1. REVIEW ARTICLE
The promise of reason
JOHN M. ALEXANDER
Speech serves to indicate not only what is useful
and what is harmful, but also what is just and what is
unjust.
1

2. - Aristotle
Silence is a powerful enemy of social justice.
- Amartya Sen
SURPRISINGLY, both Amartya Sen and V.S.
Naipaul share nostalgia for a kind of "universal
civilisation" - an idea that recognises the value of
human life and spirit everywhere and at the same
time pays tribute to human individuality and cultural
diversity. This, they hope, would one day prevail
over regionalism, casteism, racism and sectarianism
in India and elsewhere in the world. And yet, when
reflecting on India's past and future, Sen and
Naipaul seem to depict contrasting images. Perhaps
it is possible to relate to both these contrasting and
yet undeniable portraits of India, and even begin to
wonder whether the contrast can ever be reconciled.
In The Argumentative Indian that brings together 16
essays on Indian history, culture and identity, Sen
highlights the long-standing argumentative tradition
of India and points out the importance of reviving it
in contemporary social and political life. The book is
an excellent interweaving of facts and values about
India, and could be of interest not only to Indians but
2

3. to anyone who would be interested in a balanced
view of India. The anthology, instead of being a
random collection of disparate essays, provides a
rich variety of perspectives on a central theme: the
urgency of bringing back a culture of argumentation
in confronting problems in public affairs.
The use of arguments rather than physical force and
violence, the practice of dialogue and discussion
rather than a straightforward imposition of one's
views, Sen reminds us, have been integral parts of
Indian tradition and history: "prolixity is not alien to
us in India"; "we do like to speak"; "this is not a new
habit". Sen authenticates this by the fact that India
has been supportive of various religious
experiences: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism,
Islam, Christianity and others. Even more
importantly, Sen corroborates this with India's
intellectual pluralism: heterodoxies as different as
scepticism, agnosticism, atheism and materialism
have coexisted with mainstream religious and
philosophical schools of thought; dissenting opinions
and viewpoints were considered necessary
prerequisites to advancements in literature, science
and mathematics, already from the Vedic period;
many well-developed calendars have been in
practice for a long time in India's multicultural
3

4. history.
What, then, happened to India's argumentative
heritage over the years? One possible reason, Sen
explains in Essay 7, is the preoccupation of the
"exoticist" and "magisterial" interpretations of India
by the West, particularly, during the colonial period
and thereafter. Rationality and argumentation were
projected to be something native and original only to
the West, whereas India's uniqueness was assumed
to consist in its `mystical' and `spiritual' traditions. Of
course, the mystical or spiritual in this context often
meant the absence or an insignificant presence of
intellectual legacy. This tendency seemed to have
dialectically affected Indian self-perception as well.
In their eagerness to stress what are uniquely their
`own' spiritual traits, Indians seemed to have not
only passively accepted a reductionist Western
imaging of Indian intellectual traditions, but have
also failed to keep alive a wide range of Indian
rationalistic trends in logic, epistemology,
psychology, linguistics, economics and political
science.
Along with these, Sen also finds the increasing
tendency to view Indian culture through the narrow
prism of Hindutva and the recent attempts to make a
4

5. selective presentation of Indian history for justifying
anti-secular sentiments as deliberate efforts to
suppress the multiplicity of voices within a larger,
plural Indian identity. Such efforts, Sen decries, are
nothing but miniaturising "the broad idea of a large
India - proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist
present" and replacing it by "the stamp of a small
India, bundled around a drastically down-sized
version of Hinduism". If Tagore were to see the India
of today, Sen writes in Essay 5, he "would be
shocked by the growth of cultural separatism" and
"would have strongly resisted defining India in
specifically Hindu terms, rather than as a
`confluence' of many cultures". In the essay inspired
by Satyajit Ray, Sen finds in Ray a person who
celebrated the "dizzying contrasts" of cultures within
India and insisted on respecting their individuality.
A major part of Sen's anthology, particularly Essays
1-2 and 9-12, does contemplate on the different
ways of bringing back the practice of argumentation.
One preliminary way, Sen points out, is the
possibility for all to participate in fair and effective
electoral politics. But when ballots and elections are
also more broadly linked to a "public expression" of
values of justice, respect and human dignity, and
supported by a "wider participation" of the media,
5

6. civil society groups and the general public in social
criticism, political protest and public agitation, they
can go a long way in sustaining and strengthening
democracy. "Silence", says Sen, "is a powerful
enemy of social justice."
Looking at India's past and present, there are a
number of reasons to be less enthusiastic and even
sceptical about Sen's proposal: Does argumentation
not run the danger of being co-opted by the rich and
the powerful? Do the well-educated and those who
can better articulate and persuade not have an edge
over others to manoeuvre the course of public
discussion? For many years now, social inequalities
based on caste, gender and community have been
legitimised and perpetuated by different religious,
anthropological and even genetic theories biased in
favour of the elite. Owing to democratic politics and
the rule of law, these inequalities can today be
contested. Yet, making use of these democratic
possibilities in order to create a less unequal society
still remains a far distant dream, particularly because
of the prevailing economic and educational
inequalities.
Despite all these contradictions and possible
setbacks, Sen's guiding principle is that
6

7. argumentation can be an ally of the poor and
powerless in resisting hegemony. True, a more
action-oriented political protests and public
agitations to demand a particular right for the poor
will catch the public eye and politicise the issue at
hand. They will also compel political leaders and
motivate policy-makers to take the desired course of
action immediately. And yet when political activism is
not accompanied by public discussions and
intellectual resources, sooner or later, it runs the risk
of losing momentum, spirit and vigour. Indeed,
political activism and critical argumentation should
mutually support each other in order to evoke social
solidarity and to provide an effective political voice to
the poor.
IN India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), the third
book in his non-fiction trilogy on India, Naipaul
captures a different feature of Indian life, different
from the one Sen wishes to revive. To Sen India
may appear to be a land of arguments and reason,
but to Naipaul it comes out as a land of resentments
and rage, although Naipaul would arrive at this
complex pronouncement by a complicated detour.
Furthermore, despite the fact that both Sen and
Naipaul commonly share a nostalgic sentiment for
the onset of universal civilisation, they seem to differ
7

8. from each other in their accounts of how people
come to grasp universal values.
In his first account (1964), Naipaul called India "an
area of darkness", obscured in its poverty and
wretchedness, obliterated in its chaos and ruins,
mimicry and pathologies. In the second (1977), he
called it a "wounded civilisation", wounded by many
centuries of foreign rule, and which has not yet
found its own sense of purpose for transformation
and regeneration. Naipaul often uses words such as
"wounded", "fragmented" and "degenerated" for
societies that are stagnant and rootless.
His capacity to observe and his brilliance to
transform what he observes into words are, in the
third account, less mixed up with his temperament to
provoke and condemn. India then seemed to
Naipaul as if "swallowing its own tail", incapable of
ideology and renewal, unable to break with its past
crisis and failures. But now, it turns out to be a land
of revolutions, mutinies and rebellions.
Independence had come to India like a revolution;
now there were many revolutions within that
revolution. What was true of Bombay was true of
other parts of India as well: of the state of Andhra
Pradesh, of Tamil Nadu, Assam, the Punjab. All over
8

9. India scores of particularities that had been frozen
by foreign rule, or by poverty or lack of opportunity
or abjectness had begun to flow again.
S. SUBRAMANIUM
Amartya Sen.
Naipaul reads the arrival of revolutions in the faces,
words and sentiments of Dalit leaders, Hindu and
Muslim extremists, regional politicians, Sikh
terrorists and naxalite rebels. He discerns that these
revolutions are not just passing events, but rather
they are here to stay. These have, in fact, taken hold
of the imagination of ordinary people, a wide cross-
section of society: clerks, housewives, film
producers, stockbrokers, journalists and holy men.
Also, Naipaul realises that the present revolutions
are so very different from the `proto-revolution' for
9

10. independence. Freedom from the colonial rulers was
worked out more or less by the people at the top.
Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar and others were in the
limelight; people had to just follow. But the series of
`new revolutions' works its way from the bottom:
"people everywhere have ideas now of who they are
and what they owe themselves."
Notwithstanding all these positive signs of life,
Naipaul seems dispirited about what is going on.
Normally, revolution is a threshold for a new era;
social upheavals usher in a new social order.
Naipaul finds that the new revolutions do not have
this great stature. They look more like the failed
`Indian Mutiny' of 1857, with its terrible memories of
brutality, revenge and backlash. They are inhibited
by gossip and petty quarrels, and break up into
"particularities", "little wars", "revolutions within
revolution" and a "million mutinies". In a deliberate or
unintended move to blur reality and fiction, and
probably to say that his words and judgments in the
1990s prevail even now, Naipaul carries over his
dispiritedness to Magic Seeds (2004), where Willie
Chandran, the `half-hero' of Half a Life (2001), goes
on a revolutionary expedition to India only to find
that he has joined the "wrong revolution" and "fallen
10

11. among the wrong people".
After many years of revolutionary campaigns and
imprisonment, he realises that the revolution "had
nothing to do with the village people" and "the poor
are treated as the poor always are".
The recent awakening to one's own claims and
entitlements, in Naipaul's perception, does not also
have finesse. Out of the great revolutions that
history has witnessed so far, emerged a larger idea
about the value and dignity of human beings in
general. But out of the present ones emerge
sectarianism and parochialism: Dalits, Hindus,
Muslims and others would have loyalties first to their
clan or faith; they would have no obligation towards
a "higher" or "general" idea about human solidarity
and brotherhood; the word "brethren" becomes
irony.
And finally, what characterises and sustains the
post-Independence uprisings, for Naipaul, are not
great "ideals" and well thought-out "strategies", but
feelings of anger, rage and resentments.
To awaken to history was to cease to live
instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one's
group the way the outside world saw one; and it was
11

12. to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this
rage. There had been a general awakening. But
everyone awakened first to his own group or
community; every group thought itself unique in its
awakening; and every group sought to separate its
rage from the rage of other groups.
Naipaul discovers that feelings of resentment of
individuals against individuals, groups against
groups is not just a marginal phenomenon, but an
all-India, all-encompassing experience: Ambedkar, a
deified leader of Dalits whose photograph can be
found in every Dalit house, "had remained
embittered to the end"; "male ego is the most
hideous thing in our present society", ventilates a
feminist writer; "the local people were so full of
resentment against those Muslims that they had
clashes with them"; Shiv Sena, the army of Siva,
which wanted Maharashtra to be for Maharashtrians
targeted its anger towards poor migrants of South
India; "I should think that, like any other Indian, I had
no sense of ethical outrage in advocating killing for a
cause", justifies a naxalite rebel; and so on.
Yet, Naipaul is not altogether dispirited. He imputes
a pattern and meaning to the unrest and upheavals.
He realises that people are not forever doomed to
12

13. be crippled by their clan loyalties and group
affiliations. Indeed, they begin to grasp the general
idea of human values.
Excess was now felt to be excess in India. What the
mutinies were also helping to define was the
strength of the general intellectual life, and the
wholeness and humanism of the values to which all
Indians now felt they could appeal. And - strange
irony - the mutinies were not to be wished away.
They were part of the beginning of a new way for
many millions, part of India's growth, part of its
restoration.
Naipaul seems optimistic, but his optimism is
carefully measured out in small doses. Ironically,
Naipaul's realisation of the dawn of humanism on
the surface of Indian life seems a `naturalistic'
reading. It is a growth out of "excess": "group
excess, sectarian excess, religious excess, regional
excess". The liberation from the narrow affiliations of
caste, creed or cult and the appeal to a broader
notion of human values arise not so much out of
reason and choice of individuals and groups, but out
of excess and mutinies. People have indulged
themselves in so much of violence and animosity,
have gone through so much of anxiety and strife,
13

14. and have bottled up so much of resentment and
hatred, that they cannot go on any more. Now at last
they begin to realise how senseless and
shortsighted they have so far been.
IN narrative literature and social philosophy, there
are two different ways of viewing human
advancements. The first one, reminiscent in some
ways of the 17th century philosopher Hobbes' view
of society, suggests that societies, as it were,
progress towards the recognition of the values of
order, toleration, justice and respect out of an
inevitable necessity: periods of bloody and
prolonged war create a longing for peace and
agreements; too much of uncertainties and
fragmentation create nostalgia for stability and
wholeness; fear of anarchy and social chaos lead to
toleration and rules of justice. One does not have to
acknowledge, on this view, the role of moral
reasoning or sympathy in society's progress.
Perhaps Naipaul tries to infuse this moral scepticism
into his narratives. Without doubt, his narratives
about India are literary masterpieces. But his
invocation of the notion of excess in order to explain
the dawn of humanism and universal civilisation
leaves his narratives rather unbalanced. Moreover, a
14

15. general assumption about the lack of moral
motivations and reasoned choices in individuals and
groups prior to the recognition of humanism of
values, and the idea that people arrive at the thought
of universal civilisation out of excess can make one
doubt whether Naipaul is telling the whole story
about India and her people.
Resentment is a complex and compound human
emotion. Perhaps it may not be as overt as anger,
but it can cause bouts of unmanageable violence
and rage. When argumentation is not mediated and
resolved amicably, it is likely to leave residuals of
resentments in the participants. There is first and
foremost a kind of resentment that arises due to
some misfortune or loss of self-respect suffered by
individuals and groups in society. But there is also
another kind of resentment that arises due to envy
or a lack of magnanimity at the success or prosperity
of others. Moreover, the degree of resentment can
indeed be constructed to an irresolvable intensity if
the victims - rightly or wrongly - are made to see that
their misfortune was deliberately intended by the
offender. Likewise, the intensity of resentment can
be severe when the success or prosperity of my
neighbour is perceived to be undeserved.
15

16. Quite paradoxically, most individuals and groups of
Naipaul's narratives are presented as if carrying with
them extreme forms of resentment devoid of any
moral reasoning and sympathy. References to
stories, anecdotes and `subaltern' literature of how
individuals, groups and the nation as a whole
through democracy and argumentation, successfully
or unsuccessfully, work their way out of resentments
could have made Naipaul's narratives more
complete. Towards the very end of India: A Million
Mutinies Now, Naipaul does make a passing
reference to the "Indian state" as the "source of law,
civility and reasonableness". However, this is
somehow overshadowed by his overall
dispiritedness about the mutinies and their
protagonists, and by his preoccupation with the
notion of excess.
A SECOND plausible view of social progress is what
Sen seems to advocate and hope for. Not only does
Sen acknowledge fully the role of moral reasoning
and sympathy in human advancements, but he also
realises that dialogue, argumentation and public
deliberation are some of the surer ways of enriching
our moral imagination and universal convictions. In
The Argumentative Indian, Essay 13, Sen writes:
16

17. The possibility of reasoning is a strong source of
hope and confidence in a world darkened by horrible
deeds. It is easy to understand why this is so. Even
when we find something immediately upsetting, or
annoying, we are free to question that response and
ask whether it is an appropriate reaction and
whether we should really be guided by it. We can
reason about the right way of perceiving and treating
other people, other cultures, other claims, and
examine different grounds for respect and tolerance.
RAJEEV BHATT
V.S. Naipaul.
Sen does not deny that individuals and societies
have their dark moments. Dialogue, toleration and
argumentation may have been India's valuable
17

18. heritage. But these have always existed
concomitantly with bloody battles, communal killings,
caste based atrocities and violence against women.
Sen is also aware that often an unguarded reason
itself can be the cause of moral atrocities.
Nevertheless, Sen counts heavily on the capacity of
human beings to step back in order to reflect
critically and consider different course of actions.
The possible dangers of uncritical reasoning, argues
Sen, require not an endorsement of moral
scepticism, but rather a further critical scrutiny of
reason and a liberal encouragement of plurality of
voices.
Sen's plea for the revival of argumentative tradition
seems to make sense. In 1829, Raja Ram Mohan
Roy's anti-sati (widow burning) campaign
successfully led to a law against the practice of sati
and eventually paved the way for its disappearance
from social life. Even though Roy and many others
around him were convinced that sati was a morally
outrageous act, a wider support for the campaign
was hard to come by until Roy marshalled different
arguments and initiated a public discussion on the
issue. He had to base his case first and foremost on
a critical reading of the shastras (Hindu scriptures) in
order to argue that the justification of sati was sheer
18

19. bad hermeneutics. Simultaneously, Roy also had to
convince the then British government that, even if it
meant an alleged interference in the religious affairs
of people, it had a moral duty to outlaw a practice
which was nothing short of murder. Above all, Roy
had to expose to the public the fact that what really
motivated sati was not religious commitment, but
rather the greed of widows' relatives to increase their
own share of inheritance and marital property.
Indeed, Roy's multi-pronged approach can continue
to inspire efforts to counteract many deeply-
embedded social evils.
Sen's eagerness to revive argumentation has
philosophical aspirations as well. In Politics, Book I,
Chapter 2, Aristotle assigns a political significance to
the capacity of human beings to speak and
communicate, and elevates this capacity to the very
condition of being human. Here, Aristotle, at first, is
amazed by the number of commonalities between
animals and humans especially by their social
nature. Keen, therefore, to suggest a trait that would
be typically human, he points out that it is the
capacity for "speech" (logos) that distinguishes
humans from non-human animals: animals have
only "voice" (phone) and use them to communicate
their feelings of pain and pleasure, whereas humans
19

20. have speech and use them to express not only what
is useful and hurtful, but also what is just and unjust.
Argumentation, however, is a double-edged sword.
It can positively be used to resist hegemony and to
pave the way for a more equitable society. But it can
also be manipulated by the elite to work in their
favour. That is why when arguments are biased in
favour of the privileged and well-educated and when
the voices of the powerless are not listened to,
resentment may seem inevitable. Oddly enough,
Aristotle himself cannot be completely innocent of
certain forms of elitism. Although he pointed out that
being human fundamentally involves a public sphere
so that citizens can participate and interact with
fellow citizens through their speech and action, he
did not draw this insight within an egalitarian
framework. He seemed to have easily accepted the
idea of his time that certain sections of society like
slaves, labourers and women did not have the free
time and qualities required for a fuller participation in
political life. The revival of Indian argumentative
tradition, therefore, can shed light not only on the
inconsistencies in Aristotle's position, but also on the
contradictions in Indian social life.
References:
20

21. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian (London:
Allen Lane/Penguin, 2005), pages 432.
V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now [1990]
(London: Vintage, 1998), pages 520.
V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization [1977]
(London: Picador, 2002), pages 161.
V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness [1964] (London:
Picador, 2002), pages 290.
V.S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds (London: Picador, 2004),
pages 294.
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