NEVER OUT OF PLACE

AMARTYA SEN’S ACCOUNT OF HIS FIRST 35 YEARS IS BOTH ILLUMINATING AND CHARMING

- Devangshu Datta

It is hard to pigeonhole Amartya Sen. He nearly opted to study physics due to his love for maths. He has taught game theory and done mathematically-driven abstract work on social choice. He has edited and translated a book on Hindu philosophy written by his late grandfather and mused at length on many philosophical questions himself and worked on famines, economic deprivation, class, gender inequalities, etc.

If you wanted to know the wellsprings of these divergent interests, this book has some answers. The bald facts, of course, are well-known. Sen has been a leading economist and public intellectual since the mid-1950s held many academic positions, and influenced public policy for decades. Nevertheless, this autobiography is deeply illuminating.

Sen describes the first 35 years or so of his life in some detail, and by doing so with the benefit of many years of hindsight, he throws a spotlight on his research choices and the humanist, rational philosophy by which he has always lived. This understanding comes to the reader organically even as Sen describes milieus that have disappeared or altered beyond recognition.

The book is linear in chronology and the title derives from the fact that Sen has multiple “homes”— places he has felt comfortable in. These include Santiniketan, where he was born in 1933, and where he did most of his schooling, staying with his maternal grandparents, while his father worked in Dhaka. (There’s a brief description of his early childhood in Mandalay and Dhaka.)

HOME IN THE WORLD A Memoir
by Amartya Sen
ALLEN LANE