by UDDALAK MUKHERJEE
Amartya Sen spoke to Uddalak Mukherjee of The Telegraph on a number of pertinent issues, including the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the protests against it, in Calcutta on January 13
Do you think that the protests by students against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) is a commentary on India’s education system, which in spite of suffering debilitating blows remains committed to India’s foundational idea?
I think that is a very interesting question. Certainly, in terms of the informed and reflected nature of the protests, they look like a tribute to the Indian education system. And to some extent, it may well be that. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a tribute to what is taught. It’s a tribute to the fact that education comes not only from teaching but also from talking to other students and interacting with them. When I was a student in Presidency College in the early 1950s, I think I was learning as much from talking with others as I was by listening to lectures — although some of the lectures were exceedingly good, like those by Bhabatosh Dutta, Tapas Majumdar, not to mention Sushobhan Sarkar. They were great lectures.
But I was learning a lot from chatting with others, arguing with them and interacting. So I think that tradition of, if I may use a phrase I have used before, being argumentative is a positive feature of Indian intellectual tradition. I do not want to hold anything back from the teachers’ credit. But I think, informed politics is, in fact, a very important part of people’s education. It provides a kind of atmosphere in which people ask questions like, ‘How well is the country doing?’ and ‘Why is it that some people have such difficulty in establishing their basic human rights and fulfilling the basic requirements of good living?’
So I think it is a combination of learning from teachers and learning from talking with other students. It’s a very good question, Uddalak, and I wish I knew the full answer, but that will be my partial answer.
I’ll press on with this further. In the course of these protests, we are also seeing important shifts within this solidarity. We have under Indian conditions seen certain rigid lines — political, ideological, demographic, gender — collapse and take the form of uniform solidarity. For instance, the participation of women, and not just women who are going to be directly affected, if I may add. What do you think is important to sustain this solidarity?
Again, that is a very good question. I think at the beginning of the movement, Muslim women played a very important part. That was a part of Indian society that had particularly suffered from neglect. Muslim women were initially rather afraid and didn’t feel that they could have an effective voice. They were quite afraid of what the reaction would be in a rather punitive State.
The Telegraph for more