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2024-04-15

Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny : Sen, Amartya

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Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny Kindle Edition
by Amartya Sen (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 out of 5 stars 200

Part of: Issues of Our Time (7 books)

The world may be more riven by murderous violence than ever before, yet Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen argues in this sweeping philosophical work that its brutalities are driven as much by confusion as by inescapable hatred.

Sen argues in his new book that conflict and violence are sustained today, no less than the past, by the illusion of a unique identity. Indeed, the world is increasingly taken to be divided between religions (or 'cultures' or 'civilizations'), ignoring the relevance of other ways in which people see themselves through class, gender, profession, language, literature, science, music, morals or politics, and denying the real possibilities of reasoned choices.

In Identity and Violence he overturns such stereotypes as the 'the monolithic Middle East' or 'the Western Mind'. Through his penetrating investigation of such subjects as multiculturalism, fundamentalism, terrorism and globalization, he brings out the need for a clear-headed understanding of human freedom and a constructive public voice in Global civil society. The world, Sen shows, can be made to move towards peace as firmly as it has recently spiralled towards war.
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From other countries

Tristan Sherwin

5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful, thought-provoking argument

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 April 2019

Amartya Sen’s *Identity And Violence* is probably one of the most thought-provoking and persuasive books I’ve read.

The general premise of his essay is to highlight the divisive and potentially incendiary effects that can transpire when we reduce an individual’s identity to a sole category, such as religion, nationality, language etc., instead of recognising, and celebrating, that individuals are defined by a plurality of affiliations.

In his concluding chapter, Amartya Sen neatly summarises how this illusion of singular identity easily serves the agendas of those with violent purposes:

“The advocacy of a unique identity for a violent purpose takes the form of separating out one identity for special focus, and it proceeds from there to eclipse the relevance of other associations and affiliations through selective emphasis and incitement... The specific identity that is separated out for special action is, in most cases, a genuine identity...: a Hutu *is* indeed a Hutu, a “Tamil tiger” is clearly a Tamil..., and a gentile German with a mind poisoned by Nazi philosophy is certainly a gentile German. What is done to turn that sense of self-understanding into a murderous instrument is (1) to ignore the relevance of all other affiliations and associations, and (2) to redefine the demands of the “sole” identity in a particularly belligerent form. This is where the nastiness as well as the conceptual confusions are made to creep in.” (p.176).

Sen, throughout this book, demonstrates how many of our social theories—even those working to tackle terrorism and violence—still fall into the trap of forcing people into singular identities, and how these theories are readily useable for “accentuating sectarian exclusion” and “warmly welcomed by leaders of social confrontation and violence.” The answer, Sen powerfully suggests, is to invoke the richness of the many identities that humans have.

A definite must read!

—Tristan Sherwin, author of *Love: Expressed*

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clauwau

5.0 out of 5 stars Refreshing views of the global perspective

Reviewed in Canada on 16 January 2017

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This book may not be for everyone. It is by far an academic book but it reads extremely well. While the main idea of plural identities is repeated perhaps too often, the author makes very convincing arguments, while refraining from identifying "who is wrong and who is right". His ideas might be interpreted as utopian but it is an utopia that we must collectively achieved. The book opens the mind to a better world.

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Carlos Allende

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read

Reviewed in the United States on 14 September 2017

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A little longer that it should have been, yes, but quite insightful and an eye opener. This would be a better world if we followed Sen's recommendations of not constraining people to a sole identity.

3 people found this helpful

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Nazariya

5.0 out of 5 stars How to make sense of the 'messages of hate' bombarded at us everyday and why they are created by uninformed/mis-informed people?

Reviewed in India on 23 July 2016

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This is an extremely relevant and timely book that looks at the reasons for the growth of the 'right wing sentiment' across the world. And what can we and our democratic institutions do to reverse it. We already know Dr. Amartya Sen as a brilliant economist, but here, you will meet Dr. Sen, the social philosopher. You will be informed by his humane voice of reason how the per-conceived notions about our own identities can narrow our point of view about ourselves (and others too!) How can we make informed decisions about our politics/political leaders/policies/our personal tastes, with such narrow points-of-view?

Our newspapers/TV everyday are full of reportage about hate crimes/terror attacks and even referendums, elections in which candidates and political parties are asking specific groups (their identities defined by nationality, religion, language, ethnicity, etc.) to be vary and 'suspect' of the 'other'.

For eg. - If somebody is American and loves Japanese comics, Indian and Jazz music, Mexican food, European architecture, French films, Japanese electronics : Will we say that he/she is doing contradictory things? Or such tastes shouldn't be allowed! (How absurd does that sound!) Can't such a person be completely at peace with all his tastes and yet be also 'American' (Or from anywhere else!)). Where is the contradiction? Dr. Sen's reasoning shows how each one of us has multiple identities in the present day world and we are so much the better for it. Today, because of such identities we are richer (in every way) and inter-connected. Finally, I would just add ' this book will help you see your own perceptions more accurately and how you see others too! (And when they do the same to you ' you are very offended!). It's absolutely worth your time.

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Lauren

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read

Reviewed in the United States on 29 April 2014

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By far my favorite non-fiction, Sen really dissects the tendency not only toward societal movements that inflict violence but also by individuals based on the constructs of identity.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Badly printed wonderful book

Reviewed in India on 9 August 2021

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The book is of course brilliantly written and one of the finest books that Sen has written. However the printing quality was awful. This doesn't look like a Penguin publication. It is like a locally produced pirated print. Paper quality is horrible. Not at all reader friendly.

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Amit Dixit

5.0 out of 5 stars Good book related to my own experience

Reviewed in India on 13 July 2021

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Very good book. It will give you an idea about how our identity shapes violence. It also discusses role of reason and choice in selecting from our multitude of identities. I have faced this problem during my industrial experience when I lost my job just because I am brahmin. The marwari owners politicized the culture in such a way that it became anti-brahmin work environment. All my other identities got lost in the confusion and it became very difficult to work.

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Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny

By Amartya Sen

Norton, 2006, 224 pp.

Reviewed by G. John Ikenberry

May/June 2006

Published on May 1, 2006

Why is the world racked by barbarity and violence? In this provocative little book, the Nobel laureate economist argues that the causes are as much distorted identities as nasty intentions. When people acquire a strong and exclusive sense of belonging to a single group, Sen notes, the conditions ripen for conflict and violence; when shrunken and shorn of its layered complexity, identity can kill -- Hutus massacre Tutsis, for example, when they no longer see themselves also as Rwandan, African, laborers, and human beings. Sen suggests that sectarian hatreds around the world -- in places such as Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Timor, Israel, Palestine, and Sudan -- are ignited or exacerbated by illusions of unique and choiceless identities, leading Sen to take issue with Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. When civilizations conflict it is because of a failure -- often a cultivated failure -- to appreciate the true diversity of identities that infuse them. Sen eloquently describes the dangers of this flattening of human identity. He is less clear, however, about how to nurture a global environment where the richness and multiplicity of identities can thrive.

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Identity and Violence : Illusions of Destiny — By Amartya Sen — A review

Posted by Vish Mangalapalli on April 21, 2008

My alma mater – FMS Delhi – boasts the presence of some venerated educational institutions like Delhi School of Economics (DSE) and St.Stephens in its neighbourhood. It was natural that students of these institutions also came to FMS to pursue a business degree and this resulted in an informal network of friends in these places. DSE and Stephens had a great culture of guest lectures and interested parties from FMS gate crashed these lectures.

One such lecture into which some of us gate crashed was Prof. Amartya Sen’s lecture on aspects of Game Theory. The problem that Prof. Sen was tackling that day was: What happens to a rational donkey equidistant from two haystacks? He then went onto resolve the “assinine” problem through techniques of Game Theory. It is a different matter that I did not understand the lecture beyond the initial proposition. He was not yet a Nobel Laureate then but carried a whispered respect of being next in line for Nobel in Economics. This was in 1994 and we had to wait for another four years to see the Nobel prize being awarded to Prof. Sen. Personally, I felt a surge of pride for all the obvious reasons when I got to hear that Prof. Sen won a Nobel in economics. Barring an article here and there and his penetrating essay “Tagore and his India” — I did not venture to read anything of Prof. Sen, although I managed to collect a few books of his. Then came “Argumentative Indian” (and a superb introduction to it by Sunil Khilnani (..of The Idea of India fame) in The Hindu) and this was followed by “Identity and Violence : Illusions of Destiny“. I managed to read this book over the weekend and should say that it is one of those rare books that is perspective changing.

9/11 is part of our collective lexicon now. Among the many other drastic negatives that it wrought on the world, the most important has been sharpening and thrusting the role of identities of individuals and communities to the centerstage in a much more forceful way than it is necessary and warranted. What this seems to have done is to provide a toehold or platform from where violence, discrimination and stereotyping based on selective identities has started to get legitimised. The progress of this legitimisation has been at the expense of suppressing the natural tendencies for people and communities to have multiple simultaneous identities. It is the role of these identities and the need for understanding and vigorously getting them into the mainstream as a remedial measure for a lot of world’s ills, the subject matter of Amartya Sen’s book “Identity and Violence : Illusions of Destiny”

The first three chapters viz. Violence of Illusions: Identity based thinking, Making sense of Identity: Pluraltiy of Identity, Civilizational Confinement set a firm context for the book and the subsequent chapters elaborate and discuss the themes in detail. Prof. Sen makes it clear from the word go that an individual can have multiple identities simultaneously and none of them be mutually exclusive. However, in dealing with plural identities people have adopted 2 extreme approaches. The first extreme of pendulum being Identity Disregard — where all identities get relegated to non existence. This is very evident in the fundamental assumptions and generalisations one gets to see in the area of a majority of social science theories especially in economics around rational agent or economic man. The other extreme of the pendulum being Singular Affiliation where only one identity gets a continued emphasis despite the context alteration. Both lead to problems i.e. of vapid generalisations or straightjacketing of people in society. Even while acknowledging the importance of plural identities, Prof. Sen goes out of his way to emphasise that a specific identity need not have a durable importance and will have to change along with the changing social context. And that in almost a majority of situations people do have freedom in choosing the relative importance of a specific identity. Having said that Prof. Sen quickly acknowledges that there are specific situations where the freedom of choosing ones identity in the eyes of others gets very limited leeway e.g. the perception of a landless labourer in the eyes of his armed landlord in Bihar. Prof. Sen goes onto emphasise that choices can also be made from encumbered positions that one happens to occupy and that one needs to be aware of the ability to exercise choice.

In the lively essay Civilizational Confinement, Prof. Sen goes onto discourage in no uncertain terms the approach to limiting identities to civilizations as was popularised by Samuel Huntington in his now famous book viz. “The Clash of Civilizations“. There are multiple bases that Prof. Sen points out to debunk this approach of which the most important being that there has been a continuous exchange between civilizations and so no one can and should claim exclusive ownership for what have come to be ideas that are now believed to have originated from their civilizations. For example there is an impression that Tolerance, Democracy, Science are typical values having origins in so called Western Civilizations. Prof. Sen debunks this as a myth and emphasises that many of these values have also been practiced in civilizations that thrived in Asia (India, China), Iran and Africa. On specific conflicts that one gets to see today e.g. Tamil vs. Sinhalese, Prof. Sen goes onto say that it has become a sort of fashion to abstract what should be limited to contemporary political processes and machinations into higher historical paradigms — ascribing weight and intellectual soundness which they do not deserve in the first place. Cultivated theory, Prof Sen, feels can bolster uncomplicated bigotry. His words on the mistake of seeing India as a Hindu Civilization and thereby denying the syncretic nature of various influences are an eye opener. In a very gentlemanly manner Prof. Sen disagrees with both the approaches of theorists who believe in inevitable clash of civilizations and proponents of civilizational amity — for both in his view have accepted and given into identities that can be firmly tied to civilizations

With this as a background Prof. Sen turns his eye on the topic of Religious Affiliations and Muslim History — where he provides the reader with any number of examples from the past where Muslim rulers despite being Muslims have subscribed to the right of people to have multiple identites and thereby gently draws the reader to the point of futility of a religion centered analysis of people as a helpful way of understanding humanity. He also castigates the American approach to fight Islamic radicalism especially while undermining of the role of civil society all over the world. Also he specifically deplores the role of western Goverments in not going beyond the Shia and Sunni differences in the muslim world when actually the diversity, outlook and temperament of the Muslim world is vastly wide.

In the chapter called West and Anti West, Prof. Sen focuses on the role of colonialism in defining identities. The natural fallout in the colonised mind is to have both disaffection and admiration for the colonising power and thereby developing a reactive self perception. This perception has a tendency to gravitate towards rejection of democracy and personal liberty, distorted reading of intellectual and scientific history of the world, support for growth of religious fundamentalism and even international terrorism. In a nice example he dwells on the behaviour of leading lights of the earlier stages of independence movement of India in limiting the intellectual identity to the spiritual dimension leaving out the material dimension. This has been so because in a sense they have accepted the superiority of the colonising power in the area of material. The fall out of this being the neglect or rejection of critical areas related to education, science and development. Elsewhere in Asia this reactive self perception has led to the articulation of so called “Asian Values” of discipline, obedience and order as distinct from the western values of personal liberty and freedom. Prof. Sen argues that this kind articulation does not have any firm basis. He also cautions the western nations that they have immense responsibility for their past deeds as colonial powers in Africa and the need to help Africa build institutional mechanisms to enable root taking of democracy and freedom

In the chapter, Culture and Captivity, Prof. Sen debunks the myth of cultural determinism which in his opinion has been engendered by hazy perceptions of cultures combined with fatalism about the dominating power of culture. This led to ( in Prof. Sens words) the creation of imaginary slaves of illusory forces. The identities that got created on account of this cultural determinism have unleashed tremendous amount of cruelty all over the world. Prof. Sen points out 2 classic examples of imagined truths and real policies. Firstly, the behaviour of Britain during the Irish Potato Famine, driven by the impression that women in Ireland cannot cook anything beyond potatoes and hence their over dependence on potato as the main ingredient in a Irish meal leading to shortages coupled with the perception of laziness of Irish people. Or that of the tendency of Indians to multiply in uncontrolled numbers leading to famine situations in Bengal. However the reality as we know today lies elsewhere. While acknowledging the role of the potency of culture, Prof. Sen also explains that culture needs to be placed in a broad framework and that culture is a) not uniquely significant factor in determining identities but that it is one among the many factors b) is not homegeneous and hence a need to have a caution in broad brushing c) is not still d) interacts with other social determinants. Given these Prof. Sen cautions that it is important to be able to clearly decide before swaying between either extremes of complete cultural liberty and cultural conservatism

In another chapter called Globalisation and Voice, Prof. Sen talks about the progress of globalisation and various voices against and for it. I have kind of understood that Prof. Sen talks about compassionate globalisation which should be combined with judicious policy making. However, I could not understand the linkages between globalisation and identities despite reading this topic twice over.

The penultimate chapter deals with the experience of various western countries with multi culturalism. Prof. Sen deplores the idea of practice of plural monoculturalism as a virtue when the need of the hour is true multiculturalism. While praising Britains’ experimentation with multiculturalism, Prof. Sen also deplores the British Govt’s attitude to encourage faith based schools for people and also putting the religious leaders of different faiths as spokepersons for the respective practitioners leading to automatic association of identities with religion. In an inspiring section in this chapter, Prof. Sen also elaborates the insistence of Gandhiji on the need for plural identities and equal representation to all involved in his negotiations with the British rulers. It is my conjecture that India’s predicament of the past and present with respect to managing multiculturalism can also become a pressing predicament for Britain (if it is already not) or for that matter any other western country with signifcant migrant populations

The last chapter ends with a caution around the penalities of solitarist identity illusion and also a very hopeful message of creating a harmonious world

The only aspect of the book that disappointed me was the lack of reference or citation to specific public policy instruments that have been successfully employed in combating the deleterious effects of identity politics.

All in all “Identity and Violence : Illusions of Destiny” is a illuminating and sensitive book and Prof. Sen comes out as a great mind, a great academecian and humanitarian. It is a tragedy that such humanising views never get the wide attention they deserve in public discourse, forums or media.

An afterthought: I wonder what would the reaction of right wing politicians be when they read this book

Amartya Sen: What China Could Teach India, Then and Now | Asia Society

Amartya Sen: What China Could Teach India, Then and Now

The Citigroup & Asia Society Global Issues Series

Amartya Sen (India), professor of Economy and Philosophy at Harvard University. (Servindi/Flickr)

Hong Kong

February 17, 2005

Moderator: Mr. Ronnie Chan

PROFESSOR SEN: When I – when we decided that something on poverty – we were talking about various subjects and I talked about identity and violence. Now, that will be the talk that I will give tomorrow at the Chinese University, but it was thought that people would be interested in hearing more about poverty, so that was how the subject came out. But I thought I might try to see the dimensions of poverty in terms of something broader than just lack of income.

Don has already mentioned the issue of political freedom, but more generally I think one could think about poverty not as a lowness of income but a lowness of one’s ability to live the way one would like to live and one would have reason to live. So it is something to do not with some lack of external objects of convenience, like income or commodity, but basically a deprivation of human life and, in particular, the thing that we value most, namely, the capability to live as we would like to live.

This is the subject of great antiquity; in fact, if you go back in time 2,500 years ago when Gautama left his princely home in search of enlightenment, he was moved by the sight of seeing on one day a dead man, and seeing on another day an extremely ill person, and on the third day a person incapacitated by old age. It is the failure, our failure to have the kind of life we would like to live, which made him start off a line of inquiry, which of course in his case took him at a different intellectual wave length, not so much about the economic issues but about the nature of the world in which we live. But I think that particular issue of how we address the lack of capability - which is, after all, what poverty is - is quite central and it has recurred again and again historically over thousands of years.

Now, income comes into it, not because it is valuable in itself, but because lack of income could be an immediate and perhaps the most important reason for people’s poverty of lifestyle or poverty of freedom. But having recognised that that is indeed the case, we still have to ask – we have to make a number of real distinctions, one of them to recognise that if income and lack of income is relevant to a study of poverty, that is not because it is intrinsically about lack of income, but it is one of the instrumental factors that predisposes us towards a reduced life. So it is a means rather an end that we have to look at.

Secondly, if you are looking at income and lowness of income, we have to see not lowness in some absolute standard(s) but inadequacy, and what is adequate depends on a number of circumstances. It may depend on our physical features. If you have – if you are prone to some kind(s) of illness, then the amount of income that you need in order to escape deprivation may be very larger. Just imagine the case of a person who has a lot of income but has an expensive illness in the form of requiring, let us say, kidney dialysis on a regular basis. Then even though he may have a higher income than another person, nevertheless, in some respects it will end up being quite clear that he or she has poverty. And it is not just because of the money that you expend in kidney dialysis reduces his net income, you can easily imagine the situation when the kidney treatment becomes impossible. If that is the case, then he does not have to spend that money for kidney dialysis, but it will be wrong to say that his poverty has now gone down because of the fact that he does not have to spend money on kidney dialysis, because given the opportunity he will rather spend the money that way.

So you have to see the predisposing condition of the poorness, the illness, as one of the factors, the physical environment, and the deprivation in which we live is one of the factors. Having just escaped from Boston with 45 inches of snow and minus 20 degrees Celsius temperature, I think the lifestyle and the need for commodities, including heavy overcoat, (are) utterly dependent on the physical universe.

And similarly, the presence of crime in the locality, violence in the locality; or to look at positive thing, the nature of the epidemiological care that we happen to have, what kind of public arrangement for health care there is dealing with epidemics, and what kind of arrangement there is for receiving medical treatment if you happen to fall ill. All these enter a picture in which private income is part of the story but need not be the only part, and sometimes not even the central part of the story.

So I think what I would talk about briefly (are) a number of these other dimensions of poverty which we ought to look at, and I would also to some extent, as I have often done in my work, look particularly at China, because I believe that the world has learned more from China over the thousands of years than from any other country in the world. Not all the lessons are necessarily positive; many of them are very positive and some of them are not, and I thought one should discuss them.

I discussed them a little bit more in an article I published in the New York Review on the 2nd of December. It’s called “Passage to China”, a slightly corny title with a variation on E.M. Forster’s novel - it was invented for me by the editor. But it really deals with the relationship between India and China. In the first millennium, they had very close contact, which is very rarely remembered now, between the 1st century AD to the 11th century AD. Very often, it related to Buddhism, but it actually involved contact on mathematics and astronomy, on science, on public health care, on medicine, on linguistics, on music, on art, and so on - very extensive things. So most of it was – the article is concerned with the 1st millennium. However, I go on in the last chapter to discuss what is the continuing relevance of this in today’s world and how some of the issues they were discussing then - public health care, the need for having a globalised approach, the importance of dissent - all these issues have remained current even in today’s world.

But I want to draw particularly on lessons from China in this respect, and in my books on India I have often drawn greatly from the Chinese experience. I remember that – actually, China is quite a big figure in Indian thinking and has always been so. In 7th century when Xuanzang left India and went back to China after having spent about a decade in India, he asked rather implausibly the question, “Is there anyone in India who does not admire China fully?” This is the nice 7th century question. It is a serious question and of course it is coming in many different forms.

When I was growing up in Calcutta, since the left wing student movement was very strong, the big figure, of course on those days was the inspiration of the communist movement in China which was probably the stronger influence on thinking of students in Calcutta than almost anything else I can think of.

I remember also when I was a student in Cambridge, one of my teachers, Joan Robinson, a great economist, explained to me why China is so admirable, as she was making a cultural comparison of the kind which has become very common now ever since Sam Huntington wrote his book about civilisation and trying to reduce every civilisation into something like a one or two sentence summary. Joan told me that the real trouble with Indians, she told me, is that Indians are just too rude; and she said the Japanese, the trouble really is that the Japanese are too polite; and then she said the Chinese are just right. So I think those are good inspiration to go and study the Chinese experience.

Now, in so far as private income is only one of the influences on the achievements in reducing poverty, the first thing I want to mention is that even though in the poverty discussion most of the concentration tends to be these days on what happened since economic reform. The fact is that there is a very major lesson in what happened in China previous to that. I am not commenting on the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, I am not talking about the Chinese famine (from) ’59 to ’61 in which 29.6 million people died. There were all kinds of mistakes.

But the fact is that China was still the global leader as a poor country expanding basic education at a level which was very hard to imagine, as well as basic health care. All kinds of things came like “barefoot doctors” and so on. But the spread of health care across the country was quite remarkable. By 1979, when the economic reform came, the Chinese life expectancy was already 68 years; the Indian life expectancy was 54 years, 14 years behind it.

There are really major lessons there, and I might say also one of the unsung contributions of the pre-reform educational and health care expansion is, I believe, the radical economic expansion that took place in the 1980s. After the economic reform, it would have been very hard without the base of elementary education which China had and India did not at that time, which is still a factor which bothers India badly.

Now, that social delivery problem is extremely serious and that is also one of the reasons why one has to look at the social system more fully to understand the nature of poverty reduction that can be achieved. Now, here, moving from positive to slightly negative territory, along with the economic reform which was dramatically imaginative and successful in extending the opportunity of earning an income, expanding private income basically, initially primarily concentrated on agriculture through the 1980s and then later more and more globalised, along with that came a certain slackening of the social delivery of the health care. Health care suddenly became private.

In one step, China moved from a Canada-like system to the US‑like system, which in this context was not an improvement necessarily, and one of the difficulties is that you see that even in the progress of life expectancy. Even if you compare the change since 1979, even though China remains well ahead of India, the gap between China and India is now reduced from 14 years to seven years. The Indian life expectancy has grown about three times as fast as that in China, despite having a lower rate of economic growth.

And I think in this reduction in the slackening, the lack of social insurance does play a very substantial part, in my judgement, in my analysis. And you see it particularly if you look at some parts of India which has in many ways shared the egalitarian commitment that put China ahead in the first place in the pre-reform period, but which continues to have a public health insurance system, like the state of Kerala, a fairly substantial state of 30 million people. The Chinese and the Kerala population, the Chinese have roughly the same expectation of life in ’79: 68 in China; 67 in Kerala. In China now it is 71; in Kerala is 76. Infant mortality rate in China was then 37; in Kerala also 37. In China is 30 now; in Kerala is 10.

So I think there is a price that is paid in the slackening, in my judgement - I am being very frankly critical of that as a great admirer of China - in that some of the major insights that the world has learned from China in the pre-reform period, taking the rough with the smooth, is something where I believe if I were to place myself in the unlikely role of advising China, I would say that the whole issue of health care has to be looked at. China is one of the few countries in the world in which you actually have to buy your vaccines. So that in a sense, which I, as a member of the World Vaccine Board, am very concerned about that issue, because it does, if the infant mortality rate has stagnated, I think it has a lot to do with that. So I think the whole question of how public health care is delivered and arranged is one of the issues.

Now, we don’t have very much time so I will move on to another issue, which is - and I am trying to concentrate on those things which tend to get less discussed than others - China’s success in economic growth and the number of poorer people going down have been radically high. But let me mention here a slight contrast. The Chinese – if the world has many fewer poorer people today in terms of lowness of income, and that is indeed the case, the biggest contribution of that has come from China. The second biggest is India but quite a big distance behind China. But again in the Chinese experience, there are two periods. (In) 1980, the reduction of poverty was dramatic with mainly agricultural expansion, the Chinese agriculture grew at a rate that I have never seen in my understanding of economic history of the world anywhere else. In the 1990s there has been reduction in poverty too, with the exception of last year when poverty did go up. But it had been much slower. This is not an argument for concentrating only on agriculture, because the potential on agricultural expansion was probably expanded through the 1980s because it was a one for all jumping up, moving away from a very inefficient communal based cooperative system to a private enterprise-based agriculture.

So I think globalisation was the natural direction to go and the Chinese success in that has been dramatic, and yet there has been, along with that, not only a slackening of growth or a reduction of poverty, but also a sharp increase of inequality. I have never seen the Gini coefficient go up as fast as it has in China. This is not unknown to the Chinese economists. I went to a conference two years ago held at Beijing University where the subject of exactly this, the increase in income and equality, so it is receiving attention. I think it is receiving more attention than the other issue of the social delivery problem of health care, which I commented on first. But that is an issue to be addressed.

Now, you cannot go on with this in 1980s, certainly, the 1990s and the 2000s have to be different, and yet the whole issue of how the fruits of the massive gains of globalisation have to be shared is one of the questions that has to be addressed. It is important, if I may come back to India, to learn immensely from the way the Chinese have played the globalisation game, and I think one of the respects in which I think the Indian left, and I see myself as a part of that, has been very outmoded, is in its thinking about globalisation; it has tended to assume it to be some kind of a sea monster, like the, whatever animal it is in the Jaws that comes in and gobbles up poor swimmers, but not as something that you can turn to your advantage, and that is the great lesson and at last, happily, India is learning something from the Chinese experience, which is very good. And yet, the whole issue of inequality has to be addressed.

In the elections in May last year in which the ruling Government was defeated, and in my judgement happily defeated, I think two of the main issues - one was the increase in equality despite the globalisation success, even though the inequality increase in India is far less than that in China, but it is still a considerable increase; and secondly, of course, the inability of the Government to deal with sectarianism of the ruling party, the BJP, and in particular the riots in Gujarat in which mostly Muslims got killed, and it is that sectarian fundamentalist Hindu agenda which also was one of the big factors that played a part in the defeat of the Government. But these issues required in a multi-party democratic system, they get standardly discussed, but if you don’t have such a system you have to find ways and means of keeping these issues in the public agenda.

So I move now to a third issue, that is I briefly referred to the fact that we are dealing with a world in which lowness of income is not the concept to use even as far as income is concerned in dealing with poverty; you have to look at inadequacy of income. What is regarded as an adequate income depends on the lifestyle in a community, and this is a consideration that I think might apply even to Hong Kong, because Hong Kong is a very rich country, a very rich economy, and yet there may be a problem of poverty, as any rich economy has - the United States has in a big way and so has every other [country], Switzerland too - to fund.

In one of the deeply insightful passages in the “Wealth of Nations”, Adam Smith addressed the question in an altogether definitive way, and if I have ended up trying to view poverty as capability deprivation, I have to admit that my first insight on it came from reading Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nation”. He was talking about what he called “necessities” and he was mentioning the fact that we have all - this is my language, not Smith’s - we have all desire to have certain basic capabilities, like taking part in public life, like appearing in public without shame. Now, the commodities that you need for any absolute level of poverty - to be able to mix with friends, to chat with them and appear without any shame - the commodity you need for that is immensely more if you live in a rich country than in a poor country. His example was that until recently in England, you could appear in public without a linen shirt or without leather shoes, but not anymore. Though he taught in France, he was still cold. Because the standard of what is accepted as minimally decent consumption has changed in England. So what it really means is that the level of income that you need in order to escape poverty is much higher in England than he thought it would be in France.

Now, the argument is this, and you have to be careful: he was not saying relative income is important per se, not at all; he was saying the absolute capability to do certain things, like mixing with others without shame, appearing in public without shame, is extremely important, and that happens to depend instrumentally on relative income. So if you live in a country in which, or in an economy in which there is a great deal of consumption that is needed as an essential part of decent life, then not having that, not having the same level of income as they have but something towards that average would reduce it to an absolute deprivation of capability, to be ashamed to appear in public. It’s like the way in New York families where everybody in (the) school where your child goes, everybody in school – the children may be talking about what they saw on television or cable, and so on, and if you don’t happen to have one, you are left out of communication. So that the level of income that you need in order for your kids to mix freely with others, the same thing, is much higher in New York than it is in, say, Tanzania, and it makes a big difference therefore to take into account how deprivation come about and why inadequacy of income is not the same thing as the absolute lowness of income.

There are too lessons, particularly in those areas which are prosperous - and Hong Kong is one of them - the need to think about issues. I believe that Hong Kong does not have an official poverty line, but in all the thinking about that, then that is the kind of consideration that has to come in.

The other point to make related to that, that we live now in what has been called - I think rather cornily - the “global village”. I think it was Marshal McLuhan who first made that expression common. It seemed quite fetching then; it does not quite seem now. But at least in the context of a globally contacted world, the minimum consumption that people desire is also influenced by what is going on elsewhere. When we started thinking about poverty when I was going through my school days in (the) 40s and college in (the) 50s, the idea that an average Indian villager might be deprived if he did not have an internet connection would seem unthinkable to me. I did not know about the internet, of course nobody did at that time, but quite aside from that, the whole idea that you want to be in contact with the rest of the world did not come to people as an essential ingredient of living, but it is now. So that the whole issue, the Smithian perspective of the people you mix with and how the standard of living that you need, the commodities that you need in order to do the things that are absolutely normal - namely, mix with people you would like to mix with - that has become a very important factor.

I think two other quick points and then I am going to stop and we are going to have some Q and A I believe. Another issue that is worth considering very much in the context of global poverty is disability. That of course is a big issue that changes the amount of income that you need in order to escape poverty. I had to give a keynote address to a conference arranged by Jim Wolfensohn in the World Bank on disability and in that context gained a massive amount of data. One of the things you have to do before giving a keynote address is to learn something about it. It is a good way of getting oneself educated. I was amazed to find that one way or another, 600 million people in the world have substantial disabilities of a kind that is debilitating. That is 10 per cent of the population - very large. The impact of it can be quite serious, even for a rich country.

There was recently a PhD thesis which I examined by a German young student called (indistinct). Her thesis looked at poverty in the United Kingdom, and using a cut-off rate of 60 per cent of the median income of UK, being the poverty line, she found 17.9 per cent of the UK population fell below that line. If, however, you looked at the families in which there was at least one disabled person, there are two things you have to look at. Disability reduces your ability to earn an income, but it is a double whammy because it also reduces your ability to convert income into the capability to live, and she used a capability-based approach to do the calculation and the numbers suggest that 17.9 per cent for the general population, if you look at the families with at least one person disabled, in terms of just lowness of income, not 17.9 per cent but 23.1 per cent fall below the poverty line income, and if you then adjust the extra income you need in order to compensate for disability, you never fully compensate. You know, with a prosthesis you may be able to walk but never fully, but just the cost of prosthesis, then the percentage below the poverty becomes 47.4 per cent, so nearly half the population.

Now, that affects the total, since this is only a small section of the UK population, it increases the below poverty population for the country as a whole from 17 per cent to 20 per cent. On the other hand, if you look at that seven or eight per cent of the British population that has a disability, then you are dealing with about 50 per cent being affected. Now, that is a very important factor. One of the reasons why it is important, and that is my last point, is the whole importance of health care, which I have already touched on in terms of the issue of social delivery of health, but I end up by mentioning that there are two aspects of health: the bit that is captured very well in things like the Human Development Report, the Human Development Index, which I had a hand in constructing for the UN, it captures the mortality aspect very well, but along with that of course there is a massive disability aspect. If you think of Aids, the amount or the number of people who need caring because of physical illness or because of becoming orphaned is extraordinarily high. So along with the whole issue of spreading knowledge, taking early care and making sure that Aids does not impair life in the way that it is in many parts of the world, especially in Africa but with some threat in other parts too, like in India and China as well, one has to think about the disability creating features of this illness, which is a serious issue to think about.

When I had the privilege of co-chairing the UN-related Human Security Commission along with Sagato Ogata, we did discuss how some types of insecurit(ies) are much more discussed than others. It is, for example, not recognised that on 911, 11th of September 2001, more people died of Aids than died of violence on that very day. And if you take any other day, of course many, many times more people died of Aids, and then if you add to Aids, the malaria, tuberculosis and many other illnesses which still survive which still dwarf Aids in terms of mortality, you have a massive picture.

So we are dealing with challenges in the world in which income remains central, in which making intelligent and humane use of globalisation remains important, but along with that there is an enormous amount of other issues to concentrate on, and that is why I thought that I would choose many dimensions of poverty as a subject.

I could have gone on a little bit more, but I think I should not now, and I should look forward to questions and hopefully some possible answers. I am not quite sure. I mean, I remember when I was a young man in Cambridge, there was a nice sketch about the sanguineness with which the independent nuclear deterrence was being sold in the United Kingdom, and one of the sketches I think in the Footlights Review in Cambridge consisted of the UK Government explaining why having nuclear bombs does not pose any danger to the world at all, it is extremely peaceful, and one of the persons asked the question saying, “I have for you five questions,” to which the UK Government representative said, “And I have five answers.” I am afraid I am not quite in that position of being able to show that I can answer them, but I will try. Thank you.

THE MODERATOR: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, the floor is open. Noel Patten.

MR NOEL PATTEN: I don’t know about that, but you are talking about the health care and the need to drastically improve health care in various parts of the world. Who is going to pay for this? Where is the money going to come from? By that, I am particularly thinking of the ageing population all over the world, and still people retiring at the same age or perhaps even younger, so there is also the issue of the social security payments, and less and less people working for those who are retired, less and less people working for those who need medical benefits and assistance.

PROFESSOR SEN: Thank you very much, it is a very good question. I think the whole issue of how to pay for (it) is serious. Let me say, you have raised two different types of issues there: one is the question of affordability, if you happen to be in a poor country; and secondly, the issue of an ageing population and its impact, which can be particularly serious for relatively rich countries where people tend to live rather longer.

As far as the first is concerned, if there is one great lesson that emerged from the Chinese experience in the pre-reform period, it is that in order to expand health care in a poor country, you don’t need as much resources, in terms of money, as you might think if you were looking by standard in a richer country.

And let me give you an economic analysis. The reason for that is health care basically (is) a very labour intensive activity; it’s doctors, it’s nurses, it’s the whole arrangement connected with it. So that a country which is poor and has low wages, relatively speaking - and I discussed that in my book called “Hunger and Public Action” published in 1989 - while the relative costs are dramatically less in a poor country, which is also why if you take parts of India like Kerala, where the life expectancy is 76 years and has expanded, it has not ended up spending, as a proportion, a dramatically high amount of its resources; it has spent something which is slightly higher than the rest of India, but the difference has not been dramatic.

So one has to be an economist and not look only at this as the supplies that have to be created, but also the relative cost of that and bear in mind that a low wage economy also makes health care, as well as education, basic education, cheaper. That is the first issue.

But the second issue - as you are very right to ask that question, because it is an important question to address - is it affordable? And if you look at many other countries, and in my joint book, the 1989 book co-jointly with Jean Dreze, we discussed a number of other countries like Costa Rica, and so on, which have actually expanded health care at the time when they were still very poor.

The ageing population raises a different issue. I think the whole issue about social security reform in the United States is to a great extent being posed in a way that is not fully informative. One does not have to agree with all the critique that you see, but the idea that there is an immediate danger in the United States does not seem to me to be the case. I mean, I think at least until 2050 the social security would not have been in any kind of deficit anyway.

That does not mean that one should not think about it now. But the issues that you have to look at here at two – are three, actually. The first issue is - and this is a radical issue to consider - whether the way the world is organised today in terms of work and retirement is properly done or not. If anything, there has been a tendency to reduce the retirement age, as in Italy, say, but one of the medical things to emerge is not only that people are living longer, but most of their capacities are also much longer lasting, and this is especially so for non-physical work, and the world has been turning away from physical work to more and more work of a kind that is less endangered by age. So I think the whole issue of retirement has to be considered and taken seriously. That is one of the issues.

The second issue is that if that is the case of (...tape turned over...) it is not the question of saying, “What a pity people live long,” but it is a question of making do with how best to face this problem which is, after all, a reward of goodness rather than badness.

The third thing is to address the whole issue of social health care, because quite a lot of the high expenditure is connected with medical expenses really. And here I think, since I live in the United States and have had the opportunity of looking at their health care system, we have the oddity that the United States certainly has the best health care in the world. If I were suddenly to fall ill, if I wanted treatment – you know, at the moment I have a home in Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, United States. I will go to Cambridge, United States, to have myself treated.

And yet, if you look at the cost effectiveness compared with the percentage of income that goes into health care, the life expectancy - again, in the United States - it is a middle-income country among the rich, not the top flyer. A real issue about how to address the social delivery question - I raised it in the context of poor countries like India and China, but the same issue has to be addressed in the context of the rich countries too. The issue, is there something on the European side to learn?

One of the frustrating things for me in the debate that took place in the Clinton era about health, coverage of all for health insurance, was that the only model that was being considered was Canada, which of course is an extreme model in which no private treatment is allowed. It seems to me impossible to imagine a situation in the United States where the rich could spend as much as they like on a yacht, on buying a villa, but they cannot spend their money in order to get something which affect them most, namely, their own health care.

This does not affect the Canadian rich so much because the United States exists as a country next to it, and that would cease to be the case if United States went through as Canada. The thing to look at would have been the European experience, and we have not got time to discuss it. The varieties of systems there, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany and there is lot to see how the social delivery network could be expanded without choking or in a counter-productive way the possibility of private expenditure in health care also.

So I think in these lines I would like to look for (a) solution to the problem. I think the problem does exist, but I don’t think it’s really as much of a doom scenario as is sometimes made to be. But I am delighted (that) you asked it.

MR JAMES OGILVY: Thank you, Ronnie. My question is recent discussion among G7 countries regarding the forgiveness of debt to third world countries. Is there any marked relationship between forgiving debt and the reduction of poverty among the individuals within those countries, or are the two somewhat different or divergent?

PROFESSOR SEN: Well, I think there is a connection, a clear connection. As you know, the initiative in this particular case is coming primarily from the UK and Gordon Brown in the G7 countries. And the analysis on which it is based, and which I was just two weeks ago – Gordon Brown and I were jointly addressing a conference in Manchester on something else, but I had the chance of talking with him a little on that. The argument it seems to be that in terms of the impact it will have in releasing some of these very poor countries from releasing resources to spend on things like education and health care, we are talking about, could be quite dramatic. So I believe that that is a serious thing to look at.

Against that, you have to look at two things. One is that the last thing you want is a situation in which the instrument of borrowing money becomes unavailable because you are afraid that you may have to forget the debt at some stage, so you have to look at the system, and there is no – any system that carries out a reform of such a radical kind has to pay attention to that.

It is not the same thing as the argument that was presented by the US Government - actually by a friend of mine, John Taylor, a fellow economist whom I have worked together with in the American Economic Association; when I was President of AEA, he was in the Executive Committee, and I know that he is a very humane man too - but the argument that was presented by John was mainly that this would be somehow illegal. I am not sure that I fully understand that argument, because it is really for the question of the legality within the countries to work this out. But it would be quite interesting, especially suddenly if the UN, for example, or actually mainly more the World Bank, if it suddenly did not receive the money, it would do something to finance it, but part of the Gordon Brown plan therefore has been to see how that issue could be addressed.

These are serious issues to be addressed - there is no question - but you also have to bear in mind, since sometimes people are greatly moralist about this, that there is a history of the world in which G7 has reason to be very concerned and take some responsibility. Much of the debt in the third world, particularly Africa, was incurred in the period where military dictatorships were strongly encouraged by the Cold War. Every time a military strongman overthrew a democratically elected government, depending on whether it was pro-Soviet or pro-American, it got support from the Soviet Union or from NATO, and therefore dictators and military rulers never lacked friends. It is that which has done more harm, not just in terms of debt, most of the debt or the bulk of it, a high proportion of it, came from buying military expenditure, military expenditure in that period.

In that I think the Cold Warriors really had a very substantial goal. This was only one of its minor effects, the major effect was a continent which was proceeding towards democracy. I remember visiting first Africa in 1963, Uganda, and it really seemed to be a kind of dramatically nation democracy. I remember writing for a Bombay paper as to how vigorous the journalists were in Uganda compared with the tameness of the Indian journalists. I am afraid within 10 years of that, I think I calculated about 60 per cent of my friends were dead and Africa was turning a page, and with the connivance of the NATO countries on one side and the Soviet Union on the other.

So I think that one has to think that, and there is a legacy of that. Even today, if the war continues in these areas - of course a lot of it, if you are looking at armament sales, it depends on both demand and supply, and the demand of course comes from there. But there is a supply issue too. The availability of arms in the world to feed these very often civil wars remains confined to G7 countries to a great extent. More than 85 per cent of armament exported in the world is exported by G7 countries. It is a dramatically high ratio.

So along with the high philanthropic drawing of the debt forgiveness, one has to consider a total picture of a global order. And what G7 is doing in that context, what it did in the past, since the past is incredibly involved in dealing with debt, as well as what it is doing today.

But the fourth answer - I am sorry, I took the opportunity of your question to broaden it a bit - but the short answer is, yes, it will help a lot, but that does not mean it is an easy solution to look for, because one has to preserve the institution of borrowing and lending, because you don’t want to threaten that in the context of where we want all pardoning of debts.

MR WEIJIAN SHAN: Professor Sen, I very much enjoyed your remarks. If you would allow me to make a few remarks with regard to the pre-reform health care system in China.

PROFESSOR SEN: Yes. Right.

MR WEIJIAN SHAN: I was one of the “barefoot doctors”, as you described, during the Cultural Revolution in China and, as such, I must say that I thought that system was probably the only good thing during the Cultural Revolution. I observed with my own eyes not just the inadequacy of medicine, but (the) total absence of medicine in many parts of China. However, I thought that that system was entirely unsustainable because if there was any freedom of choice, you wouldn’t stay on as a “barefoot doctor” to walk around barefoot. It was not particularly comfortable to start out with, and (the) starvation was even worse, and I am still catching up.

In fact, I was a great admirer of India at that time because - especially the Buddhist religion - as I was so much looking forward to my next life as the present one was so bad. After the Cultural Revolution, I actually thought a lot about this health care system because I saw the breakdown of (the) health care system in the countryside again, where there was absolutely no medicine at all.

It was not until in 1989 that for the first time I visited Taiwan, and by chance I visited one rural clinic where I saw a few young doctors in a very poor part of Taiwan. So I asked them why they liked to stay there to take care of the poor and earning very little income. They told me that they were scholarship students and part of their obligation was to serve in the countryside for at least two years after graduation, very similar to the military scholarship that you get from the United States.

I thought that’s a great system because with freedom of choice, the only way that you can have something like a “barefoot doctors” system is to incentivise people, like providing scholarships when they go to medical school, and I though that China ought to emulate Taiwan in this particular regard. Thank you.

PROFESSOR SEN: I applaud your remarks also very much. My point wasn’t to say that the Chinese health care system in the pre-reform period was in any sense ideal. What I was saying (were) two things: first of all, judged in terms of life expectancy, mortality rates, including infant mortality rates, it had achievement which for that level of income was extraordinarily high. Now, the Taiwanese of course had already, when you looked at ’89 income level(s), that was enormously higher than that of mainland China as a whole, so that in some way(s) the comparison is not all that easy.

But the other thing to look at here, and that is the second point, is that the choice is not just between “barefoot doctors” and badly stocked medical cabinets in rural health care and having private medical insurance only. Many countries in the world have a higher role of delivery of public health care in relatively poor countr(ies). I was giving the example of Kerala which has never had “barefoot doctors” and not in - certainly compared with Taiwan, it would not be regarded as a great achievement or in fact its life expectancy is higher than in Taiwan.

It is a question of whether one has to recognise that there is a role of social delivery of health care which we don’t see in a way in the post 1979 period. Now, in that context I was pointing out that there was considerable achievement even in an earlier period. This does not in any way negate the criticism you made. I think being barefoot is not my favourite way of moving around either.

I was very impressed to see – actually, we had gone to this meeting I was mentioning earlier - Gordon Brown and I - in a conference in Manchester, when we were celebrating, among other things, Manchester’s past, and Richard Cobden, who was one of the great thinkers in the free trade link and one of the Manchester liberals – and also, by the way, one of the things which is often forgotten, one of the most vocal critics of imperialism and vocal critics of spending money on army and navy in the aspect of the 1830s, an aspect that is not completely overlooked. But there he mentioned that in order to have peace between France and England, he is going to walk barefoot to Paris. So I think I recognise that is regarded as a vigorous state to be in, and I don’t doubt that.

But my point, it does not contradict what you were saying; the system they had was very defective in many ways. The question is whether the only alternative is to privatise medicine, and also if you look at the achievement in terms of such criteria with demographers and health statistics with life expectancy and infant mortality, there is a serious issue: why is it that the Chinese life expectancy or the Chinese infant mortality should be going down only from 37 to 30 and not closer to something like 10, I think, as in Kerala? That question, it seems to me, needs to be addressed.

That does not contradict anything whatsoever that you did. But in order to make provision for your next life, we have to make sure that we have a system which learns from the rationality that emerges of a different system, and you have given good reason for being very sceptical of the pre-1979 health arrangement, but one has to combine that scepticism also with the scepticism of a system which has primarily private health care insurance and very little social delivery.

MR KIM: Professor Sen, I am very pleased to have an opportunity to learn about the poverty with your valuable knowledge. I had the chance to embark in preparing for the first Economic and Social Development Plan in Korea. At that time I found one thing: unemployment is one of the biggest reasons of poverty, so maybe job opportunity to create a workplace is very important to Seoul, this kind of issue. In the supply side also, you mentioned the capability to do something is very important. I think that fundamentally education and vocational training is very important to Seoul, to improve the capability. I would like to hear more about your knowledgeable points. Thank you.

PROFESSOR SEN: Thank you. No, I entirely agree absolutely with that. If we had more time, I would have liked to have had a conversation with you on the Korean experience, which is a very important one I think in the history of the world from many points of view, both in terms of the intelligence and the division with which the globalisation challenge was taken on Korea earlier, beginning from a period earlier than that of China in fact, but also the role that education plays in the Korean expansion and development.

Of course, Korea had a long tradition of education-based policies going back to the days among neo-Confucians and so on through the period, and historically that is a big hurdle that Korea had. But it has sometimes overlooked how dramatic the Korean efforts were in the post Second World War period in expanding elementary education. When somebody like Sir Sam Huntington contrast(ed) Korea with Ghana and attributed just the culture, it overlooks the fact that, yes, culture is obviously important, but one form that the cultural expression took in Korea, which was entirely absent in Ghana, was the massive expand from the school education that occurred in the post World War period. And if one was to look for what dramatic difference basic education can make, I think the two countries to look at particularly are Korea and, in an earlier period, Japan from the major Restoration when the educational expand was very great.

So I think these are issues if I had - among the other dimensions of poverty - if I had more time I would have gone into, and I am very grateful that you have allowed me to, given me the opportunity to supplement it. And among the dimensions of poverty to look at, illiteracy is the major one which makes a big difference. I think if you look, say, if you look at the success of Kerala, it began with basic education. It was very lucky in being, I might say, outside the British Empire and Hong Kong has been very lucky in some ways in being inside the British Empire and being part of the global system. Most of India wasn’t all that lucky, but the two native states, Travancore and Cochin, had a very long history of expanding public education. (In) 1817, the Queen of Travancore, Maharani Lakshmi Bayi made a big statement on the importance of education, especially girls’ education, very early for 1817. And I think it had played a major part in the education now. Even the health care thing is really an off-shoot of the basic educational efforts there. So I am very, very glad you made the point.

MS (?)......: Thank you, Professor Sen. Thank you for this opportunity. I am a student from mainland China and I am studying at the City University of Hong Kong. I wonder, because you have already said a lot of things about poverty and you said about absolute income and about inequality, actually I wonder which one is actually important, because you say in 1980s, you say a lot of the reduction of poverty in China is great, and in 1990s it seems the reduction is slower and actually it is about before that – actually, a lot of people, although others see it as poverty but they feel themselves, because the people around them are not as poor as them, so they don’t think them as poor people, but now using the differences of the income and the standards of living, actually the difference is bigger, and so a lot of people are now actually in the poor condition. So I actually wonder which one is important: absolute income or the inequality? If it is the inequality is more important, then it seems that we can – we don’t have a bright future, because most of the Governments are acting in the interests of the wealthy people actually. So what can we do, actually? Thank you.

PROFESSOR SEN: Well, I am delighted with the question and I wish I had the privilege of having you as my student; it would be very nice to have a conversation on this. It’s a very good question. I think the short answer is that both absolute and relative income are important for different reasons. Because many of our capabilities depend on our ability to buy goods, including when the public health service does exist, buying medical care would be one of them, but buying books, being able to go to a movie, to enjoy life in other ways, absolute income is important.

And yet, as Smith (has) pointed out, when, as Ronnie points out, he was in an ostracised situation without his black tie in a dinner here, the relative income is important because if you are not able to buy what others are wearing, or other ways, you don’t have the facilities like cable or internet and so on, then you will feel deprived and then relative income becomes a concern. So I think one has to take a sufficiently plural view to see what is the relatively important – what the importance is of absolute income and of relative income.

Now, since you commented on the 80s on China, let me mention why the 90s would have been an inescapably more difficult period for China, for three different reasons. First of all, (in the) 80s, I think I pointed out, I already mentioned, China had a major mismatch of its lower agricultural productivity and its potential because of a very unfriendly co-operative collective system. So (the) 80s absorbed that and there was a dramatic increase in income and in employment in the way that you could not go on doing it. There was one for catching up, so in the 90s it would have been different.

Secondly, given the fact that the concentration was so much on the agricultural sector, there was (an) industrial expansion, but the whole world of global economy had to be exploited. I (have) mentioned already in Korea; Korea was way ahead at that time in making use of the global world. (The) 90s had to take this up, but the nature of this kind of employment is invariably – it is not the case that development is only about the rich people or some sceptical remark of that kind that you might extend your remark to, but that quite a lot of the globalised effort will immediately affect mainly the rich people to start with, like in India too, where there has a lot of globalisation in India, but it is primarily people who are trained in, you know, higher education and not many others.

So I think in some ways that problem would have come up in the 90s, but the issue is how you could make that wealth more widely shared. And the third issue that with globalisation comes with regional concentration, because things are easy to produce in some areas and not in others.

I remember visiting Shenzhen, I guess it was three years ago, and I was quite impressed by how the city has changed. The dramatic growth is just unbelievable. And you have to think about the problem that globalisation raises in terms of regional concentration. That is not to say that you have to avoid globalisation, but to see the problem and to address it, so these are the issues.

And if you were a student of mine, you and I would have chatted on that, but I am very grateful at least for you to have raised this right now. Thank you.

Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India 2021

Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India

An English grandee of the East India Company depicted riding in an Indian procession, 1825-1830. Photograph: Print Collector/Getty Images
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/29/british-empire-india-amartya-sen

It is true that before British rule, India was starting to fall behind other parts of the world – but many of the arguments defending the Raj are based on serious misconceptions about India’s past, imperialism and history itself
by Amartya Sen

Tue 29 Jun 2021 15.00 AEST
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The British empire in India was in effect established at the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757. The battle was swift, beginning at dawn and ending close to sunset. It was a normal monsoon day, with occasional rain in the mango groves at the town of Plassey, which is between Calcutta, where the British were based, and Murshidabad, the capital of the kingdom of Bengal. It was in those mango groves that the British forces faced the Nawab Siraj-ud-Doula’s army and convincingly defeated it.

British rule ended nearly 200 years later with Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech on India’s “tryst with destiny” at midnight on 14 August 1947. Two hundred years is a long time. What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish?

During my days as a student at a progressive school in West Bengal in the 1940s, these questions came into our discussion constantly. They remain important even today, not least because the British empire is often invoked in discussions about successful global governance. It has also been invoked to try to persuade the US to acknowledge its role as the pre-eminent imperial power in the world today: “Should the United States seek to shed – or to shoulder – the imperial load it has inherited?” the historian Niall Ferguson has asked. It is certainly an interesting question, and Ferguson is right to argue that it cannot be answered without an understanding of how the British empire rose and fell – and what it managed to do.

Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India – podcast

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Arguing about all this at Santiniketan school, which had been established by Rabindranath Tagore some decades earlier, we were bothered by a difficult methodological question. How could we think about what India would have been like in the 1940s had British rule not occurred at all?

The frequent temptation to compare India in 1757 (when British rule was beginning) with India in 1947 (when the British were leaving) would tell us very little, because in the absence of British rule, India would of course not have remained the same as it was at the time of Plassey. The country would not have stood still had the British conquest not occurred. But how do we answer the question about what difference was made by British rule?

To illustrate the relevance of such an “alternative history”, we may consider another case – one with a potential imperial conquest that did not in fact occur. Let’s think about Commodore Matthew Perry of the US navy, who steamed into the bay of Edo in Japan in 1853 with four warships. Now consider the possibility that Perry was not merely making a show of American strength (as was in fact the case), but was instead the advance guard of an American conquest of Japan, establishing a new American empire in the land of the rising sun, rather as Robert Clive did in India. If we were to assess the achievements of the supposed American rule of Japan through the simple device of comparing Japan before that imperial conquest in 1853 with Japan after the American domination ended, whenever that might be, and attribute all the differences to the effects of the American empire, we would miss all the contributions of the Meiji restoration from 1868 onwards, and of other globalising changes that were going on. Japan did not stand still; nor would India have done so.

While we can see what actually happened in Japan under Meiji rule, it is extremely hard to guess with any confidence what course the history of the Indian subcontinent would have taken had the British conquest not occurred. Would India have moved, like Japan, towards modernisation in an increasingly globalising world, or would it have remained resistant to change, like Afghanistan, or would it have hastened slowly, like Thailand?

These are impossibly difficult questions to answer. And yet, even without real alternative historical scenarios, there are some limited questions that can be answered, which may contribute to an intelligent understanding of the role that British rule played in India. We can ask: what were the challenges that India faced at the time of the British conquest, and what happened in those critical areas during the British rule?

There was surely a need for major changes in a rather chaotic and institutionally backward India. To recognise the need for change in India in the mid-18th century does not require us to ignore – as many Indian super-nationalists fear – the great achievements in India’s past, with its extraordinary history of accomplishments in philosophy, mathematics, literature, arts, architecture, music, medicine, linguistics and astronomy. India had also achieved considerable success in building a thriving economy with flourishing trade and commerce well before the colonial period – the economic wealth of India was amply acknowledged by British observers such as Adam Smith.

The fact is, nevertheless, that even with those achievements, in the mid-18th century India had in many ways fallen well behind what was being achieved in Europe. The exact nature and significance of this backwardness were frequent subjects of lively debates in the evenings at my school.
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An insightful essay on India by Karl Marx particularly engaged the attention of some of us. Writing in 1853, Marx pointed to the constructive role of British rule in India, on the grounds that India needed some radical re-examination and self-scrutiny. And Britain did indeed serve as India’s primary western contact, particularly in the course of the 19th century. The importance of this influence would be hard to neglect. The indigenous globalised culture that was slowly emerging in India was deeply indebted not only to British writing, but also to books and articles in other – that is non-English – European languages that became known in India through the British.

Figures such as the Calcutta philosopher Ram Mohan Roy, born in 1772, were influenced not only by traditional knowledge of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian texts, but also by the growing familiarity with English writings. After Roy, in Bengal itself there were also Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Madhusudan Dutta and several generations of Tagores and their followers who were re-examining the India they had inherited in the light of what they saw happening in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their main – often their only – source of information were the books (usually in English) circulating in India, thanks to British rule. That intellectual influence, covering a wide range of European cultures, survives strongly today, even as the military, political and economic power of the British has declined dramatically.

View image in fullscreenThe Gateway of India in Bombay, a monument commemorating the landing of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911. Photograph: robertharding/Alamy

I was persuaded that Marx was basically right in his diagnosis of the need for some radical change in India, as its old order was crumbling as a result of not having been a part of the intellectual and economic globalisation that the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution had initiated across the world (along with, alas, colonialism).

There was arguably, however, a serious flaw in Marx’s thesis, in particular in his implicit presumption that the British conquest was the only window on the modern world that could have opened for India. What India needed at the time was more constructive globalisation, but that is not the same thing as imperialism. The distinction is important. Throughout India’s long history, it persistently enjoyed exchanges of ideas as well as of commodities with the outside world. Traders, settlers and scholars moved between India and further east – China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere – for a great many centuries, beginning more than 2,000 years ago. The far-reaching influence of this movement – especially on language, literature and architecture – can be seen plentifully even today. There were also huge global influences by means of India’s open-frontier attitude in welcoming fugitives from its early days.

Jewish immigration into India began right after the fall of Jerusalem in the first century and continued for many hundreds of years. Baghdadi Jews, such as the highly successful Sassoons, came in large numbers even as late as the 18th century. Christians started coming at least from the fourth century, and possibly much earlier. There are colourful legends about this, including one that tells us that the first person St Thomas the Apostle met after coming to India in the first century was a Jewish girl playing the flute on the Malabar coast. We loved that evocative – and undoubtedly apocryphal – anecdote in our classroom discussions, because it illustrated the multicultural roots of Indian traditions.

The Parsis started arriving from the early eighth century – as soon as persecution began in their Iranian homeland. Later in that century, the Armenians began to leave their footprints from Kerala to Bengal. Muslim Arab traders had a substantial presence on the west coast of India from around that time – well before the arrival of Muslim conquerors many centuries later, through the arid terrain in the north-west of the subcontinent. Persecuted Bahá’ís from Iran came only in the 19th century.

At the time of the Battle of Plassey, there were already businessmen, traders and other professionals from a number of different European nations well settled near the mouth of the Ganges. Being subjected to imperial rule is thus not the only way of making connections with, or learning things from, foreign countries. When the Meiji Restoration established a new reformist government in Japan in 1868 (which was not unrelated to the internal political impact of Commodore Perry’s show of force a decade earlier), the Japanese went straight to learning from the west without being subjected to imperialism. They sent people for training in the US and Europe, and made institutional changes that were clearly inspired by western experience. They did not wait to be coercively globalised via imperialism.

One of the achievements to which British imperial theorists tended to give a good deal of emphasis was the role of the British in producing a united India. In this analysis, India was a collection of fragmented kingdoms until British rule made a country out of these diverse regimes. It was argued that India was previously not one country at all, but a thoroughly divided land mass. It was the British empire, so the claim goes, that welded India into a nation. Winston Churchill even remarked that before the British came, there was no Indian nation. “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator,” he once said.

If this is true, the empire clearly made an indirect contribution to the modernisation of India through its unifying role. However, is the grand claim about the big role of the Raj in bringing about a united India correct? Certainly, when Clive’s East India Company defeated the nawab of Bengal in 1757, there was no single power ruling over all of India. Yet it is a great leap from the proximate story of Britain imposing a single united regime on India (as did actually occur) to the huge claim that only the British could have created a united India out of a set of disparate states.

That way of looking at Indian history would go firmly against the reality of the large domestic empires that had characterised India throughout the millennia. The ambitious and energetic emperors from the third century BC did not accept that their regimes were complete until the bulk of what they took to be one country was united under their rule. There were major roles here for Ashoka Maurya, the Gupta emperors, Alauddin Khalji, the Mughals and others. Indian history shows a sequential alternation of large domestic empires with clusters of fragmented kingdoms. We should therefore not make the mistake of assuming that the fragmented governance of mid-18th century India was the state in which the country typically found itself throughout history, until the British helpfully came along to unite it.

View image in fullscreenAn illustration of British soldiers capturing Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal emperor, in 1857. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

Even though in history textbooks the British were often assumed to be the successors of the Mughals in India, it is important to note that the British did not in fact take on the Mughals when they were a force to be reckoned with. British rule began when the Mughals’ power had declined, though formally even the nawab of Bengal, whom the British defeated, was their subject. The nawab still swore allegiance to the Mughal emperor, without paying very much attention to his dictates. The imperial status of the Mughal authority over India continued to be widely acknowledged even though the powerful empire itself was missing.

When the so-called sepoy mutiny threatened the foundations of British India in 1857, the diverse anti-British forces participating in the joint rebellion could be aligned through their shared acceptance of the formal legitimacy of the Mughal emperor as the ruler of India. The emperor was, in fact, reluctant to lead the rebels, but this did not stop the rebels from declaring him the emperor of all India. The 82-year-old Mughal monarch, Bahadur Shah II, known as Zafar, was far more interested in reading and writing poetry than in fighting wars or ruling India. He could do little to help the 1,400 unarmed civilians of Delhi whom the British killed as the mutiny was brutally crushed and the city largely destroyed. The poet-emperor was banished to Burma, where he died.

As a child growing up in Burma in the 1930s, I was taken by my parents to see Zafar’s grave in Rangoon, which was close to the famous Shwedagon Pagoda. The grave was not allowed to be anything more than an undistinguished stone slab covered with corrugated iron. I remember discussing with my father how the British rulers of India and Burma must evidently have been afraid of the evocative power of the remains of the last Mughal emperor. The inscription on the grave noted only that “Bahadur Shah was ex-King of Delhi” – no mention of “empire” in the commemoration! It was only much later, in the 1990s, that Zafar would be honoured with something closer to what could decently serve as the grave of the last Mughal emperor.

In the absence of the British Raj, the most likely successors to the Mughals would probably have been the newly emerging Hindu Maratha powers near Bombay, who periodically sacked the Mughal capital of Delhi and exercised their power to intervene across India. Already by 1742, the East India Company had built a huge “Maratha ditch” at the edge of Calcutta to slow down the lightning raids of the Maratha cavalry, which rode rapidly across 1,000 miles or more. But the Marathas were still quite far from putting together anything like the plan of an all-India empire.

The British, by contrast, were not satisfied until they were the dominant power across the bulk of the subcontinent, and in this they were not so much bringing a new vision of a united India from abroad as acting as the successor of previous domestic empires. British rule spread to the rest of the country from its imperial foundations in Calcutta, beginning almost immediately after Plassey. As the company’s power expanded across India, Calcutta became the capital of the newly emerging empire, a position it occupied from the mid-18th century until 1911 (when the capital was moved to Delhi). It was from Calcutta that the conquest of other parts of India was planned and directed. The profits made by the East India Company from its economic operations in Bengal financed, to a great extent, the wars that the British waged across India in the period of their colonial expansion.

What has been called “the financial bleeding of Bengal” began very soon after Plassey. With the nawabs under their control, the company made big money not only from territorial revenues, but also from the unique privilege of duty-free trade in the rich Bengal economy – even without counting the so-called gifts that the Company regularly extracted from local merchants. Those who wish to be inspired by the glory of the British empire would do well to avoid reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, including his discussion of the abuse of state power by a “mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies”. As the historian William Dalrymple has observed: “The economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the world’s leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation.”

While most of the loot from the financial bleeding accrued to British company officials in Bengal, there was widespread participation by the political and business leadership in Britain: nearly a quarter of the members of parliament in London owned stocks in the East India Company after Plassey. The commercial benefits from Britain’s Indian empire thus reached far into the British establishment.

View image in fullscreenCalcutta in 1912, illuminated for the occasion of a British royal visit. Photograph: RCAHMS/PA

The robber-ruler synthesis did eventually give way to what would eventually become classical colonialism, with the recognition of the need for law and order and a modicum of reasonable governance. But the early misuse of state power by the East India Company put the economy of Bengal under huge stress. What the cartographer John Thornton, in his famous chart of the region in 1703, had described as “the Rich Kingdom of Bengal” experienced a gigantic famine during 1769–70. Contemporary estimates suggested that about a third of the Bengal population died. This is almost certainly an overestimate. There was no doubt, however, that it was a huge catastrophe, with massive starvation and mortality – in a region that had seen no famine for a very long time.

This disaster had at least two significant effects. First, the inequity of early British rule in India became the subject of considerable political criticism in Britain itself. By the time Adam Smith roundly declared in The Wealth of Nations that the East India Company was “altogether unfit to govern its territorial possessions”, there were many British figures, such as Edmund Burke, making similar critiques. Second, the economic decline of Bengal did eventually ruin the company’s business as well, hurting British investors themselves, and giving the powers in London reason to change their business in India into more of a regular state-run operation.

By the late 18th century, the period of so-called “post-Plassey plunder”, with which British rule in India began, was giving way to the sort of colonial subjugation that would soon become the imperial standard, and with which the subcontinent would become more and more familiar in the following century and a half.

How successful was this long phase of classical imperialism in British India, which lasted from the late 18th century until independence in 1947? The British claimed a huge set of achievements, including democracy, the rule of law, railways, the joint stock company and cricket, but the gap between theory and practice – with the exception of cricket – remained wide throughout the history of imperial relations between the two countries. Putting the tally together in the years of pre-independence assessment, it was easy to see how far short the achievements were compared with the rhetoric of accomplishment.

Indeed, Rudyard Kipling caught the self-congratulatory note of the British imperial administrator admirably well in his famous poem on imperialism:

Take up the White Man’s burden –

The savage wars of peace –

Fill full the mouth of famine

And bid the sickness cease

Alas, neither the stopping of famines nor the remedying of ill health was part of the high-performance achievements of British rule in India. Nothing could lead us away from the fact that life expectancy at birth in India as the empire ended was abysmally low: 32 years, at most.

The abstemiousness of colonial rule in neglecting basic education reflects the view taken by the dominant administrators of the needs of the subject nation. There was a huge asymmetry between the ruler and the ruled. The British government became increasingly determined in the 19th century to achieve universal literacy for the native British population. In contrast, the literacy rates in India under the Raj were very low. When the empire ended, the adult literacy rate in India was barely 15%. The only regions in India with comparatively high literacy were the “native kingdoms” of Travancore and Cochin (formally outside the British empire), which, since independence, have constituted the bulk of the state of Kerala. These kingdoms, though dependent on the British administration for foreign policy and defence, had remained technically outside the empire and had considerable freedom in domestic policy, which they exercised in favour of more school education and public health care.

The 200 years of colonial rule were also a period of massive economic stagnation, with hardly any advance at all in real GNP per capita. These grim facts were much aired after independence in the newly liberated media, whose rich culture was in part – it must be acknowledged – an inheritance from British civil society. Even though the Indian media was very often muzzled during the Raj – mostly to prohibit criticism of imperial rule, for example at the time of the Bengal famine of 1943 – the tradition of a free press, carefully cultivated in Britain, provided a good model for India to follow as the country achieved independence.

View image in fullscreenCorpse removal trucks in Calcutta during the famine of 1943. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

Indeed, India received many constructive things from Britain that did not – could not – come into their own until after independence. Literature in the Indian languages took some inspiration and borrowed genres from English literature, including the flourishing tradition of writing in English. Under the Raj, there were restrictions on what could be published and propagated (even some of Tagore’s books were banned). These days the government of India has no such need, but alas – for altogether different reasons of domestic politics – the restrictions are sometimes no less intrusive than during the colonial rule.

Nothing is perhaps as important in this respect as the functioning of a multiparty democracy and a free press. But often enough these were not gifts that could be exercised under the British administration during imperial days. They became realisable only when the British left – they were the fruits of learning from Britain’s own experience, which India could use freely only after the period of empire had ended. Imperial rule tends to require some degree of tyranny: asymmetrical power is not usually associated with a free press or with a vote-counting democracy, since neither of them is compatible with the need to keep colonial subjects in check.

Asimilar scepticism is appropriate about the British claim that they had eliminated famine in dependent territories such as India. British governance of India began with the famine of 1769-70, and there were regular famines in India throughout the duration of British rule. The Raj also ended with the terrible famine of 1943. In contrast, there has been no famine in India since independence in 1947.

The irony again is that the institutions that ended famines in independent India – democracy and an independent media – came directly from Britain. The connection between these institutions and famine prevention is simple to understand. Famines are easy to prevent, since the distribution of a comparatively small amount of free food, or the offering of some public employment at comparatively modest wages (which gives the beneficiaries the ability to buy food), allows those threatened by famine the ability to escape extreme hunger. So any government should be able stop a threatening famine – large or small – and it is very much in the interest of a government in a functioning democracy, facing a free press, to do so. A free press makes the facts of a developing famine known to all, and a democratic vote makes it hard to win elections during – or after – a famine, hence giving a government the additional incentive to tackle the issue without delay.

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India did not have this freedom from famine for as long as its people were without their democratic rights, even though it was being ruled by the foremost democracy in the world, with a famously free press in the metropolis – but not in the colonies. These freedom-oriented institutions were for the rulers but not for the imperial subjects.

In the powerful indictment of British rule in India that Tagore presented in 1941, he argued that India had gained a great deal from its association with Britain, for example, from “discussions centred upon Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry and above all … the large-hearted liberalism of 19th-century English politics”. The tragedy, he said, came from the fact that what “was truly best in their own civilisation, the upholding of dignity of human relationships, has no place in the British administration of this country”. Indeed, the British could not have allowed Indian subjects to avail themselves of these freedoms without threatening the empire itself.

The distinction between the role of Britain and that of British imperialism could not have been clearer. As the union jack was being lowered across India, it was a distinction of which we were profoundly aware.

Adapted from Home in the World: A Memoir by Amartya Sen, published by Allen Lane on 8 July and available at guardianbookshop.com

This article was amended on 29 June 2021. Owing to an editing error, an earlier version incorrectly referred to Karl Marx writing on India in 1953. The essay was written in 1853.
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Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India 2021