Oh! Calcutta! Amartya Sen’s childhood memories brim with nostalgia

Santiniketan, in West Bengal, about 100 miles from Kolkata, is one of the most magical places on Earth. The Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore used a stretch of family land there to set up a great university. Modestly scaled buildings are scattered among groves; classes are conducted under the trees. The last time I was there, our rickshaw driver puttered to a halt outside a handsome residence. That, he said with some pride, was the house of Professor Amartya Sen.

I’m not sure that there are many professors of economics, even in university towns, whose presence inspires the cab drivers like that. Sen, over the past decades, has earned the gratitude of ordinary people by his honesty of thought and dedication to how their lives in general might be improved.

Perhaps his most famous work is on the causes of famine, inspired by his childhood experience of what happened in Bengal in 1943. He demonstrates unarguably that famine often has nothing to do with a shortage of food; rather, it reflects questions of infrastructure, and in particular the impact of prices and specific government policies. If famines have become much rarer over the past 40 years, that may be due in large part to Sen’s analysis.

Home in the World falls into a small genre of splendid autobiographies by Bengali intellectuals. It joins the treasured company of Tagore’s Childhood Days, Satyajit Ray’s lovely memoirs of Calcutta (as it then was), Nirad Chaudhuri’s two classic volumes, including The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, and a book that ought to be much better known, Tapan Raychaudhuri’s glorious The World in Our Time. Sen’s book covers the first half of his life, from an upbringing in Bengal, a journey to study in Cambridge, up to his return to India in 1963. It has an admirable honesty of purpose, giving us a sense of the development of Sen’s thought and intellectual engagement, as well as descriptions of family and friendships.