food-grain reserve to the tune of 80 million tons. The reserve that lay in the warehouses of the Food Corporation of India cost the country heavily in support prices to farmers, huge administrative expenses, waste, damage and leaks, and corruption. The cost was comparable to that of accumulated stocks of opiates with no legal takers. It also caused an explosion of black money and disruption of law and order. Besides, with no purchasing power generated among weaker sections of society, the advantage of food build-up did not help much in fighting famine.
A survey conducted in the 1980s by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Luxemburg, under the leadership of Dr. Kirit Parekh, had concluded that the world had enough food reserves but those reserves had not eradicated hunger. Another conclusion of the survey was that for food reserves to benefit the hungry, there should be parallel programs for employment generation, which in turn would create additional purchasing power. To throw in an aside, I had brought the thousand-odd-page report of the survey and its conclusions to the attention of India’s policy makers, through a special article in The Economic Times, Bombay. But the policy makers of the time had other priorities, as do those of today.
At the time, India exported several million tons of food-grains to Vietnam and the Soviet Union, leaving India's own poor hungry. Even today, as Prof. Sen points out, there are no effective programs to take full advantage of the reserves and make their distribution cost-effective. However, the midday meal program for school children, introduced lately, has had a positive effect. But that’s not enough, he hastens to add.
In 11 of his earlier books, which won him the Nobel Prize, Prof. Sen told developing countries what they should do to improve the well-being of their people. The Argumentative Indian can be called a summing up of policy-related issues, especially those relevant to Indian realities. A key issue he tackles in the book is gender inequality. He identifies six areas of that inequality: survival inequality, natality inequality, unequal facilities, ownership inequality, unequal sharing of household benefits and chores, and domestic violence and physical victimization.
Femala Feticide
Discussing the decline in female-to-male ratio, the author points out the alarming nature of female feticide practiced in parts of India. Though law has been passed banning this sexually discriminatory abortion method, it is still resorted to in many parts of India, especially in the northern and western states, resulting in what he calls natality inequality. Female feticide has forced the states where it is more prevalent to import females from other parts of the country. The author avoids discussing its impact on the middleclass, even though it is this class, because of its easy access to modern technology, resorts to it more often than the poor class. One wonders how much dowry money these murderers are saving in this manner.
Prof. Sen also warns about "friendly fires" caused by policy measures aimed at countering class disadvantages. He stresses the need to constantly scrutinize the impact of public institutions and policies that have been created as anti-inequality devices. He cites the case of compulsory education of children, which India adopted as a state policy long ago. An investigation conducted by the Pratichi Trust, which was founded by Prof. Sen with his Nobel Prize money, revealed that the compulsory education policy has not met with much success among the lowest castes. Many children of these castes haven’t even completed elementary school education. The main reason, he says, is the difficulty in finding teachers willing to work among these castes. The problem is further worsened by the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
The author also contrasts India’s long tradition of tolerating diverse viewpoints and religious beliefs with the Hindutva ideology which gained currency in India during the Bharatiya Janata Party rule. The ideology that identifies Indian culture as Hindu culture reached its ridiculous level when some Hindu extremists tried to prevent the distribution and sale of Valentine Day greeting cards, even in cosmopolitan cities like Mumbai. The Hindutva zealots, the author says, ignores the fact that Indian culture and civilization has been vastly enriched by contributions made by all religions that flourished in the country. The flourishing of all religions itself is attributable to the tolerance of Hinduism toward diverse, even opposing, viewpoints and values.
The Argumentative Indian is a great book. It’s very readable, too.
(Kulamarva Balakrishna is a freelance journalist and social activist. He lives most of the year in India and part of it in Vienna. His social activities are conducted under the auspices of the International Centre for Social and Environmental Engineering, which he founded a few years ago at Bengre, Padubidri, Karnataka State, India.)
[Published on April 16, 2006]
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Reader's Response
Superb Review
Kulamarva Balakrishna's review of Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian is superb.
--Akhil Hussain, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
May 1, 2006