By Dr Suresh Khairnar
Rabindranath Tagore himself named him because this child was born in Shantiniketan in the house of his maternal grandfather Kshitimohan on 3 November 1933. Today he is turning 92 years old. And if we take a look at his journey from birth till now, mother Amita was the first girl from a respectable Bengali family in Bengal who started performing modern dance on stage. And for self-defense, she received formal training in Judo-Karate from Japanese teachers. All this happened a hundred years’ ago.
Influenced by Amita’s dance, Rabindranath Tagore started performing the songs written by him on stage along with Amita’s dances. Nowadays all the respectable Bengalis try to give special training to their girls from Rabindranath Tagore’s songs to the dances based on them. Now even in respectable Bengali families, Bengali girls know how to dance or sing at weddings. This is also considered an additional quality to accept her as a bride! This change has taken place as a result of Bengal’s renaissance in the last hundred years! And Amartya Sen’s mother Amita has also contributed to this change!
But the media of that time used to criticize her more than praise. Because before Amita, no girl from a respectable Bengali family had done all this on stage. For that, there were girls from special artistic families like Nati Vinodini. Just like there were Devdasis in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Goa.
A boy was born from this mother’s womb! Whom Rabindranath himself named Amartya! At times Rabindranath himself used to come to Amartya’s maternal grandfather Kshitimohan’s house every morning without giving any information! If Kshitimohan is still asleep, then immediately according to his talent of a quick poet, he would say Ravi means the Sun has come! And Kshiti means the Earth has not yet woken up? Amartya heard all this from his grandmother! And then Rabindranath and Kshitimohan set out for a morning walk! Rabindranath’s company for eight years after birth and the coming and going of world class guests in Pathabhavan since its establishment, in which before Mao Tse Tung, China’s supreme general Chang Kai Shek has come to Pathabhavan and given a speech!
Amartya Sen has written all these in his autobiography!
“Similarly, Mahatma Gandhi came in 1945, four years after the death of Rabindranath Tagore in 1941. And in his speech, he was worried about what would happen to Shantiniketan after the death of Rabindranath Tagore. And I have taken his autograph. But before that he asked for a donation of five rupees for the Harijan Fund. And I had saved some money from my pocket money. From that, I gave five rupees to the great personality of the world. But for great personalities like him, this donation is not a big deal. But I remember, Gandhiji told me with a very beautiful smile that “I have taken this donation to end the caste system in our country!” And he has given his signature in Devnagri script, M.K. Gandhi, in my notebook. Which I have preserved till date.
Similarly, while studying at Patha Bhavan, I had the benefit of very good friends. Tan Lee, son of Professor Tan Yun Shan, the founder of Cheena Bhavan, who was one year younger than me and has been my lifelong friend. And he passed away recently in 2017.
And during my early education in Patha Bhavan, I was friends with some girls too! Like among boys, Sadhan, Shib, Chitta, Chaluta, Bheltu, and Mrinal who were my closest friends! And among girls, Manjula, Jaya, Bithi, Tapati, Shanta, my opinion about my Shantiniketan friends is that a biography can be written on each one of them!”
Making friends seems to be one of Amartya Sen’s favorite habits! He has named many of his relatives too! Similarly, the intimate relationship he had built with students and teachers in Trinity College is a sign of that! The very meaning of him naming his autobiography HOME-IN-THE-WORLD-A-MEMOIR! It is his affectionate form!
Amartya Sen may have become world famous as an economist, but his commitment to human relations is extraordinary. After the partition of India, he went to meet his Pakistani friends living abroad, which also included women. And suddenly went to Lahore, Karachi and other cities just to meet friends. And to join the family of those friends, you need global level sensitivity. At the time of his studies, his friends in Cambridge also included Englishmen. And that too included women. All this is a story of 75 years ago.
Amartya Sen was very irritated by the traditional unequal treatment of women in a country like India. And that is why the same thing is a matter of concern for him even today in the relationship between men and women. And Amartya Sen has gone from Pathabhavan to Presidency and later to Cambridge, Oxford and MIT to study and teach at the global level. In his village’s Jeevan Shikshan Shala and later in Shindkheda’s New English School and then in Amravati’s Medical College and also in Rashtra Seva Dal, friendship with girls and boys has been very important for him. Many friends have asked him whether he had more female friends or male friends? He writes he had not made any list. But friendship is friendship. And there should be no distinction between men and women in it. This role has been there since childhood. And seeing Amartya Sen’s role almost the same, it seems that this man is born specifically to love in life.
Amartya joined Presidency College, Calcutta in 1952 at the age of 19 (now a university). In front of him, he used to sit in the historic coffee house to discuss the current situation of the country and the world along with his studies. He used to have deep discussions about the Second World War, India’s freedom movement and the historic Bengal famine of 1942-43 in which lakhs of people died just due to lack of food. Actually, there was no shortage of food. But for the soldiers of the Second World War, ships were being sent from India to send grain in large quantities. Therefore, a man-made famine situation had developed in Bengal. This was 100% a result of the then British rule, which forcibly collected food from the mouths of the people of India and then sent it to the battlefield abroad. And here in Calcutta, Dhaka, thousands of people came from their villages in the hope of getting food and died on the roads due to lack of food. It was a common sight.
New tactics are being adopted to humiliate Amartya Sen, who writes and speaks on such very important topics, because his writing and speaking against the wrong policies of the current government is not liked by the people who do ‘Mann Ki Baat’. This shows that the era of undeclared emergency and censorship has been continuing in our country for the last ten years.
Dialogue is the primary function of democracy! And in the present times, monologues mean ‘Mann Ki Baat’ and such nonsensical things! Amartya Sen, who tries to argue like ‘Argumentative India’! The first thing the current central government did as soon as it came to power was to remove him from the post of Chancellor of Nalanda University! And if that seemed insufficient, Amartya Sen’s father bought a piece of land in the west of Shantiniketan and built a house named ‘Pratichi’ in 1942 at a place called Sripalli! The then Vice Chancellor Prof. Vidyut Chakraborty threw him out of the same house on which he had bought the land to build a house for himself! With whose help was the then Vice Chancellor of Vishwabharati Vidyut Chakraborty doing the extremely humiliating act of evicting a 90-year-old internationally renowned economist from his house for the past few days? Which was rejected by the Shiudi court a few days ago!
And in the same context, what would you call the act of the world’s best intellectuals like Amartya Sen, of evicting people from their homes who were raising slogans of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam at airports and railway stations? Hypocrisy? ?
On the occasion of Amartya Sen’s birthday, I pray that “I want to see him cross the century of his life while keeping his health good!”
Dr Suresh Khairnar is Ex. President of Rashtra Sewa Dal
3 November 2024
Source: countercurrents.org