Home in the World
A Memoir
Published on 9. June 2022
Book
Paperback/Softback
480 pages
978-0-241-95536-9 (ISBN)
Description
The extraordinary early life in India and England of one of the world's leading public intellectuals
Where is 'home'? For Amartya Sen, home has been many places - Dhaka in modern Bangladesh, the little university town of Santiniketan, where he was raised as much by his grandparents as by his parents, Calcutta where he first studied economics and was active in student movements, and Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he came aged 19.
Sen brilliantly recreates the atmosphere in each of these. He remembers his river journeys between Dhaka and his parents' ancestral homes and wonderfully explores the rich history and culture of Bengal. In 1943 he witnessed the disastrous unfolding of the Bengal Famine, and the following year the inflaming of tensions between Hindus and Muslims. In the years before Independence, some of his family were imprisoned for their opposition to British rule.
Central to Sen's formation was the intellectually liberating school in Santiniketan founded by Rabindranath Tagore (who gave him his name Amartya) and exciting conversations in the Coffee House on College Street in Calcutta. In Cambridge, he engaged with many of the leading economists and philosophers of the day, especially with the great Marxist thinker Piero Sraffa, who provided a direct connection not only to Wittgenstein, but to Antonio Gramsci and the anti-fascist battles in Italy in the 1920s. After years in Europe and America, the book ends when he returns to Delhi in 1963.
Home in the World shows how Sen's experience shaped his ideas - about economics, philosophy, identity, community, famines, gender inequality, social choice and the power of discussion in public life. The joys of learning and the importance of friendship are powerfully conveyed. He invokes some of the great thinkers of the past and his own time - from Ashoka in the third century BC and Akbar in the sixteenth, to David Hume, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Maurice Dobb, Kenneth Arrow and Eric Hobsbawm. Above all, Sen emphasises the importance of enlarging our views as much as we can, of human sympathy and understanding across time and distance, and of being at home in the world.
Where is 'home'? For Amartya Sen, home has been many places - Dhaka in modern Bangladesh, the little university town of Santiniketan, where he was raised as much by his grandparents as by his parents, Calcutta where he first studied economics and was active in student movements, and Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he came aged 19.
Sen brilliantly recreates the atmosphere in each of these. He remembers his river journeys between Dhaka and his parents' ancestral homes and wonderfully explores the rich history and culture of Bengal. In 1943 he witnessed the disastrous unfolding of the Bengal Famine, and the following year the inflaming of tensions between Hindus and Muslims. In the years before Independence, some of his family were imprisoned for their opposition to British rule.
Central to Sen's formation was the intellectually liberating school in Santiniketan founded by Rabindranath Tagore (who gave him his name Amartya) and exciting conversations in the Coffee House on College Street in Calcutta. In Cambridge, he engaged with many of the leading economists and philosophers of the day, especially with the great Marxist thinker Piero Sraffa, who provided a direct connection not only to Wittgenstein, but to Antonio Gramsci and the anti-fascist battles in Italy in the 1920s. After years in Europe and America, the book ends when he returns to Delhi in 1963.
Home in the World shows how Sen's experience shaped his ideas - about economics, philosophy, identity, community, famines, gender inequality, social choice and the power of discussion in public life. The joys of learning and the importance of friendship are powerfully conveyed. He invokes some of the great thinkers of the past and his own time - from Ashoka in the third century BC and Akbar in the sixteenth, to David Hume, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Maurice Dobb, Kenneth Arrow and Eric Hobsbawm. Above all, Sen emphasises the importance of enlarging our views as much as we can, of human sympathy and understanding across time and distance, and of being at home in the world.
Reviews / Votes
Sen is so engaging, so full of charm and has such a clear gift for the graceful sentence. It's a wonderful book, the portrait of a citizen of the world ... full of its author's beguiling personality, elegance and wit of presentation, and joyous in its celebration of the life of the mind. -- Philip Hensher * Spectator * Sen's sensibility still seems Tagorean. There is the same affinity for freedom and imagination, a similar commitment to the vulnerable and the downtrodden, but most of all a shared sense that we don't yet know all there is to know about the world. -- Abhrajyoti Chakraborty * Guardian * The clarity of Sen's thought and the lucidity of his prose are delightful and entertaining but the lightness of his touch can often be deceptive because it sometimes conceals the depth and range of Sen's erudition, the intensity and the passion of his commitment to certain values and ideas and his relentless quest to bring together the home and the world. -- Rudrangshu Mukherjee * The Wire India * a charming, immensely readable, and very enjoyable voyage through the making of a great mind ... we are just led with rare good humour and gentle wit through the formative years of his life ... This is a very accessible book, "fun" to use one of Sen's favourite words, written in beautifully constructed short sentences that explain the most profound observations with commendable brevity ... It is Sen's capacity to maintain a simple style while telling amusing stories or explaining complex issues (as he does occasionally) that is both unique and captivating ... This memoir is an unforgettable story of the evolution of a thinking and enquiring and all too human a mind, as also a tribute to one who has harnessed his abundant academic talent to the needs of the humblest and poorest -- Mani Shankar Aiyar * Open the Magazine * Amartya Sen's Home in the World is really three books in one. A sensitively written memoir of the first thirty years of his life, it is interspersed with sharp commentaries on history and politics as well as intellectual disquisitions on economic theory and philosophy. -- Sugata Bose * Harvard Magazine * hypnotic ... Amartya Sen's exemplary life is a lesson in engagement with the world in which he is so at home; he is a real advertisement for someone who is happy being "a citizen of nowhere", or everywhere. -- Ferdinand Mount * Prospect * it strikes me that Sen is more than an economist, a moral philosopher or even an academic. He is a life-long campaigner, through scholarship and activism, via friendships and the occasional enemy, for a more noble idea of home - and therefore of the world. -- Edward Luce * Financial Times * This charming and absorbing book ... has the flavour of a relaxed conversation with a gifted raconteur ... Sen's memoir traces the experiences, encounters, and relationships that determined his conceptual concerns and intellectual evolution. It is also a deeply humane appreciation of what life can offer, filled with respect and empathy for other humans. -- Jayati Ghosh * The Lancet * captivating ... This is not, though, just a book of ideas. Home in the World can't help but be the work of an intellectual. But, as its title implies, it is the work of an intellectual who acknowledges that ideas grow out of - are imbricated with - phenomena external to the self. -- Christopher Bray * Tablet * [full of] raconteurial energy ... Sen writes with an elegance and wit ... His accounts of his own work are characteristically succinct and fluent ... His evocation of post-war Cambridge and the towering figures of 20th-century economics are affectionate but just. Even more vivid is the picture of his undergraduate days in Calcutta, with its student revolutionaries and generous booksellers. ... It is striking just how much of Sen's own large-hearted liberalism turn out to have been prefigured in the freedoms of his unusual childhood. -- Nikhil Krishnan * Daily Telegraph *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 191 mm
Width: 133 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
333 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-241-95536-9 (9780241955369)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
07/2021
1st Edition
Penguin Books Ltd
€11.99
Available for download
Person
Amartya Sen is Professor of Economics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1998 to 2004, and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998. His many celebrated books including Development as Freedom (1999), The Argumentative Indian (2005), Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2007), and The Idea of Justice (2010), have been translated into more than 40 languages. In 2012 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama and in 2020 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade by President Steinmeier.