Peerless Minds: An Arc of Achievement

SIR V.S. NAIPAUL

AUTHOR

Interviewed by RODERICK MATTHEWS

‘I was writing to come out of solitude. Yet writing was driving me back into solitude.’

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was a British writer of Indian descent, often described as one of the world’s greatest authors. He was born in 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago, to Indian parents Seepersad and Droapatie. His grandparents migrated from India to work there as farm labourers. He won the Booker Prize, the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society and, most famously, the Nobel Prize in 2001. He lived in England till his death and was interviewed there.

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ho is Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul? He is the bright boy, born in the Indian community in Trinidad in 1932, who decided, at the age of eleven, that he wanted to be a writer. With pencil and paper in hand, he then left home at eighteen for a scholarship at Oxford, hoping to find some ‘metropolitan material’ along the way. The travelling and the searching started early, and has hardly stopped. The outsider has never entirely come in.

Long hailed as the greatest living writer of English prose, the variety and fluency of Sir Vidia’s output testifies to the truth of the accolade. Thirty books across the decades—memoir, fiction, reportage, travelogue. He is effortlessly flexible, creating hybrid vehicles in which it is difficult to discern where fiction becomes fact, where memory and invention intersect. His dedication to the craft of writing has been exceptional; partly a quest, wholly a means of support. A full life, but he says that he really needed three—one for experience, one for writing and one for living.

His natural home is long-form prose, and in conversation he is not voluble. He speaks in sentences rather than paragraphs, preferring short, balanced phrases, well considered. Penetration is the key, coupled with economy; I don’t think I heard him yield an ‘um’ or an ‘er’. During a discussion about manipulation within families, his wife, Nadira, asked him whether she had ever been a pushover. ‘Not for long,’ was the terse verdict. No one writes like Naipaul, but not even Naipaul speaks like Naipaul writes.

He exhibits no willingness to fill silences in the room and publicly has said little about himself, beyond what is in his books. This has inevitably encouraged the growth of myths, and a large amount of what I had gleaned about Sir Vidia from a distance turned out not to be true. For example, I was assured that he would never sign a book, because he refused to create extra value in which he would take no share. Not so. He is happy to sign.

In person, he is much more of a Victorian than I expected. He is courteous at all times, has no time for vulgarity and avoids profanity. This has an elevating effect in company, as everyone tries to lose the rather Georgian atmosphere of contemporary London with its ribaldry and raucousness. VS is a calming presence, a guarantee that higher standards still exist.

There is a stocky defiance about him. As a younger man, he earned a reputation of being difficult, but he lays the burden of the difficulty upon the literary professionals around him. ‘They were rather foolish people, my publishers. I never felt they helped me.’ Here speaks the legacy of the occasions when a new work was found wanting.

But we can understand. First, he wrote to live; he had nothing else. Rejection was not lightly to be borne when years had to be committed to the writing. Second, he was usually right, not least over A Bend in the River (1979). Widely considered his masterpiece now, it was judged too cerebral at the time by his agent, who was shortly afterwards dumped.

He was legendarily unwilling to make changes—‘touch one comma and you’re dead’ was rumoured to be his motto. But his confidence has been repeatedly vindicated. A former editor of his dropped by recently, and volunteered that handling Sir Vidia’s copy had been the easiest job in the world. As he was leaving he held the laureate’s hand. ‘You are the last of the greats,’ he said with some emotion. Quite an endorsement from a man who has run a major publishing company and is now a successful literary agent. The moral is probably that arrogance is in the eye of the beholder; as much a failure of self-censorship as a matter of bad character.

This side of Sir Vidia—the side that earned him a reputation for caustic wit—has fallen away somewhat over the years, though not entirely. When I was introduced to him as a man with a book recently published, he asked only, ‘Is it a good book?’ A fair question, I thought, and well put. ‘Parts of it are interesting,’ I replied, and he smiled.

It is true that he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but in that he is hardly unique. How many of us would proudly wear a T-shirt bearing the legend ‘I LOVE listening to idiots’? What does make him unique is his acuity as an observer, and his ability to sustain ideas and insights across extended literary space.

He has written of using ‘the literary eye’. I ask him how that shaped his work.

‘What I meant was that I had been trained to see by fellow writers. Then you get this looking and thinking.’

His work revolves around his ability not only to see clearly what is there and to describe it pithily, but also to see what is invisible, what is poetically true and how human relationships, on both a large and small scale, develop and change. His use of parallels and ability to extend his themes over hundreds of pages make his reading both exciting and calming. References to colour are common, and helpful.

I ask him how he was able to remember colours so vividly, sometimes across long years. ‘If I mention a colour, it means I have a feeling for it.’ This explains both the accuracy and the effortless integration of the material into the scenes.

He has a talent for writing at the speed of thought. Faster, and he might baffle the reader; slower, and he would irritate. Big ideas emerge from the words in real time and small events are enough to illuminate grand themes. The density of his writing has a poetic sensibility about it, and I ask if he ever wrote poetry. ‘No. I was happy with prose. It was the influence of my father, who wrote stories. So this came to me as something I would like to do—that I should write stories, or write the way he wanted to write. I liked the way he wrote.’

His ability to observe people and places is remarkable and, very evidently, he is still at it. We spent an evening in a club near his London home and I saw him constantly tracing the human ebb and flow around the room. The animation of his face and body told me that he was actively working. Equally remarkable is his ability to listen. When he gives you his attention, it feels like something worth having. And here is one pitfall of interviewing him formally: he answers as he pleases, while the depth of his engagement means that you can suddenly find that you are interviewing yourself.

He has never relished the PR circuit—the talking parts of the writing game. ‘No, I didn’t enjoy that side of it. I wanted to get on with the next thing. What I had to say, I had put in the book.’

He doesn’t feel that there is any specific place that a new reader should start out on his work, but anyone wishing to understand him as a writer in his own words should read The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Writer’s People (2007). The former is a reflective memoir, the latter a collection of essays about seeing and feeling as a writer. Both touch repeatedly on his Trinidad childhood and the ways in which it formed him.

Only two generations away from rural north India, the Naipaul family was large, and at times shambolic, as its Hindu heritage gradually faded into a round of hollowed-out rituals and superstitions. But without his family he says he ‘could never have arrived at a sense of the world … how to look at it’. His father Seepersad—a journalist—never talked down to him, and filled in much about the world that he was not taught at school. He remembers especially enjoying visits to the Trinidad Dairies, near his school, where his father would buy him a half pint of milk. ‘He educated me.’

Sir Vidia’s willingness to transcend his local pond has brought criticism, and the accusation that he has somehow been disloyal to the far-flung corners of the world, because he left and wrote about other things. Africans and Indians felt demeaned, but he merely wrote down what he saw and what he thought.

In A Writer’s People he addressed these issues, albeit a little indirectly, by asserting that writers who remain obsessed with their local concerns, such as Derek Walcott, are ultimately limiting their vision and their scope. Thus Walcott, in the end, was ‘a disappointing writer’, he tells me. Naipaul takes the view that writing of value must rise above its local context, otherwise it is simply an internal memo from one part of a social group to another. This applies as much to Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell as to any post-colonial author.

I point out that he has never responded directly to criticism. ‘It wasn’t worth it,’ is all he will say. He is, however, consistent about the views of others, being also impervious to adulation. When I ask him whether he felt different, or wrote differently, once he had found his public, he shakes his head.

‘You didn’t feel pressure from an audience?’

‘No.’

‘Did you feel anxiety at all?’

‘No. Anxiety is part of a writing career. It comes with it.’

He has always been his own man, working alone.

‘I think you are unusual,’ I continue, ‘in that you are very self-critical but also somehow able to push away what other people think.’

‘What a nice thing to say about a writer.’

A subtle deflection.

‘You were using writing to come out of solitude?’

‘Yes.’

‘But at the same time, writing was driving you back into solitude.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you see that as a paradox?’

‘No.’

We both laugh.

‘I had no set way of writing,’ he tells me. Each book generated its own rules, though he admits to feeling ‘more in control later on’.

‘Would it be fair to say that your work is not in the words so much as it’s in the life of the mind?’

‘Exactly. What a good way of putting it.’

‘You are thinking the work and the words are just there?’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘You are not worried about the form; you just write it?’

‘Yes.’

I ask him about inspiration, if and how it worked for him. ‘There were times when I was waiting, not knowing what to write next. Inspiration is where the words come easily … and if the words are good words … if they have strength, your job is done.’

Sometimes the ideas came from fragments, built up slowly into longer work, like In a Free State (1971), which had a long, hard childhood as an atmosphere and a set of landscapes, before it grew to maturity and won the Man Booker Prize. Other books came quickly and complete, like A Bend in the River, which condensed from a dream and took only a relatively short time to complete. ‘I just wrote it, because it was there in my head. It was fully in my head. It came as one set of ideas. You see, I had experienced Africa very profoundly, and everything I saw remained with me.’

Around this freedom, certain continuities have emerged in his mature practice. He concentrates on structure first and tends to write in a linear fashion, without revision, once the structural issues are clear to him. Small edits come last, as a matter of detailed language. ‘There comes a stage in the writing when you can’t rely on imagination—just hard slog. I rather liked that.’

His artistic mission was disarmingly simple. ‘I wasn’t driven on by curiosity, I was just recording what I had seen. That is what I wanted to do.’

‘You didn’t take notes?’

‘Exactly.’

‘You relied on your memory?’

‘Yes.’

‘You must have a prodigious memory for detail.’

‘I suppose I must have.’

‘You are very observant about the way light falls. That’s like a painter’s eye.’

‘Yes.’

‘You enjoy visual art?’

‘Very much.’

He has two beautifully furnished residences, both filled with fine art. There are original Daniell prints of Indian landscapes, and much Oriental and Indian work, both traditional and modern. There is a Hockney male nude of fine and accurate detail. So detailed indeed that some workmen once refused to walk past it while doing repairs. They were not happy that Sir Vidia had on his wall what they had inside their overalls.

Writing has been his living, and he often refers to it as hard. Did he know what he was getting into, I wondered.

‘I expected it to be very hard, you know.’

‘Always?’

‘Always.’

As a younger man, he remembers taking occasional solace in a bottle of Guinness at the end of a long day’s work; a little ease. I ask if, after all this time, he has arrived at a state of peace. He shakes his head.

‘Do you still have things you want to say?’

‘Yes,’ he replies emphatically. I know that his fiction has often taken years to germinate, so I decide not to press him. A respect for the sacred space in his head deters me. But I can see that the observing goes relentlessly on.

Even at eighty-five, he is still very engaged with the world. We discuss the rash of recent lynchings in India. ‘Terrible. Appalling. I never thought they would do that.’ When told that Donald Trump is asking if the West has the will to survive, he snaps back, ‘Of course it will.’ He has just taken out membership at Harry’s Bar, one of London’s most exclusive watering holes. Guinness still calls.

One day I arrive to find him reading the paper. ‘Anything interesting?’ I ask.

‘Yes.’

‘What is it?’

Ooh. A test. And I pass first time. About eight pages in, amid the dross of celebrity gossip, there is a story about Britain’s first pregnant father. Yes; interesting.

‘You’ll find it.’

He is always keen to know what I have been doing. One day I told him that our family cat (female, tabby, eleven) had been attacked and injured by a neighbour’s cat. Genuinely concerned, he has asked after her regularly since. I tell him I have taken to having a morning coffee outside in the garden to embolden her to revisit the scene of the assault. He enjoys the mental picture.

VS loves animals and was deeply attached to his own cat, whom he had from when it was a kitten. Augustus died a few years ago at a grand old age. ‘I miss him to this day,’ he says tenderly. If the details could be sorted out, he would like a kitten as a companion again. He abhors cruelty, and has been a vegetarian for decades. Nadira decided not to take him to see the play of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, with its remarkably lifelike puppetry, because she felt he would be too upset by it. She is probably right. He thinks horse racing is cruel.

But he is not a sentimental person in his writing. Incorruptible scrutiny is his register, as deftly defined by the Nobel citation in 2001. I once had a very long talk with him about the clear-eyed way he had understood English farming in the first section of The Enigma of Arrival. I grew up in a farming community and can vouch for the accuracy of what he wrote. I was also struck by the elegance with which he explored the countryside’s cycles of life and death, old and new, ripe and rotten. Similar observations have been made many times, from Virgil down to Thomas Hardy, but the Naipaul take is more comprehensive and more contemporary. He sees beyond the rural rhythms affecting animals and plants and manages to lay out revealing parallels and contrasts about people, their dwellings and even the mud through which they trudge. He talks of building his house in Wiltshire as creating ‘a potential ruin’; he understands a dying man’s final trip to the pub as an epic act of defiant self-expression; he can trace the rise and fall of empire in a cottage garden, or the levels of anxiety in a greenhouse.

Yet Naipaul can be misunderstood, even by the brightest. Salman Rushdie could find only melancholy in The Enigma of Arrival. That, I suggest, is because he brought his mythic understanding of the man to the book. He thus missed the message of hope and rebirth the book is telling, with its fertile oppositions of activity and idleness, its playful use of the word ‘refuge’, its brilliant evocation of things discarded and superseded, which includes the author’s younger self and self-deceptions. Rushdie also couldn’t find the word ‘love’ in the book, but in this he was simply wrong. It is there; I stopped counting after seven.

Naipaul set out to see with his literal and literary eyes, refusing to idealize Wiltshire, letting it come to him as it was, allowing himself to transcend his own ignorance and misconceptions. Here is an irony to be richly savoured; Naipaul the open-minded observer, Rushdie the closed-up reader.

‘That book did very well in America,’ he tells me, but doesn’t know why. I can hazard a guess that it has something to do with the extraordinary richness and precision he achieves in the description of the landscape and its attendant life; the intruder’s perspective that refashions familiar material. Thought you knew England? Think again. And that goes for Naipaul too.

Rushdie cannot be too harshly taxed for using his literary intelligence. Naipaul’s silence over the years has been complicit in these misunderstandings, and the prickliness of his younger days—what he describes as the ‘rawness’ of his nerves as an outsider—has laid down a maze of chimerical trails.

Some of these can be crudely summarized and equally crudely dismissed. Doesn’t like Muslims; he married one. Doesn’t rate women writers very high; one of his oldest friends is Lady Antonia Fraser. An intolerant right-winger; he has enjoyed a long friendship with the screenwriter and former Black Panther Farrukh Dhondy, who is as left of the side plate as VS is right of the soup spoon. Even his legendary feud with Paul Theroux was a rather one-sided affair. There is a picture of Paul on the bookcase in Sir Vidia’s bedroom; he pointed it out to me and described Theroux as an old friend.

And some things, of course, are true. He is known for harbouring dismissive opinions about his alma mater. ‘Oxford was full of second-rate people,’ he says and then asks me, as an old Oxonian myself, whether I had found the same. Here I encountered a typical Naipaul moment. I have always been kind, in my memory, to the place and the people I met there. But when really pushed, when held to a higher standard of truthfulness by the man and his question, I had to reply that though I had been taught by some fine minds, most of the other people I met could fairly be described as normal. If by second rate we mean ‘not out of the ordinary’, I was forced to concede that he was right. He didn’t say that everyone there was second rate, only that a lot of second-rate people were there. I wouldn’t put it like that, but putting things his way is the very essence of what has earned Naipaul the prizes, gongs and houses. Here is a man who has no fear of saying things that are uncomfortably honest.

This has been his trademark, and though it has led him into trouble occasionally, it has never bothered him. One of the first times I met him was over a meal in an Indian restaurant in Tooting. Lady Naipaul asked him if he had enjoyed the food. ‘No, I didn’t,’ he replied. Because he probably hadn’t. So with Oxford. ‘I learned nothing. Nothing at all.’ And no, he probably didn’t. ‘It passed over me … like a wave,’ was all he would reveal.

He has often been his own subject, and the more autobiographical reaches of his work show a writer determined to move on from ready-made forms and standard concerns, a man who is trying to explain himself in the various senses that might convey. ‘I am a modern writer,’ he agrees. He is modern because he bends form away from tradition, and because he includes himself in the picture, in a way that classic novelists would not. But perhaps the most vitally modern aspect of his work lies in the way he has first recognized, then striven to reconcile the division between ‘the man and the writer’.

‘I worked very hard for that.’ Yes, you did.

I came to Sir Vidia late in his life and, for no good reason, with factors that have undoubtedly coloured my impressions of him. I have found him both reticent and connective, stubborn and compliant and, above all, encouraging. This has helped me to sift through the mythopoeic dust that surrounds him. Why should an extraordinary man not have extraordinary qualities?

I once read a book about modern art that used Jean Cocteau’s concept of ‘sacred monsters’—gifted individuals at war with tradition, justified by what they produce and excused for the means they employ. Who can understand characters so driven that they unsettle their own lives and those of others to create the things we all admire? Special ingredients make special dishes. Sometimes, however, special methods are enough. Many who knew Naipaul along the way paid a price of some sort. Many seem to have deemed it worth it.

We talked one evening about the process of observation, and I ventured that it was a circular and permanent process—that writers observe, yet also harvest material from observing themselves observing. Though sometimes productive, this is a compulsion that cannot easily be laid aside.

‘I suppose once you start on that process it doesn’t end,’ I suggest. ‘Is that why you kept writing?’

‘That is true. I never thought of it like that, but now that you have put it like that, I think it is true of me.’

‘Was that difficult?’

‘I didn’t find it a burden.’

He looks away, drawn to the many red lights that currently illuminate the sky in our ever-augmenting capital. Cranes. Construction. Always something new to see.

‘You are still thinking like that now, aren’t you?’ He nods.

I push further. ‘You’re not going to give up, are you?’

‘Never,’ he replies firmly.

AMARTYA SEN

ECONOMIST

Interviewed by JAMES ASTILL

‘There is [a] need for clear-headed thinking to help reduce violence in the world. Much more needs to be done in bringing out the ways through which the pernicious effects of insisting on singular identities work in the rough and fierce world around us.’

Amartya Sen, eighty-five, economist and philosopher, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 and the Bharat Ratna in 1999. He is the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor at Harvard and member of faculty at Harvard Law School. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social-choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines and indices of the measure of well-being of citizens of developing countries. In 2017, he was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. This interview was done by James Astill while Dr Sen was hospitalized in the US.

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hen asked to introduce himself to the world outside the academy in a biographical essay to mark his winning the Nobel Prize for economics in 1996, Amartya Sen recounted an appalling childhood memory. At home in Dhaka, Bangladesh, when he was eleven, a Muslim labourer had staggered in, screaming, through the gates of his family compound. The man’s name was Kader Mia. He had been knifed in the back by some Hindu thugs after daring to venture, desperate for a day wage, into the Sen family’s Hindu-majority neighbourhood. Kader’s wife had implored him not to take the risk, the dying man told Sen’s father, Ashutosh, as the latter struggled to get him to a hospital. Yet Kader had had no choice, he gasped: his family was without food. ‘The experience was devastating for me,’ Sen recalled. It had opened his eyes, at that tender age, to two problems he would spent much of the next seven decades trying to analyse and explain.

The first concerns the damage sectarian politics do, often including violence. And it is sobering to think that Sen is one of India’s last public intellectuals able to issue that warning on the basis of personal experience in the 1940s, when the political fissures between Indian Hindus and Muslims yawned. The second problem, represented by Kader’s poverty, is that poor people are also liable to suffer other sorts of abuses to their rights. ‘Economic unfreedom,’ Sen mused, ‘can make a person a helpless prey in the nature of the violation of other kinds of freedom: Kader Mia need not have come to a hostile area in search of income in those troubled times if his family could have managed without it.’ These are recurring themes in the vast trove of papers and books Sen has published over the past half century; they also help explain his approach and method. For Sen, crucially, the purpose of economics is to solve real-world problems like poverty and political violence. This moral imperative leads him, like his hero Adam Smith, deep into ethics.

Indeed, he is often said to be an economist who thinks like a philosopher, basing his work, even when it is highly technical—as much of it is—on fundamental principles of fairness and equality, against which he is ever weighing, and often demolishing, received wisdom. Thus, perhaps, his most famous instance of problem-solving is the insight, based on his analyses of famines in Asia and Africa, that mass starvation is rarely caused by too little food in aggregate. Rather, it tends to be a result of callous or ill-conceived policy shifts that end up depriving some people of their access to food. The Bengal famine of 1943, Sen showed, was not due to a shortage of food per se—on the contrary, there was more food available in Bengal in 1943 than there had been in 1941. The main problem was that due to wartime inflation, the price of staples had risen faster than that of agricultural wages, with the result that poor people could no longer afford to feed themselves. That was a colossal failure of government, not crops, which any concerned and responsive administration could have fixed—hence Sen’s celebrated dictum: ‘No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.’ That insight irrevocably changed the thinking of policy-makers and development wonks about famines.

A similar approach is evident in much of Sen’s work—including that on social-choice theory, in which, extending the work of Kenneth Arrow, he argued a case for collective action against inequality. Sen is sceptical, ethical and pragmatic at times—a theorist with his feet rooted in the real world. He is considered to have made fundamental contributions to at least four fields of economics—welfare economics, for which he won the Nobel Prize, social-choice theory, economic measurement and development economics. Yet, if there were a Nobel Prize awarded for philosophy, he might conceivably have won that too.

He is rooted in Bengal’s alluvial soil, especially. Though he has spent most of the past seventy years at universities in America and England (including as the first Asian master of a Cambridge college), he has never taken up foreign citizenship and often returned to India, especially Bengal. Most years he returns to Santiniketan, where his grandfather Kshitimohan, a renowned Sanskritist, taught at the progressive college founded by India’s first Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. It was Tagore who gave Sen his name—Amartya, meaning ‘immortal’. He also imbued him with the same intellectual cosmopolitanism, an embrace of all the world’s philosophical traditions as well as their complexity, upon which Visva Bharati was founded.

That, too, was an embrace that brought Sen back to India because for him, as for Tagore, an openness to outside influence for the purpose of debate and mutual improvement is fundamental to the idea of India. It is a notion he explored in his magisterial work The Argumentative Indian, which was in part a repudiation of the more exclusionary and reductive identification of India with Hinduism. It happens also to contain some of the best opening lines of any book: ‘Prolixity is not alien to us in India. We are able to talk at some length.’

This appetite for intellectual clamour, and related to it, heterodoxy, is also reflected in his distinctive method. Economists tend to prize rigour—they seek out the general principles of a phenomenon and ignore the particulars. Humanists, by contrast, value erudition. Believing that the world is not reducible to strict principles, they revel in the particulars of any case; their arguments proceed on the basis of quotation and citation, not mathematical formulas. Yet, Sen, like Arrow before him, has often demonstrated both approaches, including in the same groundbreaking volume. This is in part in the interest of accessibility; Sen wants his problem-solving to reach the widest possible audience. It also reflects his love of intellectual history; Sen lets the great thinkers of the past, from the East and the West, pose many of the questions that he sets out to answer.

Sen is a prime technician—able to theorize, as an admiring colleague of mine once put it, ‘without oxygen at any height’; committed to grappling with the world’s quirks and mundanities. In my interactions with him for the purposes of this chapter, I encountered, unhappily for both of us, another image of that distinctiveness. After I initially wrote to the great economist, requesting some time to chat, he responded enthusiastically. He would be glad to talk about his work. Maybe, with the next Harvard semester approaching, we could meet for a lunch together in Massachusetts? He would look forward to it. But then some weeks passed and Sen became harder to reach. My emails and telephone calls went unanswered.

He appeared to me, unaccountably, to have changed his mind—except of course, he hadn’t. Rather, he had had a difficult diagnosis, which would make arranging our conversation harder but, as it turned out, not impossible. Instead of meeting to talk face-to-face, as we had planned, we conducted our conversation by email, for that was easier for Sen to fit around his medical treatment. After I sent him a list of questions, he responded to at least some of them from hospital; he called once to discuss some point or other while he was in the waiting room for radiation therapy (‘At least it does you good…’ he said and sighed). It was decent of him. Though I had given him the opportunity to back out of our arrangement, he insisted on keeping a promise, even at a most difficult time. It seemed like a metaphor for his remarkable career: an intellectual grappling with real-world imperfections, in this case, with his own ailing health.

An advantage of this interview method, at least, is that it gave Sen time to cogitate over his responses, which he emailed back to me, perfectly formed. His words below are unedited. This makes his judgements and the nuances they contain especially interesting. Some readers may be surprised by Sen’s selection of the books he is most satisfied with. He finds no room for The Argumentative Indian on that list, much as he enjoyed the praise a hawker, standing in the Mumbai traffic, once lavished on a pirated copy of his bestselling book (‘It is very cheap.’).

He also seeks to clear up a couple of misunderstandings. No, contrary to the use some on the Indian Left have sought to make of him, Sen is not ‘anti-growth’. Nor, as some hotheaded greens have alleged, is he unconcerned about the environment. Sen is for human welfare, which requires plenty of growth and a healthy environment. But it also requires other things, like healthcare, education, access to modern energy. Sen pays attention to the details. He embraces complexity as enthusiastically as most of the rest of us run from it. He accepts life’s contradictions and anomalies, always striving, it seems, to attain that most Indian of virtues: balance.

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JAMES ASTILL: A feature of classical utopias is that they tended to give a lot of prominence to philosophers. Would you say that the striking prominence of economists in Indian public debate is utopian—and how do you account for it?

AMARTYA SEN: This is a really interesting question. Classical visions of utopia came in many different forms, but they typically served as vehicles of expression of discontent with existing societies and social arrangements. Even though a utopia is meant to be never quite achievable, the idea of utopia has been used by very practical people. Thomas More’s rightly celebrated book, Utopia, completed a little over 500 years ago (in 1516), came from the hands of a man with many practical responsibilities. He would later become the lord high chancellor of England as well as a major Catholic critic of the newly emerging Protestant theology of Martin Luther and William Tyndale, and also a strong opponent of the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon [More was ultimately convicted of treason and beheaded]. The idea of a utopia had a major role in inspiring More, but the connections would be hard to understand fully without philosophical analysis.

Not so with the prominence of economists in Indian public debates. The fact is that public debates in India today are often on economic subjects—from Manmohan Singh’s economic reforms to Narendra Modi’s demonetization. Economists cannot, in good conscience, shun these debates and discussions.

JA: Please list, in order of importance, your three biggest contributions to economics and public debate (or more if you like!) and explain what made them so important.

AS: I fear I am still waiting to make a big contribution, large enough to overwhelm my own internal scepticism. Meanwhile, I can read—and enjoy and benefit from—great books by others, whether in fiction or non-fiction. That is fun enough for me. However, since you would probably be disappointed by my reticent answer, let me try to address your question by reinterpreting it. I can see that some books of mine have been more widely read, such as Poverty and Famines (1981), Development as Freedom (1999) and The Argumentative Indian (2005), than others.

We have to rely, in one way or another, on other people to decide whether a contribution made sense and had a reach. In fact, sometimes the relation between what others think and what you have reason to think can be quite complex. When my book Poverty and Famines, which was critical of ongoing ways of thinking about starvation and hunger (including what the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, the mighty FAO, was powerfully championing at that time), was published, the director-general of the FAO announced in a radio interview with me, ‘It is the worst book I have ever read.’ To check how far at the bottom I really was, I asked him whether he meant [it was] the worst book he had read on the subject, to which he exclaimed firmly, ‘No, no, the worst book I have ever read on any subject.’ I have to confess I did think that this must be quite an outstanding achievement.

One’s own books are always hard to read—one thinks of the ways in which it could have been said better. But if I have to give you a selection based on my own sense of satisfaction, I would perhaps choose some of my other books, including Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970, 2017), Identity and Violence (2006) and The Idea of Justice (2009). But the scale here is that of the author’s own satisfaction. You will not be able to make me describe ‘what made them so important’, since I don’t even know that they really are important for others.

In 2005, just outside the Bombay airport, a young vendor who was offering to sell me, through the window of my taxi, a pirated edition of my recently published book, The Argumentative Indian, told me, ‘This is a very, very good book.’ I asked him why it was ‘good’, to which he said, ‘I don’t know, but it is very cheap from me.’ I thought that there he had some solid ground to stand on.

JA: How has your view of any of those contributions changed significantly over time, and if so, what has surprised you about that evolution or reappraisal?

AS: That is inevitable. We write, we rethink and our ideas move on, often in a subtle way. When I wrote my first book (not counting my PhD thesis), which was on social choice theory (Collective Choice and Social Welfare), I knew I was having fun in thinking about analytical—and sometimes mathematical—problems on the making of aggregative decisions on behalf of a society containing many people with conflicting interests and different priorities. Happily for me, the first edition of the book was followed by the development of quite a large literature (I was delighted to see others taking on problems I had tried to investigate), and so I had to come back to these questions, again and again, over time.

I was particularly satisfied that the book was being widely read since I had spent a lot of time in doing the first edition to present my analytical findings, which were often quite mathematical, in an accessible way, in simple English. The chapters with mathematical reasoning were ‘starred’ to warn the reader, but they were invariably preceded and followed by completely non-mathematical discussions, clear to all, in unstarred chapters.

Even though theorems and proofs cannot be avoided in difficult problems of social aggregation, I wanted the basic ideas to reach those who had no love for mathematics. It was quite hard work to write the totally informal unstarred chapters—to present complex mathematical reasoning in simple English (when it was possible to do so, which turned out to be very often the case). I was extremely elated when I found that the first edition of the book was being read by non-technical readers, and I personally learned a huge amount from the discussions that followed. I don’t know to what extent I can say that my views changed, but they certainly got extended and sharpened, and I was also very happy to take on additional problems in the second expanded edition of the book, which directly followed from the public discussions that were taking place. You may not be able to bathe twice in the same river, but it is wonderful to immerse yourself again in a familiar river that has moved on, taking its own course.

Let me consider a different type of case about changing views on one’s own work. In my book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, I discussed how violence can be the result of assuming—or imposing on others—singular identities, when we all have many different identities (related to nationality, location, class, gender, language, profession and many other things), which can peacefully coexist. My views have not changed on that basic diagnosis, but later on, the actual growth of identity-generated violence in the world around us made me see that the book had to be made much more practically oriented. I have not completed the follow-up yet, but I am convinced of the need for a changed orientation and emphasis within the broad understanding that I tried to present in the 2006 book.

For example, I discussed in the book, in some detail, why a Muslim person’s identity is not confined only to his or her religion, but also to language and literature, fine arts and music, philosophy and science, and other correlates, including the long tradition of mathematics, going back to many early pioneers such as Al-Khwarizmi (from whose ninth-century work the modern word ‘algorithm’ is derived—the term ‘algebra’ comes from his book Al-Jabrwa al-Muqabalah). This is as much a part of Muslim history as the history of religion. This plurality of identities is not only conceptually and epistemologically important (as I discussed in the 2006 book), but it is also of immediate relevance to practical politics, including critical issues in ‘Islamic’ affiliation.

A similar thing can be said about the artificially narrowed ‘Hindutva’ politics, bereft of so much of history, which has been gaining ground in India. It is important to understand that there is [a] need for clear-headed thinking to help reduce violence in the world. Even though I did analyse these connections in my 2006 book on identity and violence, much more needs to be done in bringing out the ways through which the pernicious effects of insisting on singular identities work in the rough and fierce world around us.

JA: In what way do you think your work has been most or most widely misunderstood, wilfully or otherwise?

AS: I don’t think I have suffered much from misinterpretation. But there have been some aberrations. For example, in dealing with economic policies for a country like India, I have argued that while economic growth is very important, we have to go beyond that and make sure that the fruits of growth are widely shared and that essential public services (including elementary education and healthcare) and other ingredients of a decent life are available to all. This dual emphasis has sometime been missed—or overlooked—by critics who have tried to place me, quite absurdly, in an anti-growth box, just because I have argued that economic growth is important but is not enough on its own.

Also, I have argued that education and health are both important in themselves (they enrich the lives we can lead) and are also instrumentally helpful in quickening and broadening the reach of economic growth, which, in turn, again helps the quality of human lives. The latter connection, which is central to understanding the strategy of economic growth in East Asia (comprising countries such as Japan, China, South Korea and so on), is very important in my developmental thinking. It has been disappointing when some critics have tried to portray me as being confined to celebrating health and education separated from everything else, and ignoring economic growth (rather than seeing health and education as being important both directly and also indirectly through enhancing the possibility of economic growth).

Similarly, my insistence on seeing environmental problems (and those of sustainability) along with the need for economic expansion has also occasionally—though happily, not very often—been wrongly interpreted as my being negligent of environmental concerns. These misunderstandings, when they have occurred, have their roots in overlooking the need for multi-directional thinking. Arguments for paying attention to some things must not be seen as arguments against paying attention to other, often highly complementary, concerns.

We live in an interdependent world, and we have to keep our eyes simultaneously on many different things. To take a different type of example, the inequalities related respectively to class divisions and to caste hierarchy are both terribly real in India. In fighting against one of them (say, caste disparities), we have no reason to forget about the other (class-based inequalities). Indeed, the two have to be investigated together.

JA: What is the most important thing, or principle, many members of the Sangh Parivar misunderstand about Indian culture or political history?

AS: I think the Sangh Parivar underestimates the breadth of Indian culture in general, and also the capacious nature of the totality of Hindu traditions. Indian history includes strong influences of many religions (Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Christianity, Judaism, Parsi traditions, Sikhism, Adivasi beliefs), not to mention the huge school of sceptical materialistic philosophy, which has flourished in India at least from the sixth century BC. Further, the Hindu traditions themselves make room for a big variety of ideas and priorities, which have enriched India, but also many other countries, especially in the east. If the Hindutva priorities take the dreadful form, as has happened recently, of encouraging the beating up of members of minority communities for eating beef (or even for being suspected of having beef at home), that is only the rough edge—a very rough and nasty edge—of an artificially narrowed reading of the Hindu tradition. This enforced emaciation of Hinduism is a serious cultural injury, which adds to the crudity of half-reasoned denials of the diversity and grand plurality of Indian ideas and thoughts in general. We have to protest when, in the name of glorifying Indian culture, the valuable traditions of the country are being severely rubbished.

ZUBIN MEHTA

MUSIC CONDUCTOR

Interviewed by PRITISH NANDY

‘Well, just imagine one day in the world without music. I am not talking about classical music only. I am talking about rock, African, Indian.’

Bombay-born Zubin Mehta, eighty-three, is arguably the world’s most famous Western classical music conductor. He lives in Los Angeles, travels around the world conducting the best orchestras and spends much of his year in Tel Aviv, where he is the music director (for life) of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he has spent forty-eight years and conducted over 3,000 concerts, touring continent after continent. He is also chief conductor of the Maggio Musicale Florentino in Florence. He received the Padma Vibhushan in 2001, the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo in 2008 and the Tagore Award in 2013.

M

ehli Mehta was born in south Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1908. Like most Parsis of that time, he had a deep interest in music (classical Western music) from his childhood. It was a passion that consumed him. While other young men were reading the classics or playing cricket, Mehli Mehta spent all his time learning how to play the violin with amazing skill. He was inspired by Jascha Heifetz, a Lithuanian-born Russian-American violinist, whom many musicologists consider the greatest violinist of all time.

Mehta grew up to be one of Bombay’s—and India’s—pioneering figures in the world of music and founded the Bombay Symphony Orchestra in 1935. He was its first concertmaster for a decade, and then conductor for another. In 1940, he also founded the Bombay String Quartet. Five years later, in 1945, two years before Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi led India to freedom, he decided to move to the United States where he spent the rest of his life, barring a five-year stint as assistant concertmaster and concertmaster of the Hallé Orchestra of Manchester under Sir John Barbirolli, who was one of the great influences of his life.

Mehta had two sons, Zubin and Zarin. Zubin, born in 1936, turned out to be like him—an exceptional musical talent and one of the greatest music conductors of all time. He is currently the music director of the Tel Aviv-based Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. He has announced that he will retire in 2019 when he completes fifty years with the Israel Philharmonic. (He is hoping, he said in a recent interview, that before he retires, he may be able to find a Palestinian to play in the orchestra.)

That would be half a century, the longest any conductor has been with an orchestra anywhere in the world. It shows, if nothing else, the man’s fierce commitment to whatever he does. This interview was not easy to fix. The peripatetic Mehta was travelling so extensively that it took three months of chasing down a lady called Natalia Ritzkowsky, based in Greifenberg in Germany, who assists him, to persuade him to take a pause and speak to me for an hour. The interview was scheduled to commence at 10 a.m. at the Tel Aviv Hilton but was delayed by an hour and a half, with frequent phone calls coming in to break the rhythm. But no, Zubin Mehta is not a person one would like to give up on so easily. So I persisted, the craven arriviste before the great maestro.

Mehta learnt to play the violin and the piano at the age of seven, and by the time he was sixteen, he was conducting the full orchestra during rehearsals of the Bombay Symphony. He did his schooling from St Mary’s in Bombay and went on to study medicine. His father wanted him to be a doctor and his younger brother to be an accountant. But at eighteen, Zubin decided that enough was enough and dropped out of his medical course. Instead, he went to Vienna to study music under Hans Swarowsky. He graduated at twenty-one with a diploma in conducting.

Today an honorary citizen of both Florence and Tel Aviv, Mehta is the Israel Philharmonic’s Music Director for Life, a rare honour. He was also music director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra from 1961 to 1967, of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra from 1962 to 1978, and of the New York Philharmonic from 1978 till 1991. Between 1998 and 2006, he was the music director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and, since 1985, he has also been chief conductor of the Maggio Musicale Florentino in Florence.

Footloose as he is, Zubin lives in Los Angeles, the city he calls home. But persist with him a bit and he will tell you that ‘home’ for him is actually Bombay, the city where he was born. His postcard memory remembers the city as it was during his growing-up years. And, amidst his hectic schedule, he tries to keep in touch with Bombay, his friends and the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation at Banoo Mansions in Kemps Corner, and visits his home town whenever he gets a chance. For Zubin Mehta’s roots are tethered to Bombay. That’s where it all began. That’s where some of his best friends still live.

He muses, ‘The Bombay I grew up in was a beautiful city. Nothing of it remains any more, except the wonderful British architecture. I feel sad to see the way it has grown today. People in Germany and the US genuinely believe that India is doing well. They are not interested in the corruption that my Indian friends talk about. They see the growth, the economic development, and that is what excites them. I feel sad because I see that the growth has taken place in an uncontrolled manner. That disappoints me. But there is a lot of good here too—400 million people can read and write—that’s bigger than the entire population of Europe, if you look at it. The fact that there is a much larger population that cannot is something the country must look into and set right.’

Zubin Mehta speaks from the heart. He talks about his life and times with some nostalgia, lots of passion and an inability to understand why the world is going the way it is. No, he is not particularly voluble at this time of the day, he admits, but he does not have a choice. His days are always packed, either with performances or with travelling. He is constantly moving from one city to the next, conducting some of the greatest orchestras of the world, performing some of the most memorable music that will stay in the minds and hearts of this generation. So my sudden intervention in the baroque concerto of his life is not particularly welcome. He is testy, impatient and perhaps not happy to be interviewed at 11.30 in the morning, Tel Aviv time, by a man he does not consider well versed enough in Western classical music to be able to understand the nuances of what he has to say. Be that as it may, he is ready to answer my questions, as long as they are not too many.

***

PRITISH NANDY: You are a world citizen today. What does India mean to you?

ZUBIN MEHTA: Well, whenever journalists ask me what I consider my