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It was at the age of eleven that Amartya
Sen first encountered murder. The Hindu-Muslim riots, which
suddenly erupted in the 1940s in British India, were led
by instigators on both sides. One morning when Sen was playing
in the garden of his home in Dhaka, a profusely bleeding
man suddenly came in asking for help. He was rushed to the
hospital by Amartya's father, but his life could not be
saved.
The victim, Kader Mia, was a poor Muslim
day laborer whose wife had asked him not to leave home during
the riots. But the family had nothing to eat, and Mia had
to go out, he told young Amartya, to earn a little income.
Mia was knifed by sectarian thugs who knew nothing about
him other than his religion.
Most of the victims -- both Hindus and Muslims
-- in these riots were poor laborers and their families.
Even though the victims came from different communities,
their class identity was very much the same. But nothing
other than religious identity was allowed to count in the
murderous world of singular classification.
Sen argues in this book that conflict and
violence are sustained today, no less than in the past,
by the illusion of a unique identity. Indeed, the world
is increasingly taken to be a federation of religions (or
of "cultures" or "civilizations"), ignoring
the relevance of other ways in which people see themselves,
involving class, gender, profession, languages, literature,
science, music, morals or politics. Global attempts to stop
such violence are also handicapped by the conceptual disarray
generated by the presumption of singular and choiceless
identity. When relations among different human beings are
identified with a "clash of civilizations," or
alternatively, with "amity among civilizations,"
human beings are miniaturized and deposited into little
boxes.
Through his penetrating investigation of
such diverse subjects as multiculturalism, postcolonialism,
fundamentalism, terrorism, and globalization, Sen brings
out the need for a clearheaded understanding of human freedom
and the effectiveness of constructive public voice in global
civil society. The world, Sen shows, can be made to move
toward peace as firmly as it has recently spiraled toward
violence and war.
Amartya Sen's books include On Ethics
and Economics, Development as Freedom, and The
Argumentative Indian. He won the 1998 Nobel Prize in
Economics. Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard
University; he was previously Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge, England.
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