This is from about 1953 in Bombay, two years before I arrived in the family, with Tunu (Sucheta) holding the teddy-bear and Buju (Suchandra) looking sober and responsible on my mother’s left. There seems to be a radio in the background as well as a small bust of the poet Rabindranath Tagore.
Tunu lived August 12 1947 until January 26 1990. This is how I recall her last, c. 1988, after she had lost one breast to cancer and suffered other tragedies.
She, seven years older than me, was really my first teacher, telling my infant mind about the world it found itself in even before I ended up at Lady Evelyn’s kindergarten in Ottawa. There will be more of her here in due course — building a snowman together in the Canadian snows and other escapades. I wept much, far away in Honolulu, when she died in Calcutta aged 42. She would have been a happy grandmother today, enjoying her three grandchildren:
Buju lived February 14 1943 until January 10 1998. She was 12 years older than me and loved me dearly and I wept much at her tragic passing — she had no children and I cremated her with the full honours that she might have received had she left a son.
I shall write more of her in time. Meanwhile, I remain grateful for Nana Mouskouri’s rendition of Amazing Grace as there is an uncanny resemblance.
December twenty years ago is when I last saw Tunu, having returned from Honolulu to say what we knew was our last goodbye; December twelve years ago was when I last saw Buju. “The wise grieve not for those who live or for those who die, for life and death shall pass away, and I and thou and those kings of men, shall live for ever and ever” advises the Bhagavad Gita as I recall; but perhaps the advice is wrong since the wise like the unwise do grieve and should.
11 March 2010 My paternal grandfather, Manindranath Roy (not the Communist who took the same pseudonym), had been a friend and colleague of Nagen Ganguly, the son-in-law of Rabindranath Tagore.
This 1930 letter, perhaps from Puri judging by its contents (or could it be Vizag as there is a Mr Naidu as a “local man”?), was sent by Nagen’s wife, Meera Debi, to her friend, my grandmother. It is being published here as it may throw a little light on Bengal’s social life at the time. Though women wrote in Bengali amongst themselves, Bengali men educated in English seemed to invariably correspond in English.
“My Dear, Today we reached here safe and sound. The journey was smooth. Monibabu had asked someone to receive us at the station but we did not need his help as my nephew came to receive us. People here seem to be veritable cut-throats.! If you have no acquaintance here there is every possibility of your being cheated. My nephew, Ajin, took a local man , Mr. Naidu with him. If this person had not bargained with the porters they would have created great chaos demanding …….Rs. just to get our luggage off the train. Mr. Naidu also fixed the fare with the coachman. In fact the servant , the gardener, everyone has this tendency to extort as much as possible. Our gardener has fixed us one helping hand but I don’t find him suitable. He will only bring water, buy daily necessities, and sweep the floors but he will not wash utensils or clothes. He disobeyed me even when I asked him to hang the clothes for drying! Our own servant who has come with us can easily do the cooking along with sweeping and shopping. So, how practical will it be to have another help just for the washing! Today we had lunch at my brother’s. Charubabu’s son-in-law came to look after our requirements as soon as we had come here. A great disadvantage of this house is that there is no shelf or rack to keep a single thing . There are only one table and a small table. Of these one has to be kept in the bathroom for toiletries and the other will have crockery on it. There is no other almirah or cupboard to keep the crockery so that I can use this table for writing purposes. Anyway, I feel embarrassed to ask for anything because we are enjoying the house free of cost. I asked for only one thing but in vain. It was for a dressing table. It never entered my mind to bring a mirror as I had thought it was someone’s home. Naturally none of the three of us had thought it necessary. Nevertheless, I really like this house. It is on the sea beach. It merely lacks a few small necessities. I am feeling very drowsy because I have taken a bath in the sea after arriving here. I hope you are all hale and hearty. That day I got really scared while coming back from your home. My regards to all of you. Yours, Meera” .
From Facebook 8 May 2012
Rabindranath Tagore was a great man, a year younger than my great grandfather. My father when a boy paid his respects to him many a time. My grandfather worked with Tagore’s son-in-law and their wives were friends. A letter from the daughter to my grandmother is at my blog (translated very kindly by KM). Tagore, as a creative genius and literary spirit, would have been appalled by all the worship he has been subjected to in recent decades. A holiday for his 150th birthday? He would have I am sure preferred to see new genius thrive, not his work endlessly repeated, made a hash of, bowdlerized….
What I (also) find odd is no one realises that no Muslim can go about worshipping Tagore or Vivekananda etc statues and photos with garlands and namastes etc. And in this I am wholly Muslim.
“I have arrived at this belief by the study of Nature. I can only grasp the beauty of the soul by the beauty of the body, but some day one will come who will explain what I only catch a glimpse of and will declare how the whole earth is beautiful. I have never been able to say this in sculpture so well as I wish and as I feel it affirmed within me. For poets Beauty has always been some particular landscape, some particular woman; but it should be all women, all landscapes. A negro or a Mongol has his beauty, however remote from ours, and it must be the same with their characters. There is no ugliness. When I was young I made that mistake, as others do; I could not undertake a woman’s bust unless I thought her pretty according to my particular idea of beauty; today I should do the bust of any woman, and it would be just as beautiful. And however ugly a woman may look, when she is with her lover she becomes beautiful; there is beauty in her character, in her passions, and beauty exists as soon as character or passion becomes visible, for the body is a casting on which passions are imprinted. And even without that, there is always the blood that flows in the veins and the air that fills the lungs.”
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), viz., Judith Cladel, Auguste Rodin
Pris sur la Vie, 1903, pp. 103-104, translated by Havelock Ellis.
My father was a senior diplomat in India’s Embassy in Paris 1971-1973, and I (who had gained admission at Haileybury College, Hertford, in England to do Natural Science at Advanced and Special levels) loved my visits to Paris, crossing the Channel by boat or hovercraft. We lived at 14 Rue Eugene Manuel and I came to know Paris as well as a 17-18 year old could. In 1978 I returned from Cambridge to Paris for an interview, and that visit allowed me to come to know better the magnificent and moving art of Rodin. I later found his aesthetic philosophy captured in the statement above, which seems to me to be summarised by this equation:
Beauty = Ugliness + Love
which implies
Beauty – Love = Ugliness
E.g. a beautiful woman who is unloved becomes ugly just as a plain woman who is loved becomes beautiful.
If DH Lawrence had known of Rodin’s statement
“some day one will come who will explain what I only catch a glimpse of and will declare how the whole earth is beautiful”
he would have found it resonant. Perhaps his own magnificent descriptions as a naturalist made Lawrence the successor whom Rodin had wished for.
A Philosophical Conversation between Prof Sen & Dr Roy
First published in The Sunday Statesman, “8th Day”, May 14 2006
ROY: …The philosophers Renford Bambrough and John Wisdom would have been with you at Cambridge….
SEN: Wisdom I knew better; he was at my College; but you know my philosophy was not an important thing at the time. Among the philosophers there, it was C. D. Broad with whom I chatted more. But Wisdom I knew, and he mainly tried to encourage me to ride horses with him, which I didn’t.
ROY: You went to Cambridge in …
SEN: I went to Cambridge in 1953.
ROY: So Wittgenstein had just died…
SEN: Wittgenstein had died.
ROY: Only just in 1952 (sic; in fact he died in 1951).
SEN: But I knew a lot about the conversations between Wittgenstein and Sraffa because Sraffa was alive; I did a paper on that by the way.
ROY: Well that’s what I was going to ask, there is no trace of your work on Wittgenstein and the Wittgensteinians.
SEN: I don’t know why. My paper was published in the Journal of Economic Literature a couple of years ago. Now mind you it’s not a conclusion, just an interpretation, what was the role of Gramsci in the works of Sraffa and Wittgenstein, what is it that Sraffa actually did in intermediating between them.
ROY: In your book Identity and Violence, I was curious to find you call yourself a “dabbler” in Philosophy yet at the same time you are an eminent Professor of Philosophy at Harvard for decades. The question that arose was, were you being modest, and if so, truly or falsely?
SEN (laughs): I think if you make a statement which you suspect might have been made out of modesty and then I said it was because of modesty I think I would have eliminated the motivation for the statement as you identify it. I am not going to answer the question as to what I think.
ROY: But surely you are not a “dabbler” in Philosophy?
SEN: I am interested in Philosophy is what I meant, and whether I am a dabbler or whether I’ve succeeded in making some contribution is for others to judge. But not for me to judge.
ROY: Okay.
SEN: As for me, the right description is that I am a dabbler in Philosophy. But then that diagnostic is… mine, and I won’t go to war with others if someone disputes that. But it’s not for me to dispute it.
ROY: Would you, for example in reference to our discussion about Wittgenstein, say that you have contributed to Philosophy in and of itself regardless of Economics?
SEN: Most of my work on Philosophy has got nothing to do with Economics. It is primarily on Ethics, to some extent on Epistemology. And these are not “economic” subjects. I have never written on the “Philosophy of Economics” at all.
ROY: How about Ontology? I mean the question “What there is” would be…..
SEN: I am less concerned with Ontology or with Metaphysics than some people are. I respect the subject but I have not been involved.
ROY: You have not been involved?
SEN: Well, I have read a lot but I haven’t worked on it. I have worked on Ethics and Political Philosophy and I have worked on Epistemology and I have worked a little bit on Mathematical Logic. Those are the three main areas in which I have worked.
ROY: Why I say that is because, if the three main philosophical questions are summarised as “What is there?” (or “Who am I?”), “What is true?”, “What should I do?”, then the question “Who am I?” is very much a part of your concern with identity and a universal question generally, while “Is this true?” is relevant to Epistemology and “What should I do?” is obviously Ethics. Morton White summarised philosophy in those three questions. It seems to me you have in this book had to look at…
SEN: At all three of them.
ROY: Well, some Ontology at least.
SEN: But you know I agree with your diagnostic that the second question “What I regard myself to be, is that true?”, is a question of Epistemology, because that’s the context in which “Is it true?” comes in. The second is primarily an epistemological question. The third is, as you said, primarily an ethical question, though I do believe that the dichotomy between Epistemology and Ethics is hard to make. On that subject I would agree with Hilary Putnam’s last book, namely when he speaks of “the collapse of the fact-value dichotomy” which is sometimes misunderstood and described as the collapse of the fact-value distinction, which is not what Hilary Putnam is denying, he’s arguing that the dichotomy is very hard to sustain, because the linkages are so strong, that pursuit of one is always taking you into the other. But the first question you are taking to be an ontological question, “Who am I?”, and at one level you can treat it as that, but there is a less profound aspect of “Who am I?”, namely what would be the right way of describing me, to myself and to others, and that has a deep relationship with the second question. If the separation or dichotomy between the second and third raises some philosophical questions of significance, the dichotomy between the first and second would too. So “Who am I?” can be interpreted at a profound ontological level but it could also be interpreted at a level which is primarily fairly straightforward Epistemology. And it is at that level that I am taking that question to be. Namely: Am I a member of many different groups? Do I see myself as members of many different groups? If I do not see myself as members of many different groups, am I making a mistake in not seeing that I belong to many different groups? Is it the case that implicitly I often pursue things which are dependant on my seeing myself as being members of other groups than those which I explicitly acknowledge? These are the central issues of the “Who am I?” question in this book.
ROY: Well you haven’t used the word “identity” here but when you speak in your book of people having a choice of different identities, you are plainly not referring to multiple identities in the sense of the psychologist; are you not merely saying that everyone has different aspects or dimensions to his or her life, and is required to play different roles at different times in different contexts? Or is there something beyond that statement in your notion of “choice of identities”?
SEN: What I mean by “multiple identities” is, at one level, the most trivial, common but, at another level, most profoundly important recognition that we belong to many different groups: I’m an Indian citizen, I’m a British or American resident, I’m a Bengali, the poetry I like is Bengali poetry, I’m a man, I’m an economist, I belong to all these groups. Nothing complicated about that, and the multiple identity issues of the psychologist that you’re referring to indicate a certain level of complexity of humanity, and sometimes even of pathology perhaps, but that’s not what I am concerned with here, it’s just a common fact that there are many different groups to which any person belongs. And it’s on that extraordinarily simple fact that I am trying to construct a fairly strong, fairly extensive set of reasonings, because that forces us to see the importance of our own choice, our own decisions in deciding on how should I see myself, how would it be correct to see myself given the problems I am facing today, and given the priorities that I will have to examine.
ROY: But if we don’t use the word “groups” just for a minute, then we are not too far wrong to just say that everyone has different aspects or dimensions to their lives, so one dimension could be nationality, one dimension sexuality, one dimension one’s intellectual upbringing, then any person, any character in a novel would have different dimensions….
SEN: The difficulty with that, Subroto, is that in the same aspect we may have more than one…
ROY: Dimension?
SEN: Well dimension tries to capture in a Cartesian space a rather more complex reality, and you know I don’t think this is a metric space we are looking at, so dimensionality is not a natural thought in this context. One thing I am very worried about is when something which is very simple appears to people as being either profoundly right or profoundly mistaken. I’ll try to claim that it is right and it is not very profound but that it is not very profound does not mean people don’t miss it and end up making mistakes. In terms of the aspects of my life which concern my enjoying poetry, there may be many different groups to which I belong, one of them is that I can appreciate Bengali poetry in a way that I will not be able to appreciate poetry in some language which I speak only very little, like Italian poetry for example. But on the other hand, in addition to that, in the same aspect of my appreciating poetry, there may be the fact that I am not as steeped into historical romance which also figures in poetry or patriotic poetry and these are all again classifications which puts me in some group, in the company of some and not in the company of others, and therefore an aspect does not quite capture with the precision the group classification that I was referring to does capture.
ROY: Well, groups we can quarrel about perhaps because groups may not be well- defined…
SEN: Don’t go away Subroto but that does not make any difference, because many groups are not well-defined but they are still extremely important…
ROY: Of course there are overlapping groups…
SEN: Not only overlapping, but you know that is a different subject on the role of ambiguity, that is a very central issue in Epistemology, and the fact of the matter is that there are many things for which there are ambiguities about border which are nevertheless extremely important as part of our identity. Where India begins and China ends or where China begins and India ends may not be clear, but the distinction between being an Indian and being Chinese is very important, so I think that this border dispute gets much greater attention in the social sciences than it actually deserves.
ROY: Well, one of the most profoundly difficult and yet universally common dilemmas in the modern world has to do with women having to choose between identities outside and inside the home. Does your theory of identity apply to that problem, and if so, how?
SEN: I think the choice is never between identities, the choice is the importance that you attach to different identities all of which may be real. The fact of the matter is that a woman may be a member of a family, a woman is also a member of a gender, namely being a woman, a woman may also have commitment to her profession, may have commitment to a politics…
ROY: Does your theory help her in any way, specifically?
SEN: The theory is not a do-it-yourself method of constructing an identity. It is an attempt to clarify what are the questions that anyone who is thinking about identity has to sort out. It is the identification of questions with which the book is concerned, and as such, insofar as the woman is concerned… indeed the language that you use Subroto, that what you have to choose between identities, I would then say that what I am trying to argue is that’s not the right issue, because all these would remain identities of mine but the relative importance that I attach to the different identities is the subject in which I have to make a choice, and that’s the role of the theory…
ROY: They are all different aspects of the same woman.
SEN: Yes indeed. If not explicitly then implicitly, but that is part of the recognition that we need, it is not a question that by giving importance to one of those compared with the others you’re denying the other identities. To say that something is more important than another in the present context is not a denial that the other is also an identity. So I think the issue of relative importance has to be distinguished from the existence or non-existence of these different identities.
ROY: Well, you’ve wished to say much about Muslims in this book….
SEN: That’s not entirely right. I would say that I do say something about the Muslims in this book….
ROY: … yet one gets the impression that you have not read The Quran. Is that an accurate impression?
SEN: No, it’s not.
ROY: You have read The Quran?
SEN: Yes.
ROY: In English, presumably?
SEN: In Bengali to be exact. Not in Arabic, you probably have read it in Arabic.
ROY (laughs): No, just in English. Is it possible to understand a Muslim’s beliefs until and unless one sees the world from his/her perspective? I had to read The Quran to see if I could understand — attempt to understand — the point of view of Muslims. Does one need to read The Quran in order to see their perspective?
SEN: Well it depends on how much expertise you want to acquire. That is, if you have to understand what the Quranic beliefs are, to which Muslims as a group – believing Muslims, who identify themselves as believing and practising Muslims – as opposed to Muslims by ancestry and therefore Muslims in a denominational sense, yes indeed, if you want to pursue what practising and believing Muslims practise and believe then you would have to read The Quran. But a lot of people would identify themselves as Muslim who do not follow these practises or for that matter beliefs, but who would still identify themselves as Muslims because in the sense of a community they belong to that. I mean even Mohammad Ali Jinnah did not follow many of the standard Muslim practises, that did not make him a non-Muslim because a “Muslim” can be defined in more than one way. One is to define somebody who is a believing and practising Muslim, the other is somebody who sees himself as a Muslim and belongs to that community, and in the context of the world in which he lives that identity has some importance which it clearly had in the case of Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
ROY: Well, Muslims like Jews and Christians believe the Universe had a deliberate Creation; Hindus and Buddhists may not quite agree with that. Muslims will further believe that the Creator spoke once and only once definitively through one man, namely Muhammad in the 7th Century in Arabia. Would you not agree that no person can deny that and still be a Muslim?
SEN: I think you’re getting it wrong Subroto. It said Muhammad was the last prophet, it does not deny that there existed earlier prophets. Therefore it’s not the case as you said that God spoke alone and uniquely and only once.
ROY: Definitively?
SEN: No, no, Muslims believe that it was definitely spoken at each stage — as a follow up, like Christians misunderstood what message the prophet called Jesus was carrying and they deified Jesus, there was a need for turning a page, that’s the understanding; it’s not the case that’s what Muslims believe, that is not the Quranic view at all, that God spoke only once to Muhammad, that’s not the Quranic belief
ROY: True, true enough..
SEN: But you said that Subroto!
ROY: What I meant was “definitively”, the word “definitively” meaning that… SEN: Definitively they would say that at each stage there was a memory, and the memory and the understanding got corrupted over time and that’s why they were also so wild about idolatry for example
ROY: Well the Ahmadiyas, for example, are considered non-believers by many Muslims because they claim that there …
SEN: That also brings out the point I was making, that Ahmadiyas see themselves as Muslim….
ROY: Indeed.
SEN: …and in terms of one of the definitions of Muslim that I am giving you, namely as a person who sees himself as a Muslim, or herself as a Muslim, and regards that identity to be important is a Muslim according to that definition; another one would apply a test which is what many of the more strict Sunnis and Shias do, namely, that whether they accept Muhammad as the last prophet, and insofar as Ahmadiyas don’t accept that, then they would say then you are not Muslim…
ROY: Well they do actually…
SEN: Well they do, but in terms…I think what I am telling you is that in terms of the Shia-Sunni orthodox critique they say that in effect they don’t accept that, that is the charge against them, but those who believe that would say that on that ground Ahmadiyas are not Muslim. So I think there is a distinction in the different ways that Muslims can be characterised….
The search engine above should locate any article by its title; the Index and Archives may be used as well.
Readers are welcome to quote from my work under the normal “fair use” rule, but please try to quote me by name and indicate the place of original publication in case of work being republished here. I am at Twitter @subyroy, see my latest tweets above
Independent Indian: Work & Life of Professor Subroto Roy 