History, Philosophy and Society HIREN GOHAIN Indians listen when Amartya Sen speaks not because he is a Nobel Prize winning celebrity, but because he has addressed passionately all our basic concerns from modern, enlightened humanist positions with exemplary lucidity, humour and scholarly discipline. Like many others in our country, I have been bewildered by vicious lessons drawn from our past by certain groups, who have also chosen to act brutally on them. Further I also feel rather weak and helpless in the face of the prevalent perception of India
Discussion
History, Philosophy
and Society
HIREN GOHAIN
I
ndians listen when Amartya Sen speaks not because he is a Nobel Prize winning celebrity, but because he has addressed passionately all our basic concerns from modern, enlightened humanist positions with exemplary lucidity, humour and scholarly discipline. Like many others in our country, I have been bewildered by vicious lessons drawn from our past by certain groups, who have also chosen to act brutally on them. Further I also feel rather weak and helpless in the face of the prevalent perception of India’s past as mired in soulless orthodoxy, repressive social practices like caste, and a rigid narrowness of outlook. The left circles sometimes reinforce the perception by offering a scientific explanation for the catastrophe. Sen offers a heartening corrective to this bleak vision by showing that a universal, humanistic and liberal ethic also strove for a place in the past centuries on the foundations of science and rational argument. Sen’s point is that it is a mistake to regard the tradition of science as specifically western, and that other societies like the Indian, Arab and Chinese have also made significant contributions to this tradition. On the other hand the liberal humanist west, Sen could have added, also had its moments of eclipse of reason even in contemporary times. Sasheej Hegde (EPW, April 14) questions that enterprise as philosophically flawed. Hegde would have it that the logical possibility (within a certain framework of assumptions) of a certain reading of history could not provide legitimacy to its truth-claim. Hegde agrees with Sen that any reading of history is position-bound. But while Sen says that within the limitations of such a position it is possible to argue with relative objectivity, Hegde seems to argue for a post-modernist plural view of history, where there may be as many histories as there are positions. Nor do such histories add up to a coherent totality. He grants that a particular view of history may be honest, sincere and responsible to certain rigorous procedures, like for example the medievalist (sic!) geocentric view in cosmology. But that provides no unquestionable foundation to its truth-claim. Thus, it would seem that Sen’s view of a tradition of sound, scientific, rational discussion in India was no more valid than the notion of some Hindu historians that Islamic rulers had hated and stunted the development of Hindu India.
Again Hegde carps at Sen’s notion of a “position-independent” inquiry, of historical research not pre-determined by the nature of its original context. He argues that Sen’s sensitiveness to context cannot liberate him from the constitutive blindness of history. To put it in his own words, “a historical narrative account of how it is that we come to regard the world the way we do” cannot provide any justification for “what we come to regard as an authoritative explanation of a given state of affairs”. Sen is thus arraigned for taking the possibility of an abstract representation as reality itself. Hence Sen’s dredging of India’s past to nurture our present concern for democracy,
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secularism, humanism and scientific reason in India is alleged to be untenable.
On the other hand, I find Sen’s account illuminating, and not merely arguable. What appears to be lacking here is only a proper allowance for the social dialectic on which human activity and thought always depend. Sen could have taken into consideration the hostility of powerful quarters in our past to ideas of human dignity, equality and ideals of open enquiry. For that is also part of the complete picture. A case in point is the clear and firm demonstration in Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s account of ayurveda, that Indian astronomy was forced to make concessions to powerful superstitions even when offering correct scientific accounts of natural phenomena like eclipses. That was the price exacted by social orthodoxy. (A similar case today is the mad rush to reduce any human cultural trait to a genetic key.) Further, Sen’s argument itself derives its strength and relevance from his entry into a momentous ideological debate, which in turn arises out of tectonic stresses of an ongoing social dialectic. There is no shame if he has chosen his perspective in conscious opposition to that of the enemies of science and social progress.
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EPW
