Read For Free The Argumentative Indian: Writings On Indian History, Culture And Identity Produced By Amartya Sen Formatted As Digital Format
book overall is a slightly difficult read courtesy Dr Sen's very academic writing style copious amounts of footnotes, long paras establishing why the topics discussed are important, etc.
. Although, takeaway for me are brilliant chapters on social and cultural issues in India's context which not only bust lots of myths but also bring out the deep subject matter expertise of Dr.
Sen which is thoroughly enjoyable and insightful to read, This book sets out to defend the secular, plural and liberal imperative against sectarian mostly Hindutva arguments based in history and specious reasoning.
This is also the perfect example of the kind of book to not write,
One, the content is limited to a very few arguments arrived at from various considerations but not examined from various perspectives.
Examples of Ashoka and Akhbar
contributing to the secular tradition, Buddhism spreading far and wide, global import and export of ideas, the diversity in calendars affiliated with religions, a precolonial Indian identity and differences in religion for personal life versus politics comprise aboutof this book.
Two, there are close to no statistics supporting most arguments except the essay on the two sexes I suspect those were easier to procure.
This makes the book more or less a highly subjective take on what is already a very subjective topic, The book reads like a polemical defense from wellknown positions rather than a treatise that confirms those positions,
Three, the treatment of the topic is superficial, Even when it comes to subjective analyses, issues aren't delved into and obvious positions are stated with no original inductions or deductions, A few examples are repeated frequently, People have been quoted repeatedly for stating the same position, as if endorsements from historical figures confirm anything, Given that the average reader supports secularism and plurality, the book preaches to the choir without offering a finer understanding that can help in any incremental way.
Four, the book is perpetually in a state of preparation, Painful amounts of paper describe the biography, environment and reception of the arguments discussed rather than the actual meat of the arguments, It is as if the book works on a higher level of abstraction by mistake,
Five, the book almost restarts with every essay, A collection of essays can work but this one just didn't, There is a desperate need to condense the overlapping essays into unique chapters, I suspect that the book could bepages in length without sacrificing on a single idea,
Finally, the repetition, runon sentences and roundabout descriptive tours are obscene if not excruciating, The book commits most of the Orwellian sins,
To be fair, I did enjoy the essay on the two sexes which is perhaps less noteworthy due to the sheer amount of literature on it anyway as well as the exposition on Tagore that highlighted uncommonlyknown opinions.
Also, the cover is beautiful!
Do not waste you precious reading time on this book, Read any random article on the need for secular tolerance instead, I read this book in preparation for a coming trip to India, along with "English August", and English translations of the "Bhagavad Gita" and "Ramayana".
It was, simply put, an articulate promotion for the value of the history of acceptance of heterogeny in India as part of the author's larger ideological framework and as a pointed criticism of the contemporary Hindutva movement, with beautiful threads of Indian history and culture woven in throughout.
The book got me wanting both to learn more about the traditions of atheist and agnostic thought in Sanskrit literature and to get my hands of some good texts on Rabindranath Tagore, Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, and the Indian emperor Ashoka who seemed like three possibly very interesting people.
Time spent browsing message boards, gobbling tweets, combing through comment sections, and parsing truth from exaggerated facebook posts adds up quicklythe simple volume of text probably adds a dozen or more booklengths to most peoples yearly reading list.
That the text is proffered in nuggetsized chunklets is not the only siren song of social networking systemsthere is an everpresent promise of interactivity.
You can comment, even if you dont comment, It deftly skirts the deadtext problemwith which decades of academic textbook assignments conspired to taint the word "nonfiction"of the incessant droning from a distant, monolithic, voice of tedium that makes sure the reader has just enough information about the subject not to question the shallowness of the information conveyed.
Its not like the articles that populate the internet are storybased fiction they are editorials, memoires, peer reviews, In other words, all yall are reading nonfiction already, It is just shallow and I dont mean that as a pejorative like a textbook it is admittedly hard not to interpret “like a textbook” as insulting.
Its a jumpingoff point, one hundred and forty characters that lead to Wikipedia, to a Netflix documentary, to a series of online articles.
Eventually you find yourself reading The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, At least, I think thats how its supposed to work, Otherwise, the internet is simply one big exercise in dilettantisma lot about a little, but not enough even for ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat.
And it is precisely this nondeprecatory superficiality that is the power of the internet the ability to flutter from one topic to another and link seemingly disparate concepts into aforgive the anachronismweb of tangled and tenebrous thoughts is the quintessentially human organizational schema: patterns in the meaning from chaos signals in the noise.
Sometimes the links just happen, even in curatednarrative nonfiction, It is in the depths of these thick tomes that you truly feel the divine hand of serendipity as opposed to the tepid coincidence of two articles citing the same source.
It makes you learn something more than that, it makes you remember long past closing the final page,
When discussing the cultural drift of Buddhism, The Argumentative Indian referenced something that tripped my kismet alarm:
One of the positive contributions Buddhist connections produced in China is the general sense that even the Chinese must, to some extent, look outwards.Gigantic Bamiyan statues that were marvelous enough to make the cut for a millenniaold travelogue Surely those would be worth visiting, And yet, the hunt for lapis lazuli in sitelinkColor: A Natural History of the Palettea mere two books prior in my library queuebrought me facetoface with cruel truth of the Bamiyan Buddhas:
Indeed, not only did Buddhism suggest that there were sources of wisdom well outside China, but it also led to the tendency of many Chinese intellectuals to go abroad, in particular to India, in search of enlightenment and understanding.
Furthermore, since these visitors to India came back with tales of wonderful things they had seen in India, it was difficult to take an entirely Sinocentric view of world civilization.
There were also other admirable sites and achievements they could see on the way to India, For example, Xuanzang in the seventh century marvelled at the gigantic Bamiyan statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan, which he saw as he approached India from the West on the circuitous route he had taken via Khotan.
And I wondered then, as I sat on the head of the great Buddha of Bamiyan, whether it was in that valley far below us that somebody once, fourteen centuries ago, had sat experimenting with blue powder and brown glue, and had discoveredby adding wood ash perhapshow to make lapis lazuli into paint.I didnt excerpt that during my review of Color because it didnt factor in overly much in my general interpretation.
Those Buddhas and frescos were destroyed eleven months later, The Taliban used rockets for two days of bombardment, and allowed their photography rule to be broken, sending out images of bare arches where once there had been two guardians of a forgotten faith.
In their week of fame and destruction the statues were seen and discussed by people all round the world: people who had never heard of the Buddhas of Bamiyan were shocked that now they would be unable to see them for themselves.
On most levels it was a terrible cultural tragedy, But on one level it was not, Buddhism is a faith that understands impermanence, When else in their long history could these two vast and armless trunks of stone standing in the desert have reminded so many people in so many countries that nothing lasts forever.
But the post facto knowledge of their seventh century citation by Chinese tourist Xuanzangnot the mention the coincidence of two references from wildly divergent booksmade the whole sequence a bit surreal.
I feel as though I now lay some sort of personal claim on the Bamiyan statues,
Jumping from link to link and page to page on the internet inures one somewhat to the majesty of the crossreferential existence of a connected universe convergence in details buried deep withinpage books is the type of thing that might goad a reader into seeking out their next book based on a desire to learn more about those starcrossed statues.
The actual way I landed on The Argumentative Indian was visiting an exhibit about Krishna at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It prompted the revelation that I knew almost nothing about India, Among the facts that I did not know was that I shouldnt elide India and Hinduism, as I so clearly did at the Mets Krishna exhibit:
A secular democracy which gives equal room to every citizen irrespective of religious background cannot be fairly defined in terms of the majority religion of the country.It is facts like these that poke giant holes in the elementary worldview pressed upon students from general, wideangle lectures and the dreaded uniform curriculum textbook.
There is a difference between a constitutionally secular nation with a majority Hindu population and a theocratic Hindu state that might see Hinduism as its official religion Nepal comes closer to the latter description than does India.
It seems inevitable that, once the membrane is pierced, the foundational basis of shorthand existence cant restrain you:
Is India really the Hindu counterpart of Pakistan When British India was partitioned, Pakistan chose to be an Islamic Republic, whereas India chose a secular constitution.Conversations about Indian democracy, if taught at all, are "attributed to British influence despite the fact that such an influence should have worked similarly for a hundred other countries that emerged from an empire on which the sun used not to set.
Is that distinction significant It is true that, in standard Western journalism, little significance is attached to the contrast, and those in India who would like the country to abandon its secularism often cite this forced parity in Western vision as proof enough that there is something rather hopeless in Indias attempt at secularism when the new masters of global politics cannot even tell what on earth is being attempted in India.
” Its not just a Western bias, its a shallowness biasit is much easier to pigeonhole and stereotype, and shorthand works well enough to keep us going.
We ignore the tiny and the massive within Newtonian physics and round the hell out of most remainders in casual math it should be no surprise that generalpolicy History and Politics are occasionally lackadaisical with the facts that arent directly in your face at the moment:
Some cultural theorists, allegedly highly sympathetic, are particularly keen on showing the strength of the faithbased and unreasoning culture of India and the East, in contrast with the shallow rationalism and scientific priorities of the West.It in these deeper dives that really draw me into narrative nonfictionthere is always something new right around the corner, And even if you only come away with one piece of information that stands on its ownthe relentless juxtaposition of India and Pakistan that fits a convenient shorthand narrative but isnt very truethere might be something that will linger and float in the background until the next wholly unrelated nonfiction book approaches it from a new angle and you learn it: the equivalent to the initial interaction with the Bamiyan statues in Color.
This line of argument may well be inspired by sympathy, but it can end up suppressing large parts of Indias intellectual heritage,
In this preselected EastWest contrast, meetings are organized, as it were, between Aristotle and Euclid on the one hand, and the wise and contented Indian peasants on the other.
This is not, of course, an uninteresting exercise, but it is not preeminently a better way of understanding the EastWest cultural contrast than by arranging meetings between, say, Aryabhata the mathematician and Kautilya the political economist on the one hand, and happily determined Visigoths on the other.
And this is my major concern with The Argumentative Indian it is a compilation novel of the authors articles over the past decade.
You see the same things, referenced again and again compilation books are not only repetitivehow much text is wasted skimming the surface of the Gujurat Massacre ten separate times, rather than hitting it once with depth and vigorbut the tone is so disparate there is next to no authorial voice to guide you through the narrative.
Any sense of uniqueness or cohesion on the part of an author is pressed flat by the need to match the format in which the text originally appeared New York Books New Republic Financial Times et al.
Each chapter is standalone you will undoubtedly pull the fantastic knowledge from the trove, but the cost is high:
The movement east of Indian trigonometry to China was part of a global exchange of ideas that also went west around that time.It requires from the reader a dedication to break through the same thematic openings and approach the same revelatory summits each time it is sitting down with an album of remixesyou have to be really into the song to even recognize, let alone appreciate, the subtle differences.
Indeed, this was also about the time when Indian trigonometry was having a major impact on the Arab world, which would later influence European mathematics as well, through the Arabs.
Some verbal signposts to the global movement of ideas can be readily traced, A good example is the transformation of Aryabhatas Sanskrit term jya for what we now call sine: jya was translated, through proximity of sound, into Arabic jiba a meaningless word in Arabic and later transformed into jaib a bay of a cove in Arabic, and ultimately into the Latin word sinus meaning a bay or a cove, from which the modern term sine is derived.
Aryabhatas jya was translated in Chinese as ming and was used in such tables as yue jianliang ming, literally sine of intervals.
The connections are there, but they dont feel organicyoure not discovering, youre being marched through the same worn paths that the author has tread a thousand times with a thousand other tour groups.
There is no kismet when the same sources, examples, and events are used the same way by the same author in a dozen unconnected essays.
There is no Bamiyan moment to be found within these pages:
Tagores criticism of patriotism is a persistent theme in his writings.But then, perhaps the strength of The Argumentative Indian is unknowable until the next nonfiction book cites Tagore and your kismet alarm begins to ring.
As early as, put his position succinctly in a letter replying to the criticism of Abala Bose, the wife of a great Indian scientist, Jagadish Chandra Bose: Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter my refuge is humanity.
I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.
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