The Argumentative Indian is a book

Book

A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...

 written by Nobel Prize winning India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n economist Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen, CH is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society's poorest members...

. It is a collection of essay

Essay

An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

s that discuss India's history

History of India

The history of India begins with evidence of human activity of Homo sapiens as long as 75,000 years ago, or with earlier hominids including Homo erectus from about 500,000 years ago. The Indus Valley Civilization, which spread and flourished in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent from...

 and identity, focusing on the traditions of public debate and intellectual pluralism. Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum , is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics....

 says the book "demonstrates the importance of public debate in Indian traditions generally."

The Argumentative Indian has brought together a selection of writings from Sen that outline the need to understand contemporary India in the light of its long argumentative tradition. The understanding and use of this argumentative tradition are critically important, Sen argues, for the success of India's democracy, the defence of its secular politics, the removal of inequalities related to class, caste, gender and community, and the pursuit of sub-continental peace.

Criticism

Gordon Johnson, president of Wolfson College, Cambridge

Wolfson College, Cambridge

Wolfson College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. Wolfson is one of a small number of Cambridge colleges which admit only students over the age of 21. The majority of students at the college are postgraduates, with around 15% studying undergraduate...

, and general editor of "The New Cambridge History of India", argues that Amartya Sen's political aim is to expose "India's new cultural chauvinism", which "relates Indian identity to a particular sort of Hinduism" fanning communal violence

Communal violence

Communal violence refers to a situation where violence is perpetrated across ethnic lines, and victims are chosen based upon ethnic group membership...

, before a dispassionate analysis of historical facts:

Amartya Sen's own political agenda is clear for all to see and is wholly admirable [...] Given the virtue of Sen's position, to which nearly all of us would subscribe, it is hard to have to say that The Argumentative Indian proves on close reading to be a flawed book. This is because Sen does not go beyond stating self-evident truths. Although nicely written, and with many points of interest, there is a thinness and superficiality about the whole that displeases. [...] My greatest disappointment with this book is that its use of history is as unscrupulous and trivialising as that of those Sen wishes to bring down. The Argumentative Indian is not sufficiently thoughtful and serves as a forceful reminder that history is constantly being used in a dangerously naive way.

Johnson questions several historical examples, e.g.

There is a more serious distortion of Mughal history. The Mughal emperor Akbar

Akbar the Great

Akbar , also known as Shahanshah Akbar-e-Azam or Akbar the Great , was the third Mughal Emperor. He was of Timurid descent; the son of Emperor Humayun, and the grandson of the Mughal Emperor Zaheeruddin Muhammad Babur, the ruler who founded the Mughal dynasty in India...

, who ruled from 1556 to 1605, is always compared to Aurangzeb

Aurangzeb

Abul Muzaffar Muhy-ud-Din Muhammad Aurangzeb Alamgir , more commonly known as Aurangzeb or by his chosen imperial title Alamgir , was the sixth Mughal Emperor of India, whose reign lasted from 1658 until his death in 1707.Badshah Aurangzeb, having ruled most of the Indian subcontinent for nearly...

, who ruled from 1658 to 1707. There has long been a 1066 and All That view of these rulers, and it is one to which Sen repeatedly subscribes. Akbar was a good thing because he was nice to Hindus [... and] Aurangzeb [...] was a fundamentalist Islamic bigot and implemented policies that discriminated against his non-Muslim subjects, which was all a bad thing and caused the downfall of the Mughal Empire. But this is a grossly over-simplified account of Akbar, whose reign saw some pretty bloody politics and whose position on religion seems not too far removed from that of contemporary European princes with their resort to axe and fire. And it misreads the whole of the second half of the 17th century. Of course Aurangzeb was keen on Islam (or on a particular strain of it), and his piety spilled out into public policy. Of course he was cruel to his subjects, among them Hindus. But under Aurangzeb the Mughal Empire reached its greatest extent and successfully incorporated military, political and social elites of all religions into its structure. By the time of his death, the Mughals had created an extraordinarily sophisticated political and economic regime commanding consent despite its intolerances and its religious enthusiasm. For reasons best known to India's first premier, one of the major roads of power corridors in New Delhi is named after Aurangazeb, The Aurangazeb Road. For most Indians it is a grim reminder of the past.

External links

• The Argumentative Indian by Ajus Pillai, a review published in The Asian Review of Books.
• Beyond the call centre, a review published in The Guardian
  The Guardian
  The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
  
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• In defence of reason, another review from The Guardian.
• Effort to right wrongs leaves past shackled, a critical review from The Times Higher Education Supplement.