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
The Argumentative Indian
Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Economics in 1998 for his contribution in the
field of welfare economics. He is Lamont
Professor at Harvard.
This text forms the opening sections of the first
essay in Sen’s book of the same title published
in 2005. The sub-title of the book is ‘Writings
on Indian Culture, History and Identity’. Sen
argues in this essay that in India there has
Amartya Sen been a long tradition of questioning the truth of
Born 1933 ideas through discussion and dialogue.

Prolixity is not alien to us in India. We are able to talk at

some length. Krishna Menon’s* record of the longest speech
ever delivered at the United Nations (nine hours non-stop),
established half a century ago (when Menon was leading
the Indian delegation), has not been equalled by anyone
from anywhere. Other peaks of loquaciousness have been
scaled by other Indians. We do like to speak.
This is not a new habit. The ancient Sanskrit epics,
the Ramayana . and the Mahabharata, which are frequently
compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, are colossally
longer than the works that the modest Homer could
manage. Indeed, the Mahabharata alone is about seven
times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together.
The Ramayana . and the Mahabharata are certainly great
* Krishna Menon was India’s Defence Minister from 1957 to 1962. He led the Indian delegation
to the United Nations, and on 23 January 1957 delivered an unprecedented 9-hour speech
defending India’s stand on Kashmir.

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epics: I recall with much joy how my own life was vastly
enriched when I encountered them first as a restless
youngster looking for intellectual stimulation as well as
sheer entertainment. But they proceed from stories to
stories woven around their principal tales, and are
engagingly full of dialogues, dilemmas and alternative
perspectives. And we encounter masses of arguments and
counterarguments spread over incessant debates and
disputations.


The arguments are also, often enough, quite
substantive. For example, the famous Bhagavad Gita, which
is one small section of the Mahabharata, presents a tussle
between two contrary moral positions —Krishna’s emphasis
on doing one’s duty, on one side, and Arjuna’s focus on
avoiding bad consequences (and generating good ones), on
the other. The debate occurs on the eve of the great war
that is a central event in the Mahabharata. Watching the
two armies readying for war, profound doubts about the
correctness of what they are doing are raised by Arjuna,
the peerless and invincible warrior in the army of the just
and honourable royal family (the Pandavas)
.. who are about
to fight the unjust usurpers (the Kauravas).
Arjuna questions whether it is right to be concerned
only with one’s duty to promote a just cause and be
indifferent to the misery and the slaughter—even of one’s
kin—that the war itself would undoubtedly cause. Krishna,
a divine incarnation in the form of human being (in fact,
he is also Arjuna’s charioteer), argues against Arjuna. His
response takes the form of articulating principles of action—
based on the priority of doing one’s duty—which have been
repeated again and again in Indian philosophy. Krishna
insists on Arjuna’s duty to fight, irrespective of his
evaluation of the consequences. It is a just cause, and, as
a warrior and a general on whom his side must rely, Arjuna
cannot waver from his obligations, no matter what the
consequences are.

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Krishna’s hallowing of the demands of duty wins the

argument, at least as seen in the religious perspective.
Indeed, Krishna’s conversations with Arjuna, the Bhagavad
Gita, became a treatise of great theological importance in
Hindu philosophy, focusing particularly on the ‘removal’ of
Arjuna’s doubts. Krishna’s moral position has also been
eloquently endorsed by many philosophical and literary
commentators across the world, such as Christopher
Isherwood and T. S. Eliot. Isherwood in fact translated the
Bhagavad Gita into English. This admiration for the Gita,
and for Krishna’s arguments in particular, has been a
lasting phenomenon in parts of European culture. It was
spectacularly praised in the early nineteenth century by
Wilhelm von Humboldt as ‘the most beautiful, perhaps the
only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue’.
In a poem in Four Quartets, Eliot summarises Krishna’s
view in the form of an admonishment: ‘And do not think of
the fruit of action! Fare forward’. Eliot explains: ‘Not fare
well/But fare forward, voyagers’.
And yet, as a debate in which there are two reasonable
sides, the epic Mahabharata itself presents, sequentially,
each of the two contrary arguments with much care and
sympathy. Indeed, the tragic desolation that the post-
combat and post-carnage land—largely the Indo-Gangetic
plain—seems to face towards the end of the Mahabharata
can even be seen as something of a vindication of Arjuna’s
profound doubts. Arjuna’s contrary arguments are not really
vanquished, no matter what the ‘message’ of the Bhagavad
Gita is meant to be. There remains a powerful case for
‘faring well’, and not just ‘forward’.*
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the American
team that developed the ultimate ‘weapon of mass
destruction’ during the Second World War, was moved to
quote Krishna’s words (‘I am become death, the destroyer
of worlds’) as he watched, on 16 July 1945, the awesome
* As a high-school student, when I asked my Sanskrit teacher whether it would be permissible
to say that the divine Krishna got away with an incomplete and unconvincing argument, he
replied: ‘Maybe you could say that, but you must say it with adequate respect.’ I have
presented elsewhere a critique—I hope with adequate respect—of Krishna’s deontology,
alongwith a defence of Arjuna’s consequential perspective, in ‘Consequential Evaluation
and Practical Reason’, Journal of Philosophy 97 (Sept. 2000).

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force of the first nuclear explosion devised by man. Like

the advice that Arjuna had received about his duty as a
warrior fighting for a just cause, Oppenheimer, the
physicist, could well find justification in his technical
commitment to develop a bomb for what was clearly the
right side. Scrutinizing—indeed criticising—his own
actions, Oppenheimer said later on: ‘When you see
something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do
it and you argue about what to do about it only after you
have had your technical success.’ Despite that compulsion
to ‘fare forward’, there was reason also for reflecting on
Arjuna’s concerns: How can good come from killing so many
people? And why should I seek victory, kingdom or
happiness for my own side?
These arguments remain thoroughly relevant in the
contemporary world. The case for doing what one sees as
one’s duty must be strong, but how can we be indifferent
to the consequences that may follow from our doing what
we take to be our just duty? As we reflect on the manifest
problems of our global world (from terrorism, wars and
violence to epidemics, insecurity and gruelling poverty), or
on India’s special concerns (such as economic development,
nuclear confrontation or regional peace), it is important to
take on board Arjuna’s consequential analysis, in addition
to considering Krishna’s arguments for doing one’s duty.
The univocal ‘message of the Gita’ requires supplementation
by the broader argumentative wisdom of the Mahabharata,
of which the Gita is only one small part.

  

 
    


 




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
There is, however, a serious question to be asked as to
whether the tradition of arguments and disputations has
been confined to an exclusive part of the Indian
population—perhaps just to the members of the male elite.
It would, of course, be hard to expect that argumentational
participation would be uniformly distributed over all
segments of the population, but India has had deep
inequalities along the lines of gender, class, caste and
community (on which more presently). The social relevance
of the argumentative tradition would be severely limited if
disadvantaged sections were effectively barred from
participation. The story here is, however, much more
complex than a simple generalisation can capture.
I begin with gender. There can be little doubt that men
have tended, by and large, to rule the roost in argumentative
moves in India. But despite that, the participation of women
in both political leadership and intellectual pursuits has
not been at all negligible. This is obvious enough today,
particularly in politics. Indeed, many of the dominant
political parties in India—national as well as regional—are
currently led by women and have been so led in the past.
But even in the national movement for Indian independence,
led by the Congress Party, there were many more women in
positions of importance than in the Russian and Chinese
revolutionary movements put together. It is also perhaps
worth noting that Sarojini Naidu, the first woman President
of the Indian National Congress, was elected in 1925, fifty
years earlier than the election of the first woman leader of
a major British political party (Margaret Thatcher in 1975).*
The second woman head of the Indian National Congress,
Nellie Sengupta, was elected in 1933.
* The Presidentship of the Congress Party was not by any means a formal position only.
Indeed, the election of Subhas Chandra Bose (the fiery spokesman of the increasing—and
increasingly forceful—resistance to the British Raj) as the President of Congress in 1938
and in 1939 led to a great inner-party tussle, with Mohandas Gandhi working tirelessly to
oust Bose. This was secured—not entirely with propriety or elegance—shortly after Bose’s
Presidential Address proposing a strict ‘time limit’ for the British to quit India or to face a less
nonviolent opposition. The role of the Congress President in directing the Party has remained
important. In the general elections in 2004, when Sonia Gandhi emerged victorious as the
President of Congress, she chose to remain in that position, rather than take up the role of
Prime Minister.

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Earlier or later, these developments are products of

relatively recent times. But what about the distant past?
Women’s traditional role in debates and discussions has
certainly been much less pronounced than that of men in
India (as would also be true of most countries in the world).
But it would be a mistake to think that vocal leadership by
women is completely out of line with anything that has
happened in India’s past. Indeed, even if we go back all the
way to ancient India, some of the most celebrated dialogues
have involved women, with the sharpest questionings often
coming from women interlocutors. This can be traced back
even to the Upanisads—the
. dialectical treatises that were
composed from about the eighth century BCE and which
are often taken to be foundations of Hindu philosophy.
For example, in the Brihadaranyaka Upanisad . we are
told about the famous ‘arguing combat’ in which
Yajnavalkya,
~
the outstanding scholar and teacher, has to
face questions from the assembled gathering of pundits,
and here it is a woman scholar, Gargi, who provides the
sharpest edge to the intellectual interrogation. She enters
the fray without any special modesty: ‘Venerable Brahmins,
with your permission I shall ask him two questions only. If
he is able to answer those questions of mine, then none of
you can ever defeat him in expounding the nature of God.’
Even though Gargi, as an intellectual and pedagogue,
is no military leader (in the mode, for example, of the Rani
of Jhansi—another feminine hero—who fought valiantly
along with the ‘mutineers’ in the middle of the nineteenth
century against British rule—one of the great ‘warrior-
queens’ of the world, as Antonia Fraser describes her), her
use of imagery is strikingly militant: ‘Yajnavalkya,
~
I have
two questions for you. Like the ruler of Videha or Kasi
[Benares], coming from a heroic line, who strings his
unstrung bow, takes in hand two penetrating arrows and
approaches the enemy, so do I approach you with two
questions, which you have to answer.’ Yajnavalkya does,
~

however, manage to satisfy Gargi with his answers (I am

not competent to examine the theological merits of this
interchange and will refrain from commenting on the

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substantive content of their discussion). Gargi

acknowledges this handsomely, but again without undue
modesty: ‘Venerable Brahmins, you should consider it an
achievement if you can get away after bowing to him.
Certainly, none of you can ever defeat him in expounding
the nature of God.’
Interestingly, Yajnavalkya’s
~
wife Maitreyi raises a
profoundly important motivational question when the two
discuss the reach of wealth in the context of the problems
and predicaments of human life, in particular what wealth
can or cannot do for us. Maitreyi wonders whether it could
be the case that if ‘the whole earth, full of wealth’ were to
belong just to her, she could achieve immortality through
it. ‘No’, responds Yajnavalkya,
~
‘like the life of rich people
will be your life. But there is no hope of immortality by
wealth’. Maitreyi remarks: ‘What should I do with that by
which I do not become immortal?’
Maitreyi’s rhetorical question has been repeatedly cited
in Indian religious philosophy to illustrate both the nature
of the human predicament and the limitations of the
material world. But there is another aspect of this exchange
that has, in some ways, more immediate interest. This
concerns the relation—and the distance—between income
and achievement, between the commodities we can buy
and the actual capabilities we can enjoy, between our
economic wealth and our ability to live as we would like.*
While there is a connection between opulence and our
ability to achieve what we value, the linkage may or may
not be very close. Maitreyi’s worldly worries might well
have some transcendental relevance (as Indian religious
commentators have discussed over many centuries), but
they certainly have worldly interest as well. If we are
concerned with the freedom to live long and live well, our
focus has to be directly on life and death, and not just on
wealth and economic opulence.
The arguments presented by women speakers in epics
and classical tales, or in recorded history, do not always
* Maitreyi’s central question (‘what should I do with that by which I do not become immortal?’)
was useful for me to motivate and explain an understanding of development that is not
parasitic on judging development by the growth of GNP or GDP; see my Development as
Freedom ( New York: Knopf, and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. I.

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conform to the tender and peace-loving image that is often

assigned to women. In the epic story of the Mahabharata,
the good King Yudhisthira,
. reluctant to engage in a bloody
battle, is encouraged to fight the usurpers of his throne
with ‘appropriate anger’, and the most eloquent instigator
is his wife, Draupadi.
In the sixth-century version of this dialogue, presented
in the Kiratarjuniya by Bharavi, Draupadi speaks thus—

For a woman to advise men like you

is almost an insult.
And yet, my deep troubles compel me
to overstep the limits of womanly conduct,
make me speak up.

The kings of your race, brave as Indra,

have for a long time ruled the earth without a break.
But now with your own hand
you have thrown it away,
like a rutting elephant tearing off
his garland with his trunk...

If you choose to reject heroic action

and see forbearance as the road to future happiness,
then throw away your bow, the symbol of royalty,
wear your hair matted in knots,
stay here and make offerings in the sacred fire!

It is not hard to see which side Draupadi was on in

the Arjuna-Krishna debate, which deals with a later stage
of the same sequence of events, by which time Yudhisthira
.
had made his choice to fight (rather than embrace the life
of a local hermit, mockingly assigned to him by his wife,
with unconcealed derision).
If it is important not to see the Indian argumentative
tradition as the exclusive preserve of men, it is also
necessary to understand that the use of argumentative
encounters has frequently crossed the barriers of class
and caste. Indeed, the challenge to religious orthodoxy has

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often come from spokesmen of socially disadvantaged

groups. Disadvantage is, of course, a comparative concept.
When Brahminical orthodoxy was disputed in ancient India
by members of other groups (including merchants and
craftsmen), the fact that the protesters were often quite
affluent should not distract attention from the fact that,
in the context of Brahmin-dominated orthodoxy, they were
indeed distinctly underprivileged. This may be particularly
significant in understanding the class basis of the rapid
spread of Buddhism, in particular, in India. The
undermining of the superiority of the priestly caste played
quite a big part in these initially rebellious religious
movements, which include Jainism as well as Buddhism.
It included a ‘levelling’ feature that is not only reflected in
the message of human equality for which these movements
stood, but is also captured in the nature of the arguments
used to undermine the claim to superiority of those
occupying exalted positions. Substantial parts of early
Buddhist and Jain literatures contain expositions of protest
and resistance.
Movements against caste divisions that have figured
repeatedly in Indian history, with varying degrees of
success, have made good use of engaging arguments to
question orthodox beliefs. Many of these counterarguments
are recorded in the epics, indicating that opposition to
hierarchy was not absent even in the early days of caste
arrangements. We do not know whether the authors to
whom the sceptical arguments are attributed were the real
originators of the doubts expressed, or mere vehicles of
exposition of already established questioning, but the
prominent presence of these anti-inequality arguments in
the epics as well as in other classical documents gives us
a fuller insight into the reach of the argumentative tradition
than a monolithic exposition of the so-called, ‘Hindu point
of view’ can possibly provide.
For example, when, in the Mahabharata, Bhrigu tells
Bharadvaja that caste divisions relate to differences in
physical attributes of different human beings, reflected in
skin colour, Bharadvaja responds not only by pointing to

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the considerable variations in skin colour within every caste

(‘if different colours indicate different castes, then all castes
are mixed castes’), but also by the more profound question:
‘We all seem to be affected by desire, anger, fear, sorrow,
worry, hunger, and labour; how do we have caste differences
then?’ There is also a genealogical scepticism expressed in
another ancient document, the Bhavisya . Purana:
. ‘Since
members of all the four castes are children of God, they all
belong to the same caste. All human beings have the same
father, and children of the same father cannot have different
castes.’ These doubts do not win the day, but nor are their
expressions obliterated in the classical account of the
debates between different points of view.
To look at a much later period, the tradition of ‘medieval
mystical poets’, well established by the fifteenth century,
included exponents who were influenced both by the
egalitarianism of the Hindu Bhakti movement and by that
of the Muslim Sufis, and their far -reaching rejection of
social barriers brings out sharply the reach of arguments
across the divisions of caste and class. Many of these poets
came from economically and socially humble backgrounds,
and their questioning of social divisions as well as of the
barriers of disparate religions reflected a profound attempt
to deny the relevance of these artificial restrictions. It is
remarkable how many of the exponents of these heretical
points of views came from the working class: Kabir, perhaps
the greatest poet of them all, was a weaver, Dadu a cotton-
carder, Ravi-das a shoe-maker, Sena a barber, and so on.*
Also, many leading figures in these movements were
women, including of course the famous Mira Bai (whose
songs are still very popular, after four hundred years), but
also Andal, Daya-bai, Sahajo-bai and Ksema, among
others.
In dealing with issues of contemporary inequality, the
relevance and reach of the argumentative tradition must
be examined in terms of the contribution it can make today
in resisting and undermining these inequities which
characterise so much of contemporary Indian society. It
* On this, see Kshiti Mohan Sen, Medieval Mysticism of India, with a Foreword by Rabindranath
Tagore, trans. from Bengali by Manomohan Ghosh (London: Luzac, I930).

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would be a great mistake in that context to assume that

because of the possible effectiveness of well-tutored and
disciplined arguments, the argumentative tradition must,
in general, favour the privileged and the well educated,
rather than the dispossessed and the deprived. Some of
the most powerful arguments in Indian intellectual history
have, in fact, been about the lives of the least privileged
groups, which have drawn on the substantive force of these
claims, rather than on the cultivated brilliance of well-
trained dialectics.

  

 
       




 
      




Does the richness of the tradition of argument make
much difference to subcontinental lives today? I would argue
it does, and in a great many different ways. It shapes our
social world and the nature of our culture. It has helped to
make heterodoxy the natural state of affairs in India;
persistent arguments are an important part of our public
life. It deeply influences Indian politics, and is particularly
relevant, I would argue, to the development of democracy
in India and the emergence of its secular priorities.
The historical roots of democracy in India are well worth
considering, if only because the connection with public
argument is often missed, through the temptation to
attribute the Indian commitment to democracy simply to
the impact of British influence (despite the fact that such
an influence should have worked similarly for a hundred

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other countries that emerged from an empire on which the

sun used not to set). The point at issue, however, is not
specific to India only: in general, the tradition of public
reasoning is closely related to the roots of democracy across
the globe. But since India has been especially fortunate in
having a long tradition of public arguments, with toleration
of intellectual heterodoxy, this general connection has been
particularly effective in India. When, more than half a
century ago, independent India became the first country in
the non-Western world to choose a resolutely democratic
constitution, it not only used what it had learned from the
institutional experiences in Europe and America
(particularly Great Britain), it also drew on its own tradition
of public reasoning and argumentative heterodoxy.
It is very important to avoid the twin pitfalls of (1)
taking democracy to be just a gift of the Western world
that India simply accepted when it became independent,
and (2) assuming that there is something unique in Indian
history that makes the country singularly suited to
democracy. The point, rather, is that democracy is
intimately connected with public discussion and interactive
reasoning. Traditions of public discussion exist across the
world, not just in the West. And to the extent that such a
tradition can be drawn on, democracy becomes easier to
institute and also to preserve.


1. What is Sen’s interpretation of the positions taken by Krishna
and Arjuna in the debate between them?
[Note Sen’s comment: ‘Arjuna’s contrary arguments are not
really vanquished... There remains a powerful case for ‘faring
well’ and not just ‘faring forward’.]
2. What are the three major issues Sen discusses here in relation
to India’s dialogic tradition?
3. Sen has sought here to dispel some misconceptions about
democracy in India. What are these misconceptions?

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4. How, according to Sen, has the tradition of public discussion

and interactive reasoning helped the success of democracy in
India?


1. Does Amartya Sen see argumentation as a positive or a negative
value?
2. How is the message of the Gita generally understood and
portrayed? What change in interpretation does Sen suggest?


This essay is an example of argumentative writing. Supporting
statements with evidence is a feature of this kind of writing.
For each of the statements given below state the supportive
evidence provided in the essay
(i) Prolixity is not alien to India.
(ii) The arguments are also, often enough, substantive.
(iii) This admiration for the Gita, and Krishna’s arguments in
particular, has been a lasting phenomenon in parts of
European culture.
(iv) There remains a powerful case for ‘faring well’, and not
just ‘forward’.


I. (a) The opening two paragraphs have many words related to
the basic idea of using words (particularly in speech) like
‘prolixity’. List them. You may look for more such words in
the rest of the essay.
(b) Most of the statements Sen makes are tempered with due
qualification, e.g., ‘The arguments are also, often enough,
quite substantive’. Pick out other instances of qualification
from the text.
II. A noun can be the subject or object of a sentence. Notice this
sentence
Democracy is a Western idea.
In this sentence democracy and idea are nouns. (they are
abstract nouns)

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A noun is the simplest form of a noun phrase. A noun can be

preceded by
(i) an article or demonstrative: an idea, the idea, this idea;
and/or
(ii) an adjective: a Western idea
[There can be more than one adjective, or an adverb and
an adjective]: a quintessentially Western idea.
(iii) and/or numerals and quantifying phrases: three very
influential Western ideas; such a tradition. (quantifying
phrases such as a few/some/one of the many)
A noun can be followed by prepositional phrases and relative
or complement clauses. There will be nouns and noun phrases
within the prepositional phrase as in ‘traditions of public
discussion’.
III. Noun phrases can also have phrases in apposition following
the main noun.
Notice the following sentence
The ancient Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata, are colossally longer than the works
that the modest Homer could manage.
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata add to the meaning of the
main noun (epics)and are placed next to it. They are separated
from the main sentence by commas. Notice the expansion here:
The ancient Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata, which are frequently compared with
the Iliad and the Odyssey, are colossally longer than
the works that the modest Homer could manage.
The relative clause—which are frequently compared with the
Iliad and the Odyssey— that follows, adds more information to
the epics.
IV. Parenthetical phrases or clauses may also follow the noun
phrase.
(i) This can be traced back even to the Upanisads—the
. dialectical
treatises that were composed from about the eighth century
BCE and which are often taken to be foundations of Hindu
philosophy.
The clause italicised here gives additional information about
the noun ‘Upanisads’.
.

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TASK
Examine the noun phrases in these sentences from the text
• The second woman head of the Indian National Congress, Nellie
Sengupta, was elected in 1933.
• This concerns the relation—and the distance—between income
and achievement.
• This may be particularly significant in understanding the class
basis of the rapid spread of Buddhism, in particular, in India.


Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen.

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