India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 01 :: Jan. 02 - 15, 1999

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EXCELLENCE

A special homecoming

Adulation and affection greet Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in Dhaka, Santiniketan and Calcutta, the places most closely associated with his childhood and youth.

PARVATHI MENON
in Calcutta

POPULAR joy and affection greeted Amartya Sen, the winner of the 1998 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, on his December visit to Dhaka, Santiniketan, and Calcutta. These are the places most closely associated with his childhood and youth in Bengal. Men, women and children gathered in large numbers at railway stations and airports to greet Sen; they lined the streets along which he drove and thronged public functions at which he spoke; they stood patiently outside the gates of his home in Santiniketan, waiting for a chance to see him and, if lucky, speak to him, get an autograph and shake his hand. They were celebrating the success of one of their own.

Santiniketan in particular accorded Sen a homecoming that had a special warmth. Sen was born and did most of his schooling there. His family home is there and he visits Santiniketan every year. His maternal grandfather Kshitimohan Sen, a friend and associate of Rabindranath Tagore, was an outstanding scholar of early Indian languages, medieval cultures and traditions. His parents, Ashutosh Sen and Amita Sen, finally settled in Santiniketan after his father retired from the Union Public Service Commission.

If Sen seemed initially to be somewhat uncomfortable with, though also clearly moved by, the public adulation shown him, he was in no way daunted by it, taking even the physical jostling by the enthusiastic crowds that mobbed him with good humour. "I want to unwind, get back into the rhythm of life," he said at a news conference in Santiniketan. The press of public commitments in the short time he was there perhaps did not quite allow for the fulfilment of that wish. He handled the public response to the award with grace and courtesy, and used the forums provided by public receptions and press conferences to speak on matters that have been of academic and social concern to him.

SUSHANTA PATRONOBISH
Amartya Sen speaks at the Amra Kunj, or mango grove, where he was felicitated by the Visva-Bharati University. Rabindranath Tagore was honoured here after he won the Nobel Prize in 1913.

A recent biography of Tagore tells us that 85 years ago he (Tagore) reacted with weariness to the ecstatic public response to the Nobel Prize (Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, Bloomsbury, 1995). Tagore, the authors say, could not come to terms with the publicity the Prize brought with it and with what he thought was the hypocrisy in some of the praise he received. "The perfect whirlwind of public excitement it has given rise to is frightful," Tagore wrote to a friend. "It is almost as bad as tying a tin can to a dog's tail making it impossible for him to move without creating noise... Really the people honour the honour in me and not myself. The only thing that compensates for this is the unfeigned joy and pride that the boys of any school feel at this occasion."

AMARTYA SEN attended two major functions in Santiniketan. The first of these was the felicitation by the Visva-Bharati University in the Amra Kunj (or mango grove), where Tagore was similarly honoured after winning the Nobel Prize in 1913. The second was a public meeting organised by the Bolpur Citizens Committee.

The early morning function at the Amra Kunj was marked by the elegance and gentle pace that are characteristic of that unusual campus. Sen, dressed in white dhoti and kurta with a yellow batik scarf around his neck, was brought to the stage by a procession of young children and members of the University. Vice-Chancellor Dilip Sinha presented Santiniketan's eminent son a `manpatra', a letter of honour or felicitation, which was read out in Sanskrit and Bengali.

Sen spoke first in Bengali, then in English ("You will be pleased to hear that I shall not give you a Sanskrit version," he joked). His talk focussed on four important aspects of Tagore's thought that were reflected in the education imparted in Santiniketan. The first feature of Tagore's thought was his firm belief in the "non-fragility" of Indian culture and civilisation; he believed that it was broad and of many parts, each related to and influenced by the other. Tagore, said Sen, did not believe that there was a conflict between the cultures and civilisations of the East and the West, and was against "closing the shutters" to outside influences. Secondly, the importance that Tagore gave to "reasoning in freedom" was foundational to his beliefs. The third significant aspect of Tagore's thought was his insistence that the tolerance of injustice was as bad as perpetrating injustice: "Therefore, to assume that we do not have the obligation to counter intolerance is wrong," Sen said. Finally, there was Tagore's "profound recognition" of one of the "central concerns of human life - the ability to create enjoyment for oneself and for others even in adverse circumstances."

THE public meeting organised by the Bolpur Citizens Committee on December 22 was special in another way: the privileged audience were children from schools nearby, with the adults banished to the side stands. The children were quite unputdownable; they chattered on until Sen made his appearance and they cheered lustily as he walked up to the dais. The reception committee here was headed by Member of Parliament Somnath Chatterjee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Present on the dais along with the leading citizens of Bolpur was the freedom fighter Pannalal Dasgupta.

Sen was greeted with songs, bouquets and gifts - and of course with speeches. An unusual item on the programme was a series of readings from Tagore and Sen, intended to bring out the similarity in some of their ideas, as for example on deprivation, education and women's education. This idea was conceived by Prof. Sunil Sengupta, an economist who has worked with Sen on studies of rural development.

India's poor performance in primary education and the need to raise the demand that it be made a fundamental right constituted the central point in Sen's speech here. He called upon everyone to demand that primary education be made a fundamental right.

SUSHANTA PATRONOBISH
At the Bolpur railway station.

LALIT MAJUMDAR, who taught Sen English in classes seven to nine in Santiniketan, was one of those who could not get past the security guards at Pratichi's gate. He got around the problem by posting a card to his old student. "I posted Amartya a card to observe the golden jubilee of a postcard he sent me in 1948." Majumdar chuckled as he showed this writer the 50-year-old keepsake, carefully laminated and preserved. In it, the young Amartya, elected secretary of the Seva Vibhag or social service unit of the students' association, asks "Lalitda" for textbooks, notebooks and slates for a night school for poor children that the unit ran in Ballavpur village, two miles away from Santiniketan. "Even as a young boy he had a deep, active and genuine interest in social welfare, especially mass education," Majumdar recalls. He remembers Sen as an "intelligent and alert" child who "was always courteous to his teachers". Sen went to visit his teacher one evening during the course of his stay in Santiniketan.

"Amartya was very outgoing, you know," said Dipankar Chatterjee, a friend and classmate of Sen, who retired as Head of the Department of Physics in Santiniketan. Sen stood first and Chatterjee second in the ISc (Intermediate Science) examination ("My dubious claim to fame," jokes Chatterjee). "Amartya would study hard at night and do other things during the day, so people would say he never worked but still did well!" recalled Chatterjee.

AMARTYA SEN returned to Calcutta from Santiniketan, and so to another round of public engagements and meetings. On one occasion, soon after he received the Nobel Prize, Rabindranath Tagore is reported to have said to his biographer, Edward Thompson: "I shall get no peace now, Mr. Thompson." Neither, it seems, shall Amartya Sen.