Indian Argumentative India Summary

The book “The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity”, written by Amartya Sen, is actually a collections of essays focusing on the tradition of Indian debate, historic development, culture and identity. The book is divided into four main parts named Voice and heterodoxy, Culture and communication, Politics and protest and Reason and identity. Each part contains four sections with individual essay concerning related issues, which gave us wider picture of Indian transition to democracy.
The first section carries same name as the whole volume, “The Argumentative Indian”, and through the chapter “Dialogue and Significance” we learn the history and development of discourse in India. The author highlighted the significance of two extend ancient Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana in order to illustrate the historical tradition of discourse. For

In this segment is Tagore used to illustrate the variability of Indian culture, where we can mainly see it in the segment “Gandhi and Tagore”- their opinion differ widely on many topics like nationalism, the role of rationality, modernity, the nature of economic or social development; and how he was perceived in America and Europe in the segment “East and West” or “God and Others”. The theme of individuality and uniqueness of cultures is widely examined in other segment “Our Culture, Their Culture”, where the name probably symbolize the relation to the book “Our Films Their Films” written by Satyajit Ray, who wanted to create something that could possible speak across cultural boundaries. The modern Indian identity and culture has been also affected by Western culture. It is showed in “Indian tradition and Western imagination” that the self-perception of Indians was shaped one way or another by Western