Amartya Sen's 1st wife recalls..
naeem.m...@hbo.com
Note from Amartya Sen's first wife - scholar and litterateur Nabanita Deb Sen
REUNION IN A BRIGHT KNOT OF JOY
BY NABANITA DEV SEN
It was a drab, drizzly evening in Gadiara.
Due to a power cut, one single bulb was struggling to light up
the room, the fan was lethargic, the airconditioner had totally
resigned and I wondered what the TV was up to. A hazy
picture appeared on the screen. It was Amita Sen! (Amartya
Sen's mother) with an inset photo of AKS's!
"He's got it, didibhai, he's got it!" I jumped up and screamed. The sound
wasn't there.
But I was sure what the message could be. The sound followed soon
enough. And I wished I were in Calcutta, to share the joy
and the excitement with all our friends. What a day to choose to
spend in the wilderness!
Well, this has come to us pretty late --- I wasn't as excited as
I should have been as we had been expecting it for nearly 30
years but my heart was full. Better late than never! I am happy
for his children and for his mother. I would have loved to
celebrate this special moment with my two
lovely daughters.
Antara, the elder one, is now in Oxford with a Reuters
Foundation Fellowship; Nandana, the younger one, is in
Montreal, working in an Indo-Canadian film
project. Neither of them is in New York near their father, or
in Calcutta to share this moment of glory.
Since AKS is in New York for a memorial lecture for an old
friend, I congratulated his wife, Emma (Rothschild), in Trinity.
Emma, the wonderful woman that she is, said they were
missing me and wished I was there.
I came back from Gadiara to be faced with more than a 100
messages from our friends from all over the world apart from
endless enquiries from the media.
It has been like a reunion. Lots of old friends and relatives and
colleagues and classmates with whom I have not been in touch
for so many years have all remembered me today. (And you
can see that nothing succeeds like success).
It has brought back lost friends and forgotten relatives and
tied us all in a bright knot of joy.
Although I am not an economist, there are very few established
economists I don't know - both the elderly ones and the younger ones.
The elderly ones were his teachers or colleagues and the younger his
students. Starting from Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson
and Maurice Dobb to his colleagues like Ken Arrow - I
remember many faces but forget names - Samuelson, Solow, Gary
Runciman, I.G. Patel, Manmohan Singh, Sukhamoy Chakraborty, Jagdish
Bhagwati ... among his teachers Bhabatosh Dutta and others ... among his
colleagues Bimal Jalan, Arjun Sengupta, Amiya Bagchi and many
others among his students.
How did I meet him? Jadavpur University had just been born
in 1956. It was Amartya's first year as a university professor
and the head of the department of economics. It was my first
year as a university student in the department of comparative
literature.
I read a report today in an English daily that has quite an
interesting story about how we met. I didn't know it. It says I
could not help falling in love with him at Presidency College
and that we kept looking longingly into each other's eyes,
licking Magnolia icecream and spending hours in the Coffee
House. It is reported that this story is from Nostalgia (the
Presidency College 175th year commemorative volume)
I'd like to know which page. I wish this oh-so-romantic story
were true.
Unfortunately, it is all wrong. When I went to Presidency,
Amartya was already in Cambridge. I never stepped into the
Coffee House before I finished my MA exams and I never
met him there.
What actually happened was that we met in Jadavpur University.
Me as a debater, while he was the president of the
debating society. This was our only common interest at that
moment. We developed many more like good coffee and jazz
music.
When I was going to America to study, Amartya
met the boat-train and we got engaged in Cambridge,
UK, in 1959. We went for a holiday to Wales and I sent
postcards to everyone, I was so excited. When we came
back, there was a telegram from my mother saying: "Enjoy
yourselves, do not send postcards."
Such things were not done in 1959.
Next summer, on our return, my mother-in-law blessed me
with a gold chain from her neck. Two weeks later, we got
married.
We started a life together in Cambridge, Massachussetts. I
was going to Harvard and he was a young assistant professor
in MIT. Then we moved to Cambridge, England. I went to
Newnham College and Amartya became a proper Fellow at
Trinity. We lived on Trinity Street opposite Trinity
College on top of a bookstore and I had probably the loveliest
time in my life.
We also lived in Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Delhi, back
and forth from one university to another.
Before and after, I always hung on to a fellowship after earning my
Ph.D and my motherhood at 25. Our daughters were conceived
and brought up in England, but for each birth I rushed back to India
to gift them Indian citizenship, so that they would own the land they
belonged to.
Amartya is an affectionate father and a very affectionate
teacher but he is clumsy with children and doesn't know how to
communicate with them. But as soon as they grew old
enough to be his students, there is perfect communication and
a relationship of love and trust between them.
The writer is the former wife of Amartya Se
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October 16, 1998
A friend from the days of struggle
Statesman News Service
CALCUTTA, Oct. 15. - A cranky generator and a soundless TV set: these two
brought the news of Prof Amartya Sen’s Nobel Prize award to his former wife,
Ms Nabanita Deb Sen.
She was at a village unconnected with electricity near Gadiara in Howrah
yesterday. And the TV had been switched on only to test the condition of the
generator.
And surprise! On the screen was a beaming Ms Amita Sen, Ms Deb Sen’s former
mother-in-law, with a picture of Prof Sen as inset.
And there was no sound from the idiot box!
But that flickering image was enough to tell Ms Deb Sen what "we" had wanted
to hear for years: that the man, whom she now describes as her "good friend",
had won the world’s most prestigious prize for an economist.
Ms Deb Sen, however, hasn’t been able to congratulate the Nobel laureate in
person yet.
"Where’s the hurry? Besides, Amartya told his sister to pass the news of his
feat on to me. I congratulated him via Emma (his present wife); what’s wrong
with that?"
She quickly added that this was not a question of "paying him back".
"It is just more convenient that I call him when he returns to Cambridge
rather than disturb him at New York. He must be tired."
There seemed to be a tinge of regret in her voice, though. Perhaps that was
why she revealed that she was the first person Prof Sen called after learning
that he had become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
"That was probably because I was by his side when he was a struggling scholar
in England."
And how did she react to yesterday’s news? Was she happier than the rest of
her countrymen - and more proud than them of the man to whom she was married
for close to 17 years and whom she bore two children?
"Not more, not less," she said. A pause... "Okay, maybe, a bit more happy than
the others."
The first call she made after returning to Calcutta this afternoon was to
Cambridge - to Prof Sen’s wife Emma.
Ms Emma Rothschild, despite the occasion, was mindful of practical details.
"It must cost you a lot to call from Calcutta," she said. "Hang up and I’ll
call you back."
The call didn’t take long in coming. "I wish I were there," Ms Deb Sen told Ms
Rothschild.
"We often talk about you. We miss you," she was told.
A pleasant surprise was the presence of her elder daughter, Ms Antara Deb Sen,
with her stepmother at the Nobel laureate’s Cambridge home.
"I spoke to Antara, but haven’t been able to contact my younger daughter
Nandana," Ms Deb Sen regretted. "She is in Canada, shooting for a film."
Her last conversation with Prof Sen was on 27 September, when he asked her to
go to Santiniketan; his brother-in-law had had a cerebral attack.
Does she remember their first conversation? It was probably at Jadavpur
University, where he was head of the economics department. She had just joined
the comparative literature department at the university after graduating from
Presidency College, where Prof Sen too had studied.
That was where she had first heard about him. "He had graduated before I
joined college - he was five years my senior - but he was already a legend at
Presidency. I used to hear about him quite often."
Debating brought them closer. "He was the president of a debating society, and
I was a pretty good debator myself."
Their friendship grew through 1957 and 1958, and blossomed into love the
following year.
"It was he who proposed," she said, a tinge of pride in her voice. "All his
students, including the girls, used to swoon over their professor - him in
his white dhoti, punjabi and slippers - and he swooned over me. That was the
way it was."
They were married in 1960.
Fourteen years, two daughters and several changes of address later, they
decided to part; but Ms Deb Sen declined to discuss the "negatives" this
evening.
Instead, she chose to talk of his winning the Nobel Prize. "It should have
come some time ago, but maybe it’s better that it has come so late.
"Perhaps it’s better that he should win it for something that is much closer
to everyone’s heart than for delving into the theory of economics which,
frankly speaking, escapes me.
"Famine and inequality - they are much closer to life, and less daunting
intellectually."
Prof Sen’s "talent and discipline" are what his former wife likes best about
him, but she finds his tendency to "work so hard a bit too much to take" - he
might work through a night and take the morning flight across the Atlantic.
Ms Deb Sen, however, has no advice for Prof Sen about how to spend the Rs 4.5
crore that comes with the award. "That’s not for me to say."
But though she is "not in a position to" comment on that, she keeps abreast of
her former husband’s culinary tastes: "A little bit of oil and some mashed
vegetables in a microwave. That’s cooking for the Nobel laureate."
Will all this figure in the autobiography she plans to write?
"My husband was not a Nobel laureate; but my daughters have a Nobel-laureate
father.
"For me, Amartya was a struggling scholar. I shall write about that."