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From: Shiva Shankar <sshankar@cmi.ac.in>
Date: Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 8:44 PM
Subject: Amartya Sen's Imagined India
To:
Intellectual compromise of the best gives rise to the worst. Amartya Sen's sanitised, caste-blind perspective on social unfairness, Hinduism and Indian culture, despite the show of reason, eclecticism and inclusive sensibility, is a gross distortion of historical reality, and a classic example of the limitation - and danger - of elitist liberalism.
http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5211:amartya-sens-imagined-india&catid=127:post-ambedkar-leaders&Itemid=158
Amartya Sen's Imagined India
Braj Ranjan Mani
Amartya Sen is India's leading public thinker, an intellectual star at home and abroad. A guru of welfare economics, a Sanskritist and a scholar of Indian philosophy and culture, he is distinguished for his outstanding work on inequality, democracy and justice. His sensitivity to injustices of class, gender and ethnicity has made him write with passion and precision about the pains of social asymmetry and disadvantage. It is astonishing, though, that such a conscientious scholar who has built his career on researching social unfairness and exclusion has hardly ever engaged with caste and its consequences. Caste, for whatever reasons, fails to qualify as a worthy subject of his scholarly engagement. Of course, sometimes he names caste in the categories of inequalities but just in passing and in a manner which raises questions about his approach to the axis of hierarchy and oppression in India. Whenever he mentions caste, he shows a strange inclination to minimise its negative impact or significance by invoking the all-powerful and crushing asymmetry of class. It is surprising since Sen is no impassioned believer in class radicalism, Marxism or socialism; he is, in fact, contrary to popular perception, a career academic and (at least now) a neoliberal intellectual, though of an ultra-refined kind. (Sen is himself responsible for such a public misconception about his Marxist credentials. He, in fact, cultivated the self-image of some sort of a Marxist and a radical intellectual in the days when socialism not only held popular appeal but was also in academic vogue in India and abroad. This becomes clear when we learn that Sen's favourite philosophers, as he himself affirms now, have all along been the iconic liberals John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, not Karl Marx who comes poor third in his list of thinkers who have influenced him the most.)
... ...
Hiding the ugliness of caste and brahmanism, contrary to the fond suppositions of Boston brahmans like Sen, does not serve the cause of Indian democracy and secularism; it serves the entrenched interests and oppressive power. The era of caste and brahmanism may be formally over, but the subject needs to be open, debated and discussed. Not just because they are responsible for so many of continuing inequalities, divisions and brutalities, or to remind the dominant castes or groups of their guilt, but mainly to inoculate, unite and emancipate the oppressed because that past is not yet past.
From: Shiva Shankar <sshankar@cmi.ac.in>
Date: Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 8:44 PM
Subject: Amartya Sen's Imagined India
To:
Intellectual compromise of the best gives rise to the worst. Amartya Sen's sanitised, caste-blind perspective on social unfairness, Hinduism and Indian culture, despite the show of reason, eclecticism and inclusive sensibility, is a gross distortion of historical reality, and a classic example of the limitation - and danger - of elitist liberalism.
http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5211:amartya-sens-imagined-india&catid=127:post-ambedkar-leaders&Itemid=158
Amartya Sen's Imagined India
Braj Ranjan Mani
Amartya Sen is India's leading public thinker, an intellectual star at home and abroad. A guru of welfare economics, a Sanskritist and a scholar of Indian philosophy and culture, he is distinguished for his outstanding work on inequality, democracy and justice. His sensitivity to injustices of class, gender and ethnicity has made him write with passion and precision about the pains of social asymmetry and disadvantage. It is astonishing, though, that such a conscientious scholar who has built his career on researching social unfairness and exclusion has hardly ever engaged with caste and its consequences. Caste, for whatever reasons, fails to qualify as a worthy subject of his scholarly engagement. Of course, sometimes he names caste in the categories of inequalities but just in passing and in a manner which raises questions about his approach to the axis of hierarchy and oppression in India. Whenever he mentions caste, he shows a strange inclination to minimise its negative impact or significance by invoking the all-powerful and crushing asymmetry of class. It is surprising since Sen is no impassioned believer in class radicalism, Marxism or socialism; he is, in fact, contrary to popular perception, a career academic and (at least now) a neoliberal intellectual, though of an ultra-refined kind. (Sen is himself responsible for such a public misconception about his Marxist credentials. He, in fact, cultivated the self-image of some sort of a Marxist and a radical intellectual in the days when socialism not only held popular appeal but was also in academic vogue in India and abroad. This becomes clear when we learn that Sen's favourite philosophers, as he himself affirms now, have all along been the iconic liberals John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, not Karl Marx who comes poor third in his list of thinkers who have influenced him the most.)
... ...
Hiding the ugliness of caste and brahmanism, contrary to the fond suppositions of Boston brahmans like Sen, does not serve the cause of Indian democracy and secularism; it serves the entrenched interests and oppressive power. The era of caste and brahmanism may be formally over, but the subject needs to be open, debated and discussed. Not just because they are responsible for so many of continuing inequalities, divisions and brutalities, or to remind the dominant castes or groups of their guilt, but mainly to inoculate, unite and emancipate the oppressed because that past is not yet past.
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