The Argumentative Indian
by Amartya Sen
First Posted Aug 2014
I heard on a podcast recently someone who said they “probably only have time left for less than 2,000 books in their lifetime.” Thinking about mortality in that consumptive way—how many more RPGs will I play? How many more musings will I add to this website? How many more songs will I love? Is bonkers to me. I won’t do it, else I fall into attempting to maximize my leisure input.
That said, when I look at the month or so I was willing to spend on a book like this a decade ago, I can’t help but see a child of infinite possibility. I cannot see myself doing it now. In late 2024, my non-fiction intake has slowed to a crawl (I suspect the weekly dose of non-fiction articles in The New Yorker have tamped my enthusiasm for the format) but also, my time for personal projects, be they reading, writing, or video games, is tight. Sorry twitter, sorry tiktok, you were first to go. But long, dense, random non-fiction has also flown out the window. Gotta make the most of those 2000 remaining books.
Time spent browsing message boards, gobbling tweets, combing through comment sections, and parsing truth from exaggerated facebook posts adds up quickly—the simple volume of online text consumed adds dozens of book-lengths to yearly read lists. That the text is proffered in nugget-sized chunklets is not the only siren song of social networking systems—there is an ever-present promise of interactivity. You can comment, even if you don’t comment. It deftly skirts the dead-text problem—with which decades of academic textbook assignments conspired to taint the word "non-fiction"—of the incessant droning from a distant, monolithic voice of tedium that makes sure the reader has been bludgeoned with just enough datapoints about the subject to not question the shallowness of the information conveyed.
It’s not like the articles that populate the internet are story-based fiction: they are editorials; memoirs; peer reviews. In other words, all y’all are reading non-fiction already. It is just shallow (and I don’t mean that as a pejorative) like a textbook (it is admittedly hard to interpret “like a textbook” as anything but insulting). It’s a jumping-off point, one hundred and forty characters that lead to Wikipedia, to a Netflix documentary, to a series of online articles. Eventually you find yourself reading The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. At least, I think that’s how it’s supposed to work. Otherwise, the internet is simply one big exercise in dilettantism—a lot about a little, but not enough even for ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat.
And it is precisely this non-deprecatory superficiality that is the power of the internet; the ability to flutter from one topic to another and link seemingly disparate concepts into a—forgive the anachronism—web of tangled and tenebrous thoughts is the quintessentially human organizational schema: patterns in the stars; meaning from chaos; signals in the noise. Sometimes the links just happen, even in curated-narrative nonfiction. It is in the depths of these thick tomes that you truly feel the divine hand of serendipity as opposed to the tepid coincidence of two articles citing the same source. It makes you learn something; more than that, it makes you remember something long past closing the final page.
When discussing the cultural drift of Buddhism, The Argumentative Indian referenced something that tripped my kismet alarm:
One of the positive contributions Buddhist connections produced in China is the general sense that even the Chinese must, to some extent, look outwards. Indeed, not only did Buddhism suggest that there were sources of wisdom well outside China, but it also led to the tendency of many Chinese intellectuals to go abroad, in particular to India, in search of enlightenment and understanding. Furthermore, since these visitors to India came back with tales of wonderful things they had seen in India, it was difficult to take an entirely Sino-centric view of world civilization. There were also other admirable sites and achievements they could see on the way to India. For example, Xuanzang in the seventh century marvelled at the gigantic Bamiyan statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan, which he saw as he approached India from the West (on the circuitous route he had taken via Khotan).
Gigantic Bamiyan statues that were marvelous enough to make the cut for a millennia-old travelogue? Surely those would be worth visiting. And yet, the hunt for lapis lazuli in Color: A Natural History of the Palette—a mere two books prior in my library queue—brought me face-to-face with cruel truth of the Bamiyan Buddhas:
And I wondered then, as I sat on the head of the great Buddha of Bamiyan, whether it was in that valley far below us that somebody once, fourteen centuries ago, had sat experimenting with blue powder and brown glue, and had discovered—by adding wood ash perhaps—how to make lapis lazuli into paint.
Those Buddhas and frescos were destroyed eleven months later. The Taliban used rockets for two days of bombardment, and allowed their photography rule to be broken, sending out images of bare arches where once there had been two guardians of a forgotten faith. In their week of fame and destruction the statues were seen and discussed by people all round the world: people who had never heard of the Buddhas of Bamiyan were shocked that now they would be unable to see them for themselves. On most levels it was a terrible cultural tragedy. But on one level it was not. Buddhism is a faith that understands impermanence. When else in their long history could these two vast and armless trunks of stone standing in the desert have reminded so many people in so many countries that nothing lasts forever.
I didn’t excerpt that during my review of Color because it didn’t factor in overly much in my general interpretation. But the post facto knowledge of their seventh century citation by Chinese tourist Xuanzang—not the mention the coincidence of two references from wildly divergent books—made the whole sequence a bit surreal. I feel as though I now lay some sort of personal claim on the Bamiyan statues.
Jumping from link to link and page to page on the internet inures one somewhat to the majesty of the cross-referential existence of a connected universe; convergence in details buried deep within 300-page books is the type of thing that might goad a reader into seeking out their next book based on a desire to learn more about those star-crossed statues.
The actual way I landed on The Argumentative Indian was visiting an exhibit about Krishna at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It prompted the revelation that I knew almost nothing about India. Among the facts that I did not know was that I shouldn’t elide India and Hinduism, as I so clearly did at the Met’s Krishna exhibit:
A secular democracy which gives equal room to every citizen irrespective of religious background cannot be fairly defined in terms of the majority religion of the country. There is a difference between a constitutionally secular nation with a majority Hindu population and a theocratic Hindu state that might see Hinduism as its official religion (Nepal comes closer to the latter description than does India).
It is facts like these that poke giant holes in the elementary worldview pressed upon students from general, wide-angle lectures and the dreaded uniform curriculum textbook. It seems inevitable that, once the membrane is pierced, the foundational basis of shorthand existence can’t restrain you:
Is India really the Hindu counterpart of Pakistan? When British India was partitioned, Pakistan chose to be an Islamic Republic, whereas India chose a secular constitution. Is that distinction significant? It is true that, in standard Western journalism, little significance is attached to the contrast, and those in India who would like the country to abandon its secularism often cite this ‘forced parity’ in Western vision as proof enough that there is something rather hopeless in India’s attempt at secularism when the new masters of global politics cannot even tell what on earth is being attempted in India.
Conversations about Indian democracy, if taught at all, are "attribute[d] to British influence despite the fact that such an influence should have worked similarly for a hundred other countries that emerged from an empire on which the sun used not to set.” It’s not just a Western bias, it’s a shallowness bias—it is much easier to pigeonhole and stereotype, and shorthand works well enough to keep us going. We ignore the tiny and the massive within Newtonian physics and round the hell out of most remainders in casual math; it should be no surprise that general-policy History and Politics are occasionally lackadaisical with the facts that aren’t directly in your face at the moment:
Some cultural theorists, allegedly ‘highly sympathetic’, are particularly keen on showing the strength of the faith-based and unreasoning culture of India and the East, in contrast with the ‘shallow rationalism’ and scientific priorities of the West. This line of argument may well be inspired by sympathy, but it can end up suppressing large parts of India’s intellectual heritage.
In this pre-selected ‘East-West’ contrast, meetings are organized, as it were, between Aristotle and Euclid on the one hand, and the wise and contented Indian peasants on the other. This is not, of course, an uninteresting exercise, but it is not pre-eminently a better way of understanding the ‘East-West’ cultural contrast than by arranging meetings between, say, Aryabhata (the mathematician) and Kautilya (the political economist) on the one hand, and happily determined Visigoths on the other.
It is these deeper dives that really draw me into narrative nonfiction—there is always something new right around the corner. And even if you only come away with one piece of information that stands on its own—the relentless juxtaposition of India and Pakistan that fits a convenient shorthand narrative but isn’t very true—there might be something that will linger and float in the background until the next wholly unrelated nonfiction book approaches it from a new angle and you learn it: the equivalent to the initial interaction with the Bamiyan statues in Color.
And this is my major concern with The Argumentative Indian; it is a compilation novel of the author’s articles over the past decade. You see the same things, referenced again and again; compilation books are not only repetitive—how much text is wasted skimming the surface of the Gujurat Massacre ten separate times, rather than hitting it once with depth and vigor—but the tone is so disparate there is next to no authorial voice to guide you through the narrative. Any sense of uniqueness or cohesion on the part of an author is pressed flat by the need to match the format in which the text originally appeared; New York Review of Books; New Republic; Financial Times; et al.
Each chapter is stand-alone; you will undoubtedly pull the fantastic knowledge from the trove, but the cost is high:
The movement east of Indian trigonometry to China was part of a global exchange of ideas that also went west around that time. Indeed, this was also about the time when Indian trigonometry was having a major impact on the Arab world, which would later influence European mathematics as well, through the Arabs. Some verbal signposts to the global movement of ideas can be readily traced. A good example is the transformation of Aryabhata’s Sanskrit term jya for what we now call sine: jya was translated, through proximity of sound, into Arabic jiba (a meaningless word in Arabic) and later transformed into jaib (a bay of a cove in Arabic), and ultimately into the Latin word sinus (meaning a bay or a cove), from which the modern term ‘sine’ is derived. Aryabhata’s jya was translated in Chinese as ming and was used in such tables as yue jianliang ming, literally ‘sine of intervals’.
It requires from the reader a dedication to break through the same thematic openings and approach the same revelatory summits each time; it is sitting down with an album of remixes—you have to be really into the song to even recognize, let alone appreciate, the subtle differences. The connections are there, but they don’t feel organic—you’re not discovering, you’re being marched through the same worn paths that the author has tread a thousand times with a thousand other tour groups. There is no kismet when the same sources, examples, and events are used the same way by the same author in a dozen unconnected essays. There is no Bamiyan moment to be found within these pages:
Tagore’s criticism of patriotism is a persistent theme in his writings. As early as 1908, put his position succinctly in a letter replying to the criticism of Abala Bose, the wife of a great Indian scientist, Jagadish Chandra Bose: ‘Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.’
But then, perhaps the strength of The Argumentative Indian is unknowable until the next non-fiction book you pick up cites Tagore and sends your kismet alarm to ringing.