The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

by Amartya Sen
Penguin Books, London, 2005
409 pp. Trade, $26.00
ISBN: 0-713-99687-0.

Frida Kahlo:

Exhibition at the Tate Modern, London June 9 — October 9 2005.

Reviewed by: Aparna Sharma
Film Academy, University of Glamorgan

aparna31s@netscape.net

It is now agreed that the voice from the third world is urgent and has a role to perform in the articulations of knowledge arising in European and American academies, as also within wider public discourse in the first world. Indeed, there is a commitment of which the increasing stress on cultural specificity within the disciplines of the arts and humanities is a principle symptom. It is, however, curious that the discourses of post-colonialism and cultural studies, where the concern with the third world subject gained prominence and has been pursued with commitment, have inadvertently either polarised localisms and nativisms, or stressed dialogic engagement largely in relation to the colonial encounter. Consequently, we are left with a partial view of the complex global interactions embedded within the third world experience, which is neither homogenous, nor variegated in simple arithmetic terms. At a time when societies in the West are increasingly debating the scope of ‘multiculturalism’, a whole historical tradition that we may encounter elsewhere, outside the West, which may serve to contribute in honing the notions of cultural interactions, is completely by-passed, depriving us of some necessary groundwork that has been usefully attempted if not fully accomplished.

In Amartya Sen’s new text, The Argumentative Indian, we encounter a very reasoned, incisive, and critical posture that is the much needed antidote, presenting before us the possibility for some historical corrections that will contribute in contending the third world on more provocative, interrogative, and reflexive terms than interpretive or ascribed notions of say cultural hybridization, multiculturalism, or cultural specificity would allow us. As the title suggests, the scope of Sen’s text is the subcontinent that he evokes comprehensively from a decisive position. Sen’s contention is that the dialectical or dialogic tradition is central to Indian thought; it can be traced to the earliest historical and philosophical Indian scriptures and texts and is sustained through the history of the subcontinent in response to crucial social, political and cultural stimuli at principal historical junctures.

Sen’s work in the fields of social choice theory has often been commented upon as attending to deep philosophical crises. It is no surprise that Sen commences The Argumentative Indian evoking and appreciating the multiple and argumentative positionalities from the rather philosophically difficult territories of the Mahabharata and the Upanishads. Reminiscing the irresolvable moral debate between Krishna and Arjuna (at the cusp of the great war) that culminated in the discourse of the Bhagvad Gita, Sen then plots features of the Indian construction such as democracy and secularism, foregrounding the heterodox tradition, and ‘reasoned scepticism’ within Indian thought. He raises moments of cultural interactions, such as the medieval mystical poetic traditions of the Sufis and bhaktas, the historical ties of intellectual and theological exchange between India and China, right up to the most profound confrontation in recent Indian history, between the towering modern figures of Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

The dialogical imperative has, of course, been asserted in the Marxist tradition/s of historicization in the sub continent. What Sen’s argument allows is the possibility to derive from that history, situating it in conversational terms: one, across disciplines be they political, economic or cultural; and two, across the familiar first and third world categorizations, in the bargain disturbing our faith in those divisions as being neat or contained. In this measure Sen’s scholarship assumes value not only within the Western academy, where it serves to situate third world and subaltern subjectivity in historically competing terms; within the national context too, it serves to depart from strict and narrow national agendas that assert nativism in rather limited terms. The philosophical and esoteric edge of his text complements the reason and rigour of the inter-cultural exchanges he presents. But strategically Sen, resuscitates from slipping into idealist notions by constantly arriving at a materialist stance from where he attends the issues of gender, inequality, class, nuclearization, and diasporas——a prerogative that his scholarship naturally enjoys given his contributions in field of development economics where his engagements have been with the issues of poverty, inequality, unemployment, famines, etc. This further serves in situating the dialogic imperative not in elitist terms as in some ‘nationalist’ art historical discourses, but as a ‘critical voice’ that is the ‘traditional ally of the aggrieved.’

At around the same time as Sen’s text was released, ran a solo exhibition of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo at London’s Tate Modern. Curiously, like The Argumentative Indian, at this exhibition too, which gathered a comprehensive body of the artist’s work, we encountered some critical inter-cultural exchanges. Frida Kahlo’s work has been celebrated across the world, extensively studied, and commented upon. One would be hard pressed to find another example where the personal is so clearly contextualised within the socio-political as in Frida’s work. The question of identity is central for Frida Kahlo. Some have found in her work a strong surreal edge, which it has to be agreed cannot be visually denied, but was contested strongly by Frida herself.

There is then the feminist and feminine dimension to her work where she raises issues around gender by locating and confronting herself as the subject. In this, she uses her personal encounters catapulting them through the intervention of form to a claim that transcends immediate identity towards a more disturbing and fluid conception. Much before post-colonial criticism, Frida’s art was smattered with moments of hybridity as also a critical stance towards an arriving neo-colonialism. Her approach to her Mexican identity and her appreciation for native art and forms of expression such as the ex-voto, is clearly more interrogative than the turn of the American Abstract Expressionists’ towards native American art. Lastly, she turned all the essentialisms of her third world position, strategically on their head by punctuating her work with moments of androgyny, biological hybridity and strong eastern philosophical influences in some of her works.

However, in much scholarship surrounding Frida’s art, there is a tendency to identify an immediate relation between the forms she employed and the personal, political and cultural contexts in which her work arose. While this cannot be avoided and is indeed the starting position for approaching work as complex as Frida’s, such strategy nevertheless risks confining Frida’s work as being the articulation of a third world, local position through form that is at once native and internationalised. Frida’s work testifies more imperatives than simply the internationalization of the personal and local.

In her later works, during the 1940s, we consistently find Frida drawn towards Buddhism and Hinduism. This is manifest in numerous pieces where she employs the yogic third eye. A strong connotation of speculation is attached to that, which in Frida’s work arises as fluid and varied. This variation at once comprises a critical revisitation, an interrogation and disintegration of the third eye in terms of a metaphysical or spiritual discourse. Frida evokes the meditative, speculative stance, but she uses the third eye not fully in transcendental terms. A material, political correlate is employed to indicate the third eye in some of her images: her husband Diego’s face in Self Portrait as Tehuana (1943) and a skull in a pastoral landscape in Thinking about Death (1943). In Diego and I (1949) the third eye is doubly inscribed, on the third eye on Frida’s face is Diego’s face, on whose third eye is a lone eye.

Frida’s evocation of the third eye points at the difficulty, near impossibility of the transcendental position in relation to the socio-political and cultural issues she confronts. The transaction in Frida at once furthers our understanding of the complexity involved in any inter-cultural exchange that by its nature demands interrogation and appropriation, not merely an amalgamation of a cultural impetus. There are other instances where Frida evokes Indian mythology, however, as with the third eye, that evocation is not pure but adulterated with Frida’s own confrontational inscriptions that do not shy from bold essentialisms and exoticisms akin to her position.

In Frida we thus encounter a reworking of the Eastern philosophical and mythical positions that situate cultural transaction first, in competitive terms - not within the familiar equations of perceived hegemonic relations——rather as a freer, motivated exchange that at the same time marks a departure from limited notions of nativism. Second, this transaction surfaces as critical——involving interrogation and reworking. Such mode of cultural interaction can be situated historically on intellectual terms within a wider cultural history of the world, rather than under the rubric of a particular historical moment, say colonialism, or any other form of hegemony or exploitation thereof.

While The Argumentative Indian is distinct in terms of textuality and discipline, there is a welcome and rigorous coincidence it enjoys with the art of Frida Kahlo. In both we are introduced to the possibility of approaching the third world subject as not simply fashioned by colonialism. In both, the global interactions and their reasoned appropriation within variegated socio-cultural fabrics allow us to depart from any reductionist notion of nativism or nationalist agenda on the one hand, and any celebratory, negotiated possibility of hybridization, on the other. The local is posited as conversational, not antagonistic towards the ‘global’, which too is not homogenous. The local surfaces as commanding a sense of ‘critical openness’, as Sen terms it, and this is a significant departure from the relationships of hegemony that a discipline such as cultural studies within the Euro-American academies has emphasized in relation to subaltern subjectivity. This ‘critical openness’ is valid not only within the political-economy approach, but is of value to the arena of cultural politics including cinema. It is no wonder Sen devotes a chapter length discussion to the cinema of Satyajit Ray, in whom we find some of the most celebrated expositions of local cultures through influences such as Italian neo-realism. And though there have been more critical cultural figures across the third world since Kahlo or Ray, Sen’s arguments usefully situate and provoke the scope of third world cultural praxis including third cinema that is still largely defined from the position of the first world.