Sunil Sethi: Ashoka, Akbar, and Amartya

AL FRESCO

"The pursuit of reason and rejection of traditionalism are so brilliantly patent as to be above the need of argument." That is Emperor Akbar speaking to his friend Abul Fazl in the mid-16th century, as quoted by Amartya Sen in his new collection of essays The Argumentative Indian (Penguin/Allen Lane; pages: 409; Rs 650).

Sen uses it as one of several well-reasoned broadsides in the cultural debate on "Western" versus "Asian" values, or, in Samuel Huntington's phrase the "clash of civilizations"""that the West was West long before it was modern.

Are reasoning and rationality""the keystones of liberty, tolerance, and justice""specific to Western society as opposed to non-Western civilisations, which appear to lack a tradition of sceptical reasoning? Do Asian traditions emphasise discipline and order above tolerance and liberty?

Here is what Emperor Ashoka, the first great unifier of India in the 3rd century BC, demanded: "Restraint in speech, so there should be no extolment of one's own sect or disparagement of other sects ... other sects should be duly honoured in every way on all occasions." From such flights into historical quotation, allusion, and example, Prof. Sen builds his case against cultural exclusion, debunking it as a phoney war of our time.

Ashoka and Akbar are but two figures from India's past that Amartya Sen returns to again and again. He also dwells on Buddhist and Vedic texts, Kautilya's Arthshashtra, accounts of early Chinese and Arab travellers, Gandhi, Tagore, Nehru and the cinema of Satyajit Ray to prove the point that India has long been a platform for rational argument and reasoned debate and home to a powerful secular and multicultural tradition.

At about the time when Akbar was discoursing on religious tolerance in Agra, the Inquisition was rampaging through Europe and the Dominican priest and philosopher Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Rome for heresy.

Perhaps the best-argued of Prof. Sen's generous corpus of ideas and arguments are contained in the essay "India: Large and Small", a witty and wide-ranging critique of the "narrowly religious certainty" current of Hindutva that has emerged from the tolerant and profound scepticism expressed in the broad stream of Vedic tradition.

Hindutva blinds Tagore's view of the Ramayana as "a marvellous parable", insisting that we see it as an unquestionable historical document; it negates ancient atheistic and agnostic traditions and, in the grotesque rewriting of school textbooks recently, pushes back the Vedic age to the Indus Valley civilisation.

It is time for the learned professor to have some fun. It's not known what language the inhabitants of the Indus civilisation spoke, he says, but it was certainly not, as champions of Hindutva claim, Sanskrit.

There's no sophisticated mathematics of science contained in Vedic literature, he argues, but the BJP-created textbooks like to imagine such contributions as straight out of the Vedic age. He turns his withering eye to a text by Natwar Jha and NS Rajaram titled The Deciphered Indus Script, published in 2000, though the script remains undeciphered.

The authors produced a picture of a terracotta seal with a horse on it. Sen writes: "The Vedas are full of references to horses, whereas the Indus remains have plenty of bulls but""so it was hitherto thought""no horses." He then goes on to explain how a distinguished Sanskrit professor at Harvard proved the picture of the horse to be a fraud""in fact it was a morphed image of a unicorn bull.

The distortions and falsities of history perpetuated by the Hindutva brigade sadden the Nobel laureate. He quotes a passage from the Upanishads on how the Self is True. "The unadorned truth does not favour the Hindutva view, and the adorned falsity does not survive critical scrutiny," he concludes.