‘IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE: THE ILLUSION OF DENSITY’ BY AMARTYA SEN 215pp, ALLEN LANE, 2006

Abstract

Amartya Sen, Professor of Economics at Harvard and a Nobel laureate, recalls his memories when as a child he witnessed an unknown man stumbling into the garden of his parents’ house, bleeding heavily and asking for water. Sen shouted for his parents, and his father took the man to a hospital, where he died of his injuries. The victim was a Muslim day-laborer who had been stabbed by Hindus during the riots that occurred in Bengal in the last years of the British Raj. Sen continues to be not only horrified but also baffled by the communal violence he witnessed at that time. As he puts it in ‘Identity and Violence’: “Aside from being a veritable nightmare, the event was profoundly perplexing.†Why should people who have lived together peacefully suddenly turn on one another in years of violence that cost hundreds of thousands of lives? How could the poor day-laborer be seen as having only one identity – as a Muslim who belonged to an “enemy†community – when he belonged to many other communities as well? “For a bewildered child,†Sen writes, “the violence of identity was extraordinarily hard to grasp. It is not particularly easy for a still bewildered elderly adult.â€