Book Review: Amartya Sen’s memoir 'Home in the World' is a discussion of memories and ideas

I read this book practically non-stop. They often used the steamer to travel from Calcutta to Dhaka, where the family house was called Jagat Kutir, reflecting Sen’s grandfather’s “scepticism of nationalism”. About Marx’s “labour theory of value”, Sen quotes with approval points made by Maurice Dobb who taught Sen in Cambridge. Sen quoted Adam Smith to his students: “There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving.” Sen continues, “When I read aloud that passage from Smith in a lecture at the Delhi School of Economics, I remember the relief-and indeed the thrill- that could be detected in the class.” On Partition There is a fairly detailed account of the partition of India and of Bengal. He wanted a conditionally split country, a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan, with shared foreign policy and defence—very far from what actually emerged.” Sen says that the two-nation theory was “first proclaimed not by Jinnah but by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his presidential address to the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937.” As a matter of fact, Lala Lajpath Rai in 1925 had proposed partition and he was uncannily right in predicting the boundaries of the future Dominions.