Book review: 'The Country of First Boys and Other Essays' by Amartya Sen

Book: The Country of First Boys and Other Essays
Author: Amartya Sen
Publisher: The Little Magazine-Oxford University Press
Pages: 276
Rs 550

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen does not hold controversial views like his fellow economist Jagdish Bhagwati. But Sen finds himself in the spotlight many a time for not exactly the right reasons. Both his admirers and detractors contribute to this refracted and distorted image. Sen is right to complain that no one, especially in the media, takes note of his exact views. There is the mistaken notion that he is a bleeding heart liberal and an unabashed votary of the welfare state. It is not true. In the 'Introduction, Personal and Social' he tries to clarify some of the misperceptions that have accrued around and about him.

Hopefully, the articles and speeches collected in this volume, many of them written and published in The Little Magazine run by Antara Dev Sen and Pratik Kanjilal, should help make clear where Sen really stands.

In Hunger, written in 2001, Sen takes a surprisingly critical view of food subsidies, something that his friends and critics do not expect of him. Procurement at high prices is a bonanza for farmers, but it makes food more expensive and inaccessible to the people who need it. He writes with acuity: “...since the cutting edge of the price subsidy is to pay farmers to produce more and earn more, rather than to sell existing stocks to consumers at lower prices (that too happens, but only to a limited extent and to restricted groups), the overall effect of food subsidy is more spectacular in transferring money to farmers than in transferring food to the undernourished Indian consumers.” Sen also argues that maintaining buffer stocks beyond a limit is counter-productive. Is this the stuff bleeding-heart liberals made of? He should have been made of softer marrow.

In the essay, 'What Difference Can Tagore Make', Sen makes the important observation which few Indians, and very few Bengalis, make about Tagore: “Tagore soon became identified in Europe as something of a sage with a message...This was a far-cry from the many-sided creative artist and reasoned thinker that people at home found in Tagore... However, Tagore himself did not do much to resist the wrongly conceived greatness as a mystical sage that was being thrust upon him.” He values the rational Tagore over the fuzzy and mystical Tagore.

Sen pushes for a rational dialogue and believes in public reasoning. He states his idealistic—he would hate to be called an idealist in the philosophical sense of the term—position rather touchingly in the Preface of his 2009 book, The Idea of Justice: “Reasoning is central to the understanding of justice even in a world which contains much ‘unreason’; indeed, it may be particularly important in such a world.”

In many ways, Sen reminds one of the 19th century British Utilitarian political thinkers, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. He would probably readily agree with Bentham’s The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number though not completely with his “calculus of pleasure and pain”. He’s also nearer to the young Mill who argued that it is better to be a dissatisfied Socrates than a satisfied fool.