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By Darryl D'Monte Is multiculturalism different from pluralism? Can an individual have several different identities at the same time, none of them conflicting? These questions are at the core of Amartya Sen's new book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny
Attending the second of two book releases where Professor Amartya Sen was present, in Delhi last month, I was reminded of a scene from the film based on Hanif Kureishi’s vitriolic screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette. Saeed Jaffrey has employed a white bouncer to evict some down-and-out West Indian ‘dread-locked’ tenants from the premises he owns. “It doesn’t look good for a Paki to be doing this, does it,” asks a menacing Daniel Day-Lewis, surveying the goods belonging to delinquent black tenants that he has just flung on the road outside. “I’m a landlord,” replies Jaffrey quizzically, “not a professional Pakistani.” The remark evokes Sen’s thesis in his own new book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Allen Lane, Penguin), which was the second to be released. As he said: “There are a great variety of identities to which we simultaneously belong. I can be, at the same time, an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American (he is at Harvard) or British resident (he was Master of Trinity College in Cambridge), an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a non-religious lifestyle; from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin, and a non-believer in the after-life.” At various times one is a different being, depending on the circumstances and the environment. At first glance, this would seem too self-evident to bear repetition, let alone provocation for an entire 215-page book. But the more one thinks about it, the more the all-encompassing truth of this assertion becomes apparent. Speaking for myself, I was often asked by fellow Indian students in England what I was. I remember telling a Bengali that I was an Indian Christian, which is probably the correct census classification. But this drew a derisive hoot of laughter. I am commonly mistaken for a Goan -- earlier I used to be taken for an Anglo-Indian as well, but that tribe has decreased -- and I have to painstakingly explain that I belong to a minuscule minority known as East Indians. This is an anomaly if ever there was one, since we inhabit the west coast. Converted by the Portuguese to Christianity, as were others along the coast, the British East India Company found the community more amenable to their worldview and bestowed minor favours on it, which is how we derived this title. At the same time, I have no doubt that in many senses, and I speak for all Muslims too, “we are all Hindus” in this country, since we cannot escape being influenced by the culture of the majority. Sen began his talk by referring to an amusing incident when he was once interrogated by someone from British Immigration at Heathrow. Puzzled by his residential address, which stated ‘Master of Trinity College’, he asked the genial academic whether he was a friend of the Master (presumably too polite to ask whether he was his servant!). Sen replied in the affirmative, adding that he knew him rather well and confiding in us that he often indulged in long conversations with himself… (one is immediately reminded of the story of Oscar Wilde who, when asked by British Customs whether he had anything to declare, replied: “Only my genius!”). Sen has taken a diversion from his ongoing academic inquiries to write these two recent books, the earlier one being The Argumentative Indian, which Thomas Abraham, the Penguin editor, mentioned had sold an amazing 57,000 copies in a short period. Has the great Indian middle class started reading, or is it his Nobel Prize, or both? Later this year, Harvard University Press will publish Sen’s book on the Theory of Justice, which also touches on the Gujarat riots. There are two streams in this theory: the first involves negotiation, as enunciated by Kant, the other calls for arbitration, as argued by Adam Smith. Not that his academic pursuits could ever be too divorced from his concerns about communal conflagrations in this country and others. As a child, Sen saw riots firsthand (presumably in Dhaka) when a Muslim was killed by his Hindu neighbours. That would surely have coloured anyone’s views for the rest of his life, as it did Sen’s. He questioned his father as to why perfectly ordinary neighbours took their fellow citizens’ lives. Some six decades later, Sen attributes people’s communalism to “the miniaturisation of people,” where other cultures are seen -- a la Samuel Huntington -- as “the clash of civilisations”. As a way out of such stereotypes today it is necessary to discuss such feelings and attitudes, not only to settle issues but to understand why people believe the way they do. Sen’s current concern is “the critical nature of choice”. He distinguishes ‘multiculturalism’, of the Tony Blair variety, from ‘plurality’. He likens the former to ships at sea, which are not anchored anywhere in particular but do the rounds of different and varied ports, without necessarily imbibing anything of the mores of the people there. My friend, the writer Farrukh Dhondy, was once Channel 4 TV’s editor for multi-cultural programmes in London. The British have started separate schools for different religions, but, to Sen’s mind, this strikes at the very purpose of education, which is to make children aware of the choices they possess in life. (There could be a fruitful exchange between Sen the economist and his alter ego, the philosopher, on this score.) He often commends Emperor Akbar as embodying the alternative worldview, which was to enter into a dialogue and embrace ‘the other’, as early as the 16th century. Even in Akbar’s era there was an atheist tradition that would militate against the contemporary tendency to classify someone by the religion she/he was born into. In his overview ‘Cultural liberty in today’s diverse world’ for the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report in 2004, Sen reminded us that: “Cultural liberty is a vital part of human development because being able to choose one’s identity -- who one is -- without losing the respect of others or being excluded from other choices is important in leading a full life. People want to practise their religion openly, to speak their language, to celebrate their ethnic or religious heritage without fear of ridicule or punishment or diminished opportunity. People want the freedom to participate in society without having to slip off their chosen cultural moorings. It is a simple idea, but profoundly unsettling.” He warned then of “a new wave of cultural determinism” which saw non-Western (read Islamic) civilisations as threatening. France has been trying to force-feed integration by banning all forms of religious identity in schools, like children wearing headscarves or, for that matter, crosses. Is such uniformity a good thing? He begged to disagree, pointing out how India and France contrast with each other. India has only five Hindu public holidays, four Muslim, two Christian, one Buddhist, one Jain and one Sikh, in recognition of its diversity. France celebrates 11 holidays, of which five are non-religious and the remaining six are Christian, even though 7% of the population is Muslim and 1% Jewish. Is it any wonder that France is witnessing repeated communal flare-ups?
Secularism doesn’t amount to excluding religion from public life, but treating all religions as equal, as Akbar did. Gandhi himself was an exemplar of the respect for plurality. Sen noted Gandhi’s “farsighted refusal to see a nation as a federation of religions and communities,” although he himself was deeply religious. He practised “non-sectarian and secular politics, while Jinnah focused on religious divisions in politics in terms of the different communities of Muslims and Hindus, but wasn’t very religious himself.” It is often remarked how Jinnah didn’t think twice about drinking, eating pork and marrying a Parsi. Gandhi also resented, according to Sen, the British depiction of him as someone who only represented the upper class Hindu. Instead, Gandhi talked of concern for the “dumb, toiling, semi-starving Indians,” although, in all fairness, it was probably true that his class interests coincided more with industrialists and big landlords than the masses. Time and again, Gandhi would douse the flames of mass rebellion against the colonial power by calling off agitations, including in Ahmedabad’s textile mills, and by peasants in the countryside. In his talk, Sen also remarked how the stereotype of India being a male chauvinist society was not borne out by fact. As early as 1925 -- a full half-century before Margaret Thatcher -- Sarojini Naidu was elected Congress president. As an aside, he noted, in that seminal meeting consisting of British progressives and Indian nationalists the only poet in the gathering was a woman. One recalls Gandhi’s oft-quoted reply, when asked by a Briton what he thought of Western civilisation. “I think it’s a good idea,” the sage replied! Sen’s interlocutors at the book release were N Ram, editor of The Hindu and Najam Sethi, editor of The Friday Times in Pakistan. The latter referred to how he had got into trouble in his country over a speech he had made in India in 1999; very many Indians had pressed for his release from custody. Taking his cue from the amiable professor, he questioned the tendency in India to see Pakistanis as possessing a singular identity. The founding fathers of his country had thought that propagating a single identity would bind the country together, but it split in two in 24 years -- the consequence of economic and cultural oppression, not religion. In Britain, after the bombings on 7/7, one could ask Muslims in that country who they are: Britons, Muslims or Pakistanis? Britons have a singular view on entitlements due to every citizen, like welfare, etc, which are not based on religious denomination. Sen observed that the right to vote in Britain was not restricted to citizenship but to anyone who was a subject of the Queen, which included residents who belonged to the Commonwealth -- from the West Indies, West Africa, South Asia and Australia. A few days earlier, Sen attended the release of Capabilities, Freedom and Equality: Amartya Sen’s Work from a Gender Perspective (OUP), edited by Bina Agarwal, Jane Humphries and Ingrid Robeyns. Present in Delhi to debate -- or more properly deliberate -- with Sen was his frequent collaborator Martha Nussbaum, who teaches law and ethics at Chicago University. Dr Agarwal described her as a “public intellectual, who is written about as much as she has written”. She endorses with Sen the capability approach towards empowering societies, the freedom to do what people value, which reinforces his concept of cultural plurality. In this context, she stresses citizenship with equal rights. I have been following Bina Agarwal’s work ever since she published Cold Hearths & Barren Slopes: The Woodfuel Crisis in the Third World (Allied, 1986). Later, she published A Field of Their Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 1994). What environmental journalists like Anil Agarwal (no relation) first focused on has been given academic rigour by her studies on the role of women in development. In particular, the emphasis in the second book on the importance of wresting the right of women to inherit farmland makes a significant difference in expanding the freedom of choice for this other half. The two-way conversation between Sen and Nussbaum, with minimal interventions from Agarwal, made for a lively exchange on gender in development. One of the discussants likened the plight of women to someone running a race with one leg tied. And, as far as people’s representatives in government were concerned, Sen cited how only 8% of members of both houses comprised women in the US, while India had conceded a third of all panchayat seats to women and was contemplating the same in parliament. In many top lawyers’ firms in the US, employees were prohibited from having children! In Sweden, by empowerment rather than by reservation, some 40% of the cabinet consists of women. Nussbaum, who is a frequent traveller to India, mentioned how she had visited an NGO called Aditi, in Bihar, which demonstrated to villagers how it was not undignified for men to do housework -- surely a revolutionary change in patriarchal India! InfoChange News & Features, April 2006
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