HOME IN THE WORLD

The Nobel Prize winner fashions a moving, heartfelt memoir of his early life before and after Partition in Bengali India.

Always reflective and erudite, Sen (b. 1933), a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard, reminisces on his academic and personal influences, creating an engaging portrait of a significant intellectual life. The son of urban Bengalis—his father was an academic who taught at Dhaka University, in what is now Bangladesh, and his mother was a modern dancer—the author traces his early upbringing studying Sanskrit with his father and grandfather, much influenced by the visionary, poet, and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Sen was sent to Tagore’s school in Shantiniketan, now in West Bengal, India, where he lived with his grandparents (after Partition in 1947, his family would be displaced there) and embarked on a kind of alternative, literary education without exams or corporeal punishment. Sen would incorporate in his later economic training the enormous tragedy of the Bengal famine of 1943, which he witnessed firsthand. “Starvation,” he writes, “is a characteristic of people not being able to buyenough food in the market—not of there being not enough food in the market.” Sen went on to study in Calcutta before moving to Trinity College, Cambridge, and then further advanced studies and research in the U.S. The author smoothly interweaves the rich history of the Bengali culture into his autobiography, often returning to discussions of British influence: “Two hundred years is a long time. What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish?” Sen also provides deeply personal, often moving reflections on the course of his academic work in welfare economics, a subject that was initially dismissed as irrelevant at Cambridge—but that would eventually win him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998.

Illuminating and wonderfully accessible as both an intimate coming-of-age tale and a crash course in economics.