Second thoughts on The Argumentative Indian

I had thought that I would find much to dissect, discuss and disagree with in the remaining part of the book. No such luck. The rest of the book is a meandering look at whatever seems to catch Mr. Sen's fancy. His love for Tagore and Ray are obvious and explicitly stated. Nest he goes into an analysis of what's wrong with India, with particular regard to its inequalities, whether related to gender, caste or class. I do agree with most of what he says there, but then he doesn't say anything path-breaking either. Nothing I didn't already know or suspect. How class inequalities impact every other cause of social, economic, and political inequity is something, however, I had not considered before. It makes sense, of course, as he points out when discussing communal riots across India in the last half century and more. He makes the very valid and I'm sure, underappreciated point that while most victims belonged to quite different communities, they belonged to the same class, the underprivileged and deprived. His talk on gender inequalities did not reveal anything new to me. I've always held that female empowerment has to go way beyond the freedom to get gainful employment outside the home. Education and exposure to the world to open up her mind to the possibilities there are out there are vital to make the woman an effective agent of change in the family and society. One thing I didn't know was that South-east Asian countries and China follow the same demographic trends as India with regards to preference for male progeny and the resulting skewing of the sex ratio and other indices of female health and well-being. I had assumed that with increased industrialization and a higher standard of living, those societies would have followed the Western trends towards a higher proportion of females at all age points. It seems that social ideas and practices that plague India are the same that affect these countries too. Makes you wonder then, why this male preference arises in Asian countries in the first place. As my wife pointed out, dowry as a modern institution prevails mostly in India and as far as we know, not in SE Asia. But I think, the malaise goes deeper than simple financial outlay. Asian countries are still preponderantly patriarchal. Male domination leads to the desire for male offspring. In the West, for a number of reasons (not least the dire shortage of males in the workforce post the two World Wars), females have gained a better foothold in the workplace and the society at large. Of course, the stress on education in the west over the last couple of centuries has helped to no small extent. When the opportunity arose in the 1910s, there were a lot of educated, willing women joining the workforce in various capacities. The trend got strengthened in the Second World War, and women's lib has never looked back since. I feel that in India and other Asian countries, this necessity never arose and most Indians still look upon the idea of women working as a matter of economic necessity rather than an essential part of their life experience and personality. As a result maybe, the ideas of women empowerment that arose with education and employment have not yet taken root here. Of course, Sen does not go into the depth of this question, and rightly so, because this would be a book in itself.

I still have some 50 odd pages to go, but I don't think I shall be really impressed by anything in the pages to come. I had kept my expectations deliberately low while buying this book because I have only too often endured the disappointment of dashed hopes, and I am thankful to say that I have not been misplaced in my assumption this time. By no means unreadable, but by the same measure, not a masterpiece either.

The Argumentative Indian

Have started reading Amartya Sen's 'The Argumentative Indian'. Although I've only just begun the book and have only read 50 odd pages, I have come across passages where I felt the need to annotate the margins with my own thoughts about the point being raised by the author. I have done that, infrequently, in the past but always felt like I was in some way vandalizing the book. At other times there wasn't enough space in the margins and I wonder if they could print such books with ample space for you to jot down your own thoughts on the page. In this case since I am reading the book during my daily commute, penning on the margins isn't advisable. I remember as a young teenager when I took my diary along with me on my trip to Shimla with friends. I tried writing my thoughts on the bus and didn't get down more than a few lines. It was so shaky and uncomfortable that I gave up the idea immediately. So with this book I plan to put my thoughts about what Sen has written not on paper but on my laptop instead. Waiting till I finish the book would entail a very long wait and I would forget half of what I had thought of saying by then.

The first two chapters I found somewhat enlightening though not particularly noteworthy. He talks about how we have a long history of dialogue, discussion and toleration of dissent in India, even when it comes to religion. Most of it I knew already, but the story of the sage Javali and how he rebukes Rama for his actions was new.

I found myself disagreeing with parts of his third chapter, where he talks about the BJP and Hindutva. The book was written before the last general elections of course, at a time when the Congress had just regained power after defeating the BJP. In one sentence he seems to imply that the parties allied to the BJP, the 'secular' ones like the AIADMK, the Trinamool, and the TDP fared badly because of their association with the BJP. he doesn't follow it up but just mentions it and walks away. "The voters seem to have been particularly harsh on most of the secular collaborators of the BJP." to quote him. I think this is a misinterpretation of voting trends. Tamil Nadu typically votes overwhelmingly for one party in an election only to shift entirely to the opposite end the next time round. The DMK and the AIADMK have both been alternately swept into power and swept aside in an equally convincing manner. This happened before anyone allied with the BJP and will happen again. The TDP lost because, by popular consesus, Chandrababu Naidu was seen as having focussed all his energies on the Andhra capital and broadly ignoring the vast hinterland, especially the Telangana region (which includes Hyderabad). Agriculture was hit very badly and farmer suicides were in all the news. The Trinamool I won't hazard a guess about since I don't know that much about it but the party has come into prominence only lately following the Singur agitation and other such events. Only after gaining mileage from these has it built itself as a credible alternative capable of defeating the left parties who've held sway in Bengal for over three decades now. So what I want to say is that looking at all this I don't think it was association with the BJP that cot these 'secular' parties their vote share or their seats. In fact, the BJP in power was a much milder version of the virulent ultra-right party that we see now. They were on their 'best boy' behaviour in a manner of speaking. Of course, I might have simply misinterpreted what Sen wrote and maybe he didn't mean it this way; it does seem unlikely I did though, given his left leanings.