I fail to comprehend the incredibly raving reviews Amartya Sen’s Argumentative Indian has received. Do people just look at the name of the author and write for the dustjacket without reading the contents of the book? Anyway, at last I got the opportunity to read the book and found it extremely boring.

All Amartya Sen has written about is Ashoka, Akbar and anti-Hindutva. It is like, Indian history consisted of only two kings and selected episodes post-Independence. The first part of the book is simply the first couple of pages repeated ad infinitum. I have not read a more cumbersome description of Ashoka and Akbar, or the incessant berating of BJP-RSS-VHP, the Sangh Parivar. Sen seems to think that persistent repetition is the way to establish ideas or concretize opinions. Thus, the first part can at best be described as nauseous.

The second part is a breath of fresh air where Hindutva is dropped, but Ashoka and Akbar continue to reign supreme. I learnt a lot about Rabindranath Tagore as well as about China’s historic relations with India. But while these chapters are written more from a historic point of view with opinions scattered throughout, you are left neither knowing historic facts nor being given the opportunity to form opinions or judgements for yourself. They are just thrust upon you. The chapter on Western imaginations of India even betrays a split personality where Sen repudiates inferior statements with a nationalistic stance and berates superior statements for unreasonable glorification. The constant references to only a handful of writers makes the essay unscholarly.

Part III has chapters on class and gender. I like how Sen deals with the difficult issue of caste, he does not use it unnecessarily to confuse and complicate issues, but only refers to it on rare occasions. I found his essay on women in India illuminating; Sen being a gender economist, he has portrayed the ills of women in India very well with adequate statistics. Although I did not see how it fit with the general theme of the book. He also disagrees with India’s ambitions to become a nuclear power, not only because he is a pacifist, but he argues that India’s development of the bomb lead to Pakistan’s reciprocation which has complicated issues in the subcontinent vis-Ã -vis peace.

The fourth part of the book is again a retelling of the same handful of chapters from Ashoka’s and Akbar’s lives. The chapter on Indian secularism is interesting because it was far less biased that I had expected it to be (the anti-Hindutva voice does not rise to the same crescendo as it usually does with Sen). The essay on Indian calendars is interesting but it soon turns into hymns in praise of Akbar.

Thus, the Argumentative Indian is a boringly repetitive and mediocre work by Amartya Kumar Sen, a Nobel laureate in Economics. Whether the book is on history or India in general, it is an unscholarly, biased and highly opionionated work. Perhaps the book might be better if references to Ashoka and Akbar were removed; oh, but if that were done, the book would be reduced to a pamphlet!

So, I would certainly not recommend the Argumentative Indian, but you are welcome to express your opinion of it below.

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