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Amartya Sen: “AN ASSESSMENT OF THE MILLENNIUM” – PART 1
| From: Brenda Gael McSweeney Category: Category 1 Date: 10/15/98 Time: 8:17:24 PM Remote Name: 202.41.92.72 CommentsPlease see India’s 1998 Nobel Laureate for Economics, Professor Amartya Sen’s last lecture delivered in Delhi. He kinldy agreed that we could share it liberally! Do enjoy!
AN ASSESSMENT OF THE MILLENNIUM Amartya Sen A little over four hundred years ago, in 1591-92, as the year 1000 in the Hejira calendar approached, Emperor Akbar was on the Moghal throne. The excitement, which was widely felt in Delhi and Agra about the completion of the millennium in that reckoning, led Akbar to issue a series of proclamations, about principles of governance. The pronouncements included, among other classics of civil administration, his famous tenets on religious tolerance, for example: “No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone [is] to be allowed to go over to a religion he pleased.” There was no particular reason to think that this or any other principle had any special relevance at the end of a millennium – rather than at any other time. And yet the end of the millennium in what was then the official calendar did seem like a good moment to take stock, to reflect on basic principles, and to contemplate the shape of things to come. |
Islam and India
I begin, then, with the first set of questions, concerning the absorption of Islamic culture in India and how it affects the nature of Indian identity and civilization. What did the Islamic influence do to India? Did it, in fact, change what is sometimes characterized, by some contemporary commentators, as a homogeneous culture – an allegedly “pure” pre-Islamic culture – into an inescapably hybrid one? The sense of a loss of Indian pureness in the early years of this millennium seems to have some hold in political discussions in contemporary India. How sound is thin s way of seeing what happened in the last millennium?
It is worth beginning by recollecting that even pre-Muslim India was not just Hindu India. Indeed, to begin with the most obvious, perhaps the greatest Indian emperor in the pre-Muslim period was a Buddhist, to wit, Ashoka, and there were other great non-Hindu emperors, including Harsha. Even as the Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni raided India, the Buddhist dynasty of the Palas was firmly in command over eastern India. In fact, Bengal moved rapidly from Buddhist rule to Muslim rule with only a very brief period of Hindu monarchy in between – in the form of the rather hapless Sena kings.
It must also be recollected the nearly all the major world religions other than Islam were already well represented in India well before the last millennium. Indeed, when Christianity started gaining ground in Britain in the seventh century, India had had large and settled communities of Christians for at least three hundred years – certainly from the fourth century. Jews too had been settled in India – in fact from immediately after the fall of Jerusalem. And of course, Buddhism and Jainism had been quite well-entrenched in India for a very long time. The Muslim arrival merely filled up the spectrum.
Another point to note is that unlike the British rule in India where the rulers remained separate from the ruled, Muslim rules in India were combined with the presence of a large proportion of Muslims in the population itself. A great many people in the land embraced Islam, so much so that three of the four largest Muslim national populations in the contemporary world are situated in this subcontinent: in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Indeed, the only non-subcontinental country among the top four Muslim populations in the world, Indonesia, was also converted to Islam by Indian Muslims, mostly from Gujarat. Islam was by then a native Indian religion.