Amartya Sen is a Nobel Prize-winning philosopher and economist whose work has had a global impact on how to address many issues, such as welfare, human development, hunger and poverty. He’s back at work World citizen. Memoirs (Odile Jacob, 480 pages, 26.90 euros), about the thinkers and events that shaped his career.
It was the Nobel Prize, the first received in Asia, in 1913, that gave your parents the idea to call you Amartya, which means “immortal” in Sanskrit. What role did writer Rabindranath Tagore play in your life?
Rabindranath [1861-1941] founded the Santiniketan school [Bengale-Occidental], where I had the opportunity to study, because my parents refused to settle in Dhaka or Calcutta, fearing Japanese bombing during the Second World War. It is the only place in India where you learn about Africa, Asia, Europe or Latin America, and not just about India or the British Empire. And then the school emphasizes awakening curiosity rather than a race to be the best.
Rabindranath was also one of the few intellectuals who feared nationalism at a time when India was struggling for independence. He was also careful to separate his criticism of British imperialism from its people or culture. He was also one of the first to warn of the dangers of divided communitarianism according to religious affiliation. We are seeing disastrous results today with the government of India, which is one of the most terrible in the world, because it is communitarian in the strictest sense of the term, when it attacks Muslims and propagates the idea that Hindus make up a nation.
Did the separation between India and Pakistan, the independence era, and more generally riots between Hindus and Muslims keep you away from religion?
At the age of 12, I kept telling my grandfather that I didn’t believe in any God, and he later introduced me to the Lokayata school, a Hindu philosophical doctrine from ancient India. This is a philosophy that denies the existence of anything but matter. My father was a chemistry teacher, and his assistant had shown me in his lab how mixed liquids could change shape and color, and from that day on I thought that’s how life arose.
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