Politics of identity
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
May 21, 2006

Amartya Sen argues against reducing individuals to simple, and single, categories.

PHOTO: AP

THE KILLING FIELDS: Cultural stereotypes are reinforced to cultivate violence.

AMARTYA SEN'S new book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, rests on the seemingly simple proposition that ascribing "singular identities" to people (for example, calling someone "a Muslim" while overlooking other aspects of his individual makeup) leads to the "miniaturisation of human beings" and the "belittling of human identity". Sen argues passionately against reducing individuals to a "choiceless singularity" (few people, after all, have a choice about the religion they are born into) when all of us have so much more complexity to our identities. As he rather wittily explains: "The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English)."

Illusory notions

Sen's book is concerned not only with the multiplicity of our identities, but also with the way the illusion of a solitary identity, increasingly defined in terms only of religion, has been used to cultivate violence in the world, not least by Islamic terrorists. He inveighs strongly against the Huntingtonian thesis of a "clash of civilisations", pointing out that the argument for the primacy of an individual's religious identity, to the exclusion of other affiliations and associations, ignores the demands of other (explicitly non-religious) commitments. The separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan, after all, occurred despite their common religious identity, because an ethnic and cultural identity (Bengali) came to mean more than the purely religious label (Muslim). But there is a bigger issue at stake here than intellectual argument. Sen's rejection of Huntington's categorisation of humanity in terms of artificially (and religiously) segmented "civilisations" is based on his fear of the political consequences of such an analysis. He sees an implicit alliance between Western parochialism and Islamic extremism in ignoring, or at least undervaluing, the broader history of secular tolerance in Islamic civilisation. Too many Westerners, he says, fall into the trap of seeing science and "a sense of individualism and a tradition of individual rights and liberties" as quintessentially and uniquely Western. Instead, Sen argues, they should be celebrating the fact that ideas on mathematics, science, literature, architecture, or tolerance have repeatedly crossed the boundaries of distinct "civilisations". Western understanding of Arab history ignores Arabic math and science, including algorithmic reasoning, derived from the name of the 9th century Arab mathematician Al-Khwarizmi (from whose book Al-Jabr wa al-Muqabalah the term "algebra" is derived). "If the political leadership of the Arab Muslim world has been shifting toward a greater hold of narrow Islamism, in place of the more old-fashioned pride in the broad achievements of Arab countries," Sen recently argued in an online exchange with the American scholar Robert Kagan, "parochialism in the West has been a substantial contributor to the process."

Democratic traditions

Similarly, "the Western world has no proprietary right over democratic ideas," he writes in his book. "While modern institutional forms of democracy are relatively new everywhere, the history of democracy in the form of public participation and reasoning is spread across the world." Though Sen writes knowingly of the long traditions of tolerance in Islam, from Saladin to Akbar, he does try to come to grips with the obvious counter-argument: the violence of Islamist terror. He argues, first, that Muslims who pursue peaceful and constructive lives vastly outnumber the rest, and second, that to interpret such violence (which is deliberately cultivated by the terrorists as a political tool) as evidence of an inescapable clash of civilisations would be like claiming from the evidence of 20th century history that Germans are doomed to be Nazis. Religion, he avers, is not destiny, and Huntington's civilisational "partitioning" fails to capture the complexity of the world and indeed of each civilisation.

More questions

I agree with all this — and yet. For, when Amartya Sen asks whether a "religion-centred analysis of the people of the world is a helpful way of understanding humanity", it is fair to say that ignoring religion as a factor in identity is not wise either, especially when so many — from the jihadists of West Asia to the Hindutva chauvinists of Gujarat — continue to harp on it as the basis for their appeal to people's sense of community. We need to understand why so many today, in privileging one amongst the many identities they could lay claim to, have fallen back on religion. Why are so many political grievances, real or imagined, articulated in religious terms? The answer surely lies in the primordial nature of religious identity. When other avenues of identity mobilisation are either restricted (in autocratic states) or difficult (in societies where political patterns are entrenched and admit few interlopers), ordinary people tend to fall back upon the one identity that seems basic to them. Secular intellectuals like Amartya Sen may give equal weight to the tag of being a cricket fan or an Oxbridge don to the fact of being born in a Hindu family. But we are a minority in today's world, and there remains a great danger to our value system from the larger numbers of passionate sectarians who will never read this humane and enlightened book.