Amartya Sen is a Nobel Prize-winning philosopher and economist whose work has had a global influence on the way many issues are addressed, such as well-being, human development, famine and poverty. He returns in his work Citizen of the world. Memoirs (Odile Jacob, 480 pages, 26.90 euros), on the thinkers and events that shaped her career.
It is a Nobel Prize, the first to have received it in Asia, in 1913, which gives your parents the idea of calling you Amartya, which means “immortal” in Sanskrit. What role has the writer Rabindranath Tagore played in your life?
Rabindranath [1861-1941] founded the school of Santiniketan [Bengale-Occidental], where I had the chance to study, since my parents refused to settle in Dhaka or Calcutta, for fear of Japanese bombardments during the Second World War. It was the only place in India where you learned about Africa, Asia, Europe or Latin America, and not just about India or the British Empire. And then the school emphasized the awakening of curiosity rather than the race for excellence.
Rabindranath was also one of the few intellectuals to worry about nationalism at a time when India was struggling for independence. He was also careful to dissociate his criticism of British imperialism from his people or his culture. He is also one of the first to warn against the danger of communitarianism which divides according to religious affiliation. We are seeing the devastating results today with the Indian government, which is one of the most appalling in the world, because it is communitarian in the narrowest sense of the term, when it attacks Muslims and propagates the idea that Hindus form a nation.
Did the partition between India and Pakistan, at the time of independence, and more generally the riots between Hindus and Muslims keep you away from religion?
At the age of 12, I kept telling my grandfather that I did not believe in any God, and he then introduced me to the Lokayata school, a Hindu philosophical doctrine from ancient India. It is a philosophy that rejects 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 ever since that day I’ve thought that’s how life appeared.
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