New Delhi, January 9
A Nobel laureate and eminent economist, Prof Amartya Sen, today sought to dispel the notion that India was a “confined” and “static society” and underscored the concept of Indianness as different from narrow parochial and religious identities.
“Our tradition has been one of seeing ourselves as Indians, not as Hindus, Christians, Muslims or Parsis. I think this aspect is dramatically important, especially in this point of time”, Prof Sen said while delivering a special address on Pravasi Bharatiya Divas here.
He said it was important to find out why “we felt proud of ourselves as Indians”.
Professor Sen identified three aspects of the traditional strength of India’s civilisational openness: internal, dialogic and interactive.
He said there was a rich and strong ancestry to India’s dialogic openness and was not something which had been bestowed upon the country by the British.
“It is not a legacy of the Magna Carta. There is an earlier ancestry to the practice of dialogue where it was believed that differences and disagreements could be resolved through discussion rather than violence”, he said.
Professor Sen said it was important for the country to pursue the policy of interaction to obviate any occurrence of violence which, according to him, took place due to lack of interaction.
Indians did not adopt a frog-in-the-well approach wherein society was happy to confine itself to limited surroundings, he said.
“We have reason to be proud of our country not because of a confined tradition but because India has always had a dynamic interactive tradition”, he said.
Indian success is ascribed to its interactive quality that led to the development of science and mathematics in the country.
Citing the example of the tremendous success achieved in the information technology sector by India, he said it was indicative of the interactive openness.
