Arguing about the Argumentative Indian

Since my return to India, I have been drawn to authors of Indian origin or books with an Indian setting. Around this time, I also wanted to read more ""improving"" books as P. G. Wodehouse would have put it. One of the first books I tried to read was The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen.

I am still scratching my head about what this book is about. The book starts with a lot of promise talking about the multi-faceted, multi-religious past of India and how argument (as in debate) and dialog is a central theme in Indian culture citing examples from the Upanishads, Buddhist and Jain texts and the Bhagavat Gita (which in some sense can be considered a debate between Arjuna and Lord Krishna).

Then the book starts making an elaborate argument about how India is really much more than a "Hindu country" (for instance, we could have been called a Buddhist country until the 5th century A.D. ) and makes a strong criticism against the BJP's Hindutva movement along the way. I was fine with this sentiment until Prof. Sen repeated this in multiple forms for a few chapters when I got tired of the subject.

Don't get me wrong, I like to think of myself as secular and I look at BJP's strategy to win elections with as much disapproval as other shady tactics used by parties such as caste politics, casting matinee idols as political heroes and plain old thuggery. The book was compiled in 2004 just after the BJP's electoral defeat. Back then, it might have felt like a timely counterpoint to the Hindutva movement, but as I read it now, especially after BJP's recent electoral repeat, it reads like beating a dead horse. You might have read in recent news reports about the internal squabbles of the BJP.

Besides the BJP did seem to govern a little better than how it campaigned. On the broader point, Prof. Sen may be right in saying that the Hindutva is overstating its point. But is he overstating his? Underplaying a substantial (if not the single most dominant) chunk of our heritage seems dangerous. There is something to be said about managing to remain 80% Hindu even after 600 years (or is it 800?) of non-Hindu rule.

Anyway, I stopped reading after the first few chapters; may be one of you can tell me if I should bother with the rest.

One of the chapters I did find interesting and informative was the one on Rabindranath Tagore and his relationship with Gandhiji. This had a few surprises for me; more on that later.

- Balaji R.