Philosopher or rakish dandy: who is the real Amartya Sen?

The life of Amartya Sen, one of the towering intellectual figures of our age, could be a great book. The fact that it is only a very good one is a consequence, though not an inevitable one, of the fact that he has written this one himself.

Sen has lived as full a life as one could imagine for a man who has also made epochal contributions to at least two disciplines: economics, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1998, and philosophy. His work in the subject’s most abstract and mathematical reaches remain touchstones of 20th-century economics. But the work for which he earned his wider renown was done in what were once thought the plebeian branches of the discipline: the economics of welfare and development, which he approached with a combination of technical sophistication, open-mindedness and humanity not often encountered within his discipline.

Senior academics rarely write good memoirs. The form affords them too many opportunities for pettiness, for relitigating old battles, for trying to rewrite the histories of their disciplines in their own image. Despite his general air of modesty, Sen does not entirely avoid the clunky embarrassments of the genre. There are too many paragraphs on uninteresting holidays, too many formulaic recitations of campuses where he spent productive semesters. Celebrity names are dropped with some frequency, and too many of his anecdotes leave one guessing that one had to have been there.

The pattern of the narrative is marked as much by reticence (bordering on evasion) as by modesty. A marriage and a divorce are reported almost as an afterthought; children defined almost entirely in terms of their adult careers. What must have been a horrific experience of undergoing a primitive form of radiation therapy for cancer of the mouth, when still an undergraduate, is told as a triumphant account of a clever-clogs who managed to out-diagnose the specialists.

A man is certainly entitled to his privacy, but Sen’s insistence on keeping his emotional life at arm’s length leaves little room for self-analysis, and no sense of how other people thought about him. The memoirs of the social anthropologist Andre Beteille and the feminist economist Devaki Jain – two of the many academic friends he pays tribute to in these pages – offer a different (though still sympathetic) picture of the young Sen: rakish, puckish and a bit of a dandy among the staid Marxists of Calcutta, with whom he once whiled away the hours debating politics in grimy coffee houses.

The absence of any sustained self-revelation, however, is more than compensated for by the raconteurial energy of these pages. Sen writes with an elegance and wit that would be impressive even in a man for whom English was not a third language. His accounts of his own work are characteristically succinct and fluent, and would make excellent introductions to his research for readers daunted by the prospect of Collective Choice and Social Welfare or even the neat and still troubling paradox he discovered in The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal. His evocation of post-war Cambridge and the towering figures of 20th-century economics are affectionate but just. Even more vivid is the picture of his undergraduate days in Calcutta, with its student revolutionaries and generous booksellers.

Home in the World only covers the first half of Sen’s life – to tell the story of more recent decades would take him perhaps even more deeply into the personal territory he evidently wishes to avoid. But its finest chapters are the ones that concern his boyhood, the larger part of which was spent in Shantiniketan, Bengal, where that other Indian Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, founded his experimental school. The school was unusual for allowing lessons to be held in the open air, for abolishing corporal punishment, and for holding the arts and sciences in equal regard – and despite these novelties, turning out generations of well-adjusted and impressive individuals.

Sen quotes at one point Tagore’s marvellous summary of the best of British civilization: “Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry and above all… the large-hearted liberalism of 19th-century English politics”. It is striking just how much of Sen’s own large-hearted liberalism turn out to have been prefigured in the freedoms of his unusual childhood.

Home in the World is published by Allen Lane at £25. To order your copy for £19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop