Book Review – The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen

No other author that I have ever known could stay true to his/her words and convictions throughout the course of the book as Mr.Amartya Sen can. He begins the book with the following words: ‘Prolixity is not alien to us in India.’ And, he goes on to prove his point with page after page of words that come back at you like the ocean waves – repetitive and superfluous. Prolixity may not be alien to us in India, but brevity definitely seems to be an alien concept to Mr.Sen.

To begin with, the title: When I first heard the name ‘The Argumentative Indian’, I was thinking that this book will deal with the Indian history, not just about the positives of it but also about the not-so-positive ones that defied any reason as well. But this book is not a coherent one, if you are keen on learning the history of India, its culture and identity, as the subtitle misleads you to be. The title of this book should have been ‘Demystifying Indian History : Writings against the Hindu Fundamentalists and Hindu Nationalists’ for that is all this book ever tries to do, from the beginning to the end. All that the author ever tries to do is to prove that India is not as great as it is thought to be (by Hindu Nationalists) and it is not as worse as it was portrayed to be (by Western racists – like James Mill and Winston Churchill).

Then, words: The author is blessed with quite a vocabulary that could fill an entire library and an amazing literary skill, having been a student of Tagore’s ‘Shanti Niketan’. But he lacks the skill of brevity. Wish he had known that an idea expressed in more words than necessary seldom manages to hold the attention of the reader. Lengthy sentences that monotonously repeat what was already told elsewhere fail to impress or even convey clearly what they are intended to. 10 lines into the book and your attention already flies off elsewhere.
 

Third will be repetition: 100 pages or so into the book, you find it quite tedious to progress any further. He seems to repeat the same things throughout the book – the secularism of Akbar and Ashoka, the atheist schools of Lokayata and Carvaka, Rama’s mortality and Javali’s advice to him, the differences between Gandhi and Tagore, the insensibilities of the ‘Hindu’ nationalists and how India wasn’t as great in the past as it was made out to be. The criss-cross referencing that ruins the flow of the work is a curse too. A book that carries endnotes and footnotes that consume more than 10% of its total size is definitely not going to help make the reading flow smooth, I am sure. Every other line or so, you have a footnote or an endnote shoved down your throat. His constant reminder of how he discussed – or is going to discuss - the current topic elsewhere in the same book – or, elsewhere in the world - is not helping matters either. Good that he gives a caveat about such repetition in the beginning of the book, bad that I didn’t take it seriously.
 

Fourth, his so-called secular attitude: one of the follies of the present day ‘seculars’ and ‘intellectuals’ of this country is to pounce upon every opportunity to prove how wrong the Hindu fundamentalists are with their stances and views, all the while expressing easy or even no opinions about the radical behaviors of such fundamentalists from other religions. Mr.Sen is guilty of this too. He even comes close to suggesting that the conflict of Kargil was a provocation more on the part of India, while mentioning that the part of Pakistan’s army regulars in that conflict may or may not be true. Really, Mr.Sen?! Attempting to sound neutral, Mr.Sen ends up sounding so annoying and without sense in many places, especially when he uses the negative word of ‘chauvinism’ to refer to the basic human inclination to praise one’s own country!
 

Overall, Mr.Sen has woven a web of words, akin to that of a spider’s. Sticky, repetitive, muddling and uni-dimensional, written more with the purpose of proving a point or two against the Hindu radicals of this country. Except for a few brilliant pages, rest of all is drab! Disappointed, to say the least.