The compassionate economist: Amartya Sen reflects on an Indian childhood

In “Home in the World,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen describes how growing up in India fed a desire to connect theories with real people.

As a child in British India, Amartya Sen received an early lesson in economics when he noticed that a local sports rivalry had an impact on fish prices in Calcutta. As he explains in his new memoir, “Home in the World,” depending on which team won a football match, the type of fish preferred by its fans for celebratory dinners would immediately shoot up in price. “The elementary economics of a price rise due to a sudden hike in demand,” Sen writes, “was immediately interesting.”  

The young boy captivated by fish prices went on to become a Nobel Prize-winning economist and is currently a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University. His graceful and hopeful book concludes long before those accomplishments, however: “Home in the World” focuses on Sen’s formative years, revealing the roots of his academic interests in his early experiences.   

Those experiences were wide-ranging, fittingly for somebody with what Sen describes as a “greedy curiosity about the world around us.” He was born in 1933 to a Hindu family in what was then Bengal. With the 1947 partition of India, Sen’s parents’ home in Dhaka became part of a newly created East Pakistan. (Dhaka is now the capital of Bangladesh.) By then, however, Sen was living with his grandparents in order to attend the progressive school at Santiniketan founded by Nobel-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore, a colleague of Sen’s grandfather. 

Sen was deeply influenced by his unorthodox education at the school, which emphasized freedom and reason. He also describes long kitchen conversations with his grandmother, a midwife, that taught him about India’s high rates of maternal and infant mortality, subjects that he would go on to research.  

In addition, he was profoundly affected by the suffering he witnessed during the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed between 2 million and 3 million people. Starving men, women, and children from rural provinces passed through his neighborhood on their way to Calcutta, where they hoped, largely in vain, to receive government assistance. Decades later, Sen would write the book “Poverty and Famines,” arguing that such tragedies are often caused less by food shortages than by rising demand pushing the price of food out of reach of the poor.

When Sen was 10 years old, a Muslim day laborer who had been stabbed by a Hindu gang staggered to his family’s home seeking help. The man had taken a low-paying job in a Hindu neighborhood during a period of violent Muslim-Hindu riots, despite being aware of the danger. He died of his wounds, and his death, like the famine, preoccupied Sen for a long time. “I came to recognize the huge reach of poverty in robbing a person of all freedoms – even the freedom not to take a highly probable risk of being murdered,” he reflects. 

The sectarian violence demonstrated to Sen, an atheist, the perils of reducing people to a single identity. “A Bengali identity has always been important for me, without being invasive enough to obliterate my other loyalties of occupation, politics, nationality and other affiliations, including that of my shared humanity with all others,” he observes. That belief in shared humanity, and an attendant commitment to inclusiveness and tolerance, have been significant to Sen’s body of work, including his desire to connect abstract economic theories with real people and real problems.

Sen’s convictions were solidified through years of voracious reading and debating. He joyfully recalls his undergraduate studies in Calcutta, where he spent hours in a local coffeehouse in intense conversation with classmates. “Arguing about Marx was fun,” he writes. From there he went to Trinity College in England. Arriving in London on a tranquil evening on his way to Cambridge, just six years after Indian independence, he recalls, “The quietness was in contrast to the jolt I had expected when seeing – at last – the metropolis from which my country and so much of the world had been run.” A planned two-year stay turned into ten, as Sen earned a Ph.D. and won a prestigious Prize Fellowship.

“Home in the World” reads more like an intellectual autobiography than a typical memoir. The magnanimous author credits the many thinkers who have inspired him, describing their scholarly backgrounds in detail. (He commends one important mentor, Italian economist Piero Sraffa, for helping “to persuade me out of my idiocies.”) Sen reveals little about his inner life, however. As an undergraduate he had a harrowing experience with oral cancer and radiation treatment; even this ordeal is described more scientifically than emotionally. Late in the book he abruptly states that he married Nabaneeta Dev, “a poet, novelist, and literary scholar,” in 1960, and in the next paragraph, just as abruptly, writes that “our marriage sadly ended in divorce in 1973.” Sen has considerably more to say about his first landlady in Cambridge than about his first wife.

Despite this reserve, Sen is such a charming and engaging narrator that he makes recaps of quarrels over Keynesian economics appealing – not to mention understandable to laypeople. Given his great mind and his many roving interests, it’s clear that his career could have gone in any number of directions. Now in his late 80s, Sen remarks that he “was tempted at one time to consider the possibility of writing a ‘real history of Calcutta’ – and perhaps someday I will.”

One can only hope.