One of the world’s most renowned economists has led an enviable life of companionable conversation and high ideals, finds Ferdinand Mount

You can hardly imagine a more heavenly start in life. Amartya Sen’s first name means “immortal” in Sanskrit, and it was devised for him by the poet Rabindranath Tagore when he was born in 1933; he was also brought up at Tagore’s school in Santiniketan in west Bengal. The school was founded to unite the world in peaceful harmony. It was run by Amartya’s grandfather to the poet’s recipe: outdoor lessons, no beatings, co-educational, lots of freedom, suffused with a love of Bengali literature but hostile to nationalism—a sort of Summerhill on the Ganges. Rather to the scandal of her family, Amartya’s mother Amita danced in Tagore’s verse dramas when they were performed in Calcutta. She also learned judo.

Throughout a life that has spanned philosophy, development and “social choice theory,” which won him the economics Nobel, Sen has remained under Tagore’s spell. In this memoir, he mourns only that the poet was so misunderstood in the west, no less by his admirers like WB Yeats than by critics like Bertrand Russell. Both saw him as a cloudy eastern mystic, which completely missed Tagore’s emphasis on reason and freedom—as well as his belief in science and technology. He had no truck with divine intervention, and was furious when Gandhi claimed that the Bihar earthquake of 1934 was a chastisement sent from God. For Tagore, spinning with Gandhi’s beloved charkha did not elevate the mind; it was simply repetitive drudgery.

The Hinduism that was taught at Santiniketan was of the Lokayata school, dating back to the 6th century BC. It was entirely atheistic, materialistic and atomistic too—not unlike the Presocratics in Greece at much the same time. How strange that these two ancient schools of philosophy should, in parallel, have got the universe more or less right first time. Amartya’s happy schooldays never for a moment tempted him to believe in an intelligent creator. All his life, he has been a follower of Tagore’s this-worldly approach to life and art: