Book excerpt | Amartya Sen 'Home in The World': A peek into the mind of an argumentative Indian and Nobel Laureate

Who, really, are the public figures we have come to admire today? What made them who they are? What did they read, see, and experience growing up that shaped their ideas, habits, and character? How do they think and process information? What drives them?

These questions aren't mere curiosity. They are windows to help us understand our icons - whether they are Nobel laureate Amartya Sen or Olympians like swimmer Sajan Prakash (for example, we know from news reports that his mother took a night bus from Neyveli to Bengaluru every weekend for years to help him train) and weightlifter Mirabai Chanu (who opened India's medals tally at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics). They are the reason autobiographies continue to be written.

Sen's memoir, Home in The World, helpfully answers a lot of these questions about him.

For example, readers get a glimpse into Sen's childhood as he grappled with some big ideas (like freedom and inequality) which he encountered at a young age at Santiniketan, where he studied and where his maternal grandfather - a long-time friend of Rabindranath Tagore - led the Sanskrit programme.

The book, released worldwide on July 8, 2021, is an account of select personal experiences (example, Sen beat oral cancer as a young man) and intellectual pursuits (for instance, endless discussions on the significance of Marx's ideas). In that sense the book isn't a straightforward chronology of his life (reviewers have pointed out how he hasn't talked much about his first marriage), but a sort of diptych where personal experience often sparks or informs research questions and work. 

Excerpted below is a section from his book on how as a 10-year-old he saw a famine for the first time.

When the famine erupted with great ferocity between the spring and summer of 1943, I was about to have my tenth birthday and I felt very confused. I listened to the anxious discussions on the possibility of impending doom (‘if things continue to go this way’). My parents and grandparents, my uncles and aunts all had views on why prices were rising and how  –  if it continued and intensified  –  there would be widespread starvation. ‘I don’t rule out a big famine,’ my maternal uncle Kankarmama said one morning in what would have been, I think, early 1943. I was not yet absolutely sure what a famine really was, but I was full of apprehension. I did not, of course, know any economics, but I was aware that if food prices kept rising without people’s incomes going up, many would end up starving – and dying. Listening to these family conversations on tragedy and doom was a sobering way of growing up fast.

The immediate question was: what was causing the sharp rise in the price of food in 1942, and of rice in particular, the staple food in Bengal? Remember that 1942 was not the year of the famine, but the year before it. Was the commonly aired understanding that food prices were already rising fast in 1942 (hence causing panic) correct? When, as an economist, I decided, thirty years later, to study famines in general and the Bengal famine in particular, I found that the popular beliefs were entirely correct. For example, rice prices in the College Street market in Calcutta (for which I could obtain fairly reliable data) were already up by 37 per cent between the beginning of January and the middle of August 1942. By the end of the year those prices had risen by 70 per cent. For people living on miserably low incomes, a severe price hike of this kind resulted in very serious survival problems. In 1943 the problem would intensify, and by August 1943 the price of rice was five times what it had been at the beginning of 1942. By then starvation had become impossible to avoid for a substantial section of the population of Bengal.

Why was this allowed to happen? Although the Indians did not have the power to initiate anti-­famine policies, what about the British? Was the famine really so difficult to stop? In fact, quite the contrary. The problem was not that the British had the wrong data about how much food Bengal had, but their theory of famine was completely wrong. The British government was claiming that there was so much food in Bengal that there couldn’t be a famine. Bengal, as a whole, did indeed have a lot of food – that’s true. But that was on the supply side; demand was going up very rapidly, pushing prices sky-­high. Those left behind in a boom economy – a boom generated by the war – lost out in the competition for buying food.

This was at a time when the Japanese soldiers were at the border of Burma and India. In fact, part of the Japanese Army – along with the anti-­British Indian National Army (recruited from Indian-­origin residents and captured soldiers in East and South-­east Asia, raised by the Indian leader Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose)  –  was actually reaching India, at Imphal. The British Indian Army, the British Army, and later the US Army, were all buying food. They – and all the people hired for the war effort, including for military construction – were consuming a lot of it. War-­related construction projects generated new jobs and incomes; for example, I remember many new aerodromes were being built all over Bengal. There was a huge demand-­led price rise, which was further enhanced by panic and market manipulation in the buying and selling of food.

People can’t live on the knowledge – no matter how secure – that there is a lot of food around. They have to rely on their ability to buy the food they need – competing with others in the market economy. There is a huge difference between food availability (how much food there is in the market as a whole) and food entitlement (how much food each family can buy in the market). Starvation is a characteristic of people not being able to buy enough food in the market – not of there being not enough food in the market. In the 1970s, when I studied famines across the world, it became clear how important it was to focus on food entitlement – not food availability.

I should emphasize that this basic analysis of the causes of the famine was not complicated, nor particularly new. The food supply in Bengal had not fallen dramatically, but the rise in demand in the war economy was pushing food prices sharply higher, which made them go beyond the reach of the poor labourers dependent on fixed – and low – wages. Urban wages were – to varying extents – flexible upwards because of the increasing demand for labour in the war economy, but rural wages did not rise much or at all. So the largest group of famine victims were the rural workers. The government was not particularly worried about them, since it was afraid mostly of urban discontent because of its potentially weakening effect on the war effort.

To ensure that the urban population had enough food, particularly in Calcutta, the government arranged for the distribution of food at controlled prices through ration shops in Calcutta. The rationing system effectively covered the entire Calcutta population. The food needed for distribution in Calcutta was bought in the rural markets at whatever price had to be paid to buy it, which pushed up rural food prices further, causing more rural poverty and starvation, while urban residents had heavily subsidized inexpensive food from ration shops. The distress in rural areas was thus reinforced through government policy.

Excerpted from Home in The World: A Memoir by Amartya Sen with permission from Penguin Random House.