Huntington's Death

In April 2008 a strange incident occurred. My best friend P- emailed me and asked me if I wanted to help her drive Amartya Sen to his lecture series at Stanford. Now P- is a student at SJSU and I go to UCB, so the odds of this happening were pretty off. It seems P- had answered an email request on a listserv and had got chauffer duties for Mr. Sen. Now P- being P- was super-excited and when she asked me to be her co-driver, I accepted. Amartya Sen is a hard man to meet (if you're not at Harvard) and here we would be in the same car as him for a grand total of about 10 minutes (if she drove real slow). Since I am a die-hard Sen fanatic and had just finished shoving his book Poverty and Famines down the throats of an unsuspecting bunch of students, I was naturally quite eager.

I thought quite hard about what I would say to him. And to cut a long story short, we got him from his hotel on University Avenue and drove him to the Oval at Stanford and of course Sen was charming, he sat on the front seat due to a knee injury and proceeded to turn P- to stone behind the wheel when he accidentally brushed her arm. I tried to conceal my cache of Sen's books which I had brought along for signatures (sigh.. I am a total groupie for Nobel Laureates) and if he noticed, he didn't say anything. A golf cart was supposed to meet Sen at the Oval and it never arrived. But I seized this chance to talk to him about this and that, the weather, his jacket, his wife, etc. I also asked him the one question which I had hoped I would not ask him, but I did anyhow, I asked, "Mr Sen, what goes through your mind when you see Sam Huntington in the halls of Harvard?" I don't know what bout of verbal diarrhoea brought this question out, an infinitely stupid and asinine question. But he answered with that evil glint in his eye which gainsays his stooped frame and age-wizened features. He said, "Well he is a friend, of course, and poor man, he is very very very ill.. but I do still think he is completely wrong as well and I never miss an opportunity to tell him this."

The problem with being an academic is that we revel in academic gossip. Like for instance, the time Prof. K- told me that Sam Huntington had failed his comparative exam three times, I think I cartwheeled in my head a few times. Or that Sen's book The Argumentative Indian and Identity and Violence were responses to Huntington's "Clash" thesis. And yes, the first time I read Huntington in 1999 as an intern with World Report Productions writing a brief for my boss who was going to interview Yasser Arafat, I did think he was completely off the mark. Nine years later, here I was having a fifteen minute conversation on Sam Huntington, with one of his most vocal critics while I helped him up a flight of stairs and held his files for him.

I never knew Huntington, except through his work. And I rolled my eyes everytime someone seemed to support the Clash thesis. I even accused an Indophile like William Dalrymple for embodying this thesis in The Last Mughal, until I saw him in person and revised my opinion a bit. There are rumors that The Clash of Civilizations was translated into 32 languages and was sold across the world. The political class in many nations had devoured this book. I once even wondered out loud if Osama bin Laden had read it. I answered questions on the book in various exams, cited Huntington and found him referenced almost everywhere.

I read about the news of his death on a train journey back to Gwalior, a few days ago. And I kept thinking to myself about how this man who had influenced four generations of policy makers in the US and apparently "cowered under his desk during the seventies as people were lobbing bombs into his office" (according to a rather credible source, one of his students) was no longer going to churn out essays which began offensively with "Jose can you see...".

At some point though I did tangle extensively with his writing and found myself agreeing with some of what he forcefully said about the developing world in Political Order and Decay. I agreed order was essential, till I interrogated this again sitting in remote border areas of my own country. I saw first hand how Westphalian notions of sovereignty did not work. How Huntington claimed to be a democracy evangelist and yet was haunted by the idea that people could and did want different things from the state.

I have to say encountering Huntington's work did push my thinking forward. I disagreed rabidly in discussions and waded through Mamdani and Sen to bolster my own arguments against his. He had managed to fashion the dominant discourse and many from the developing world were trying counter it. Yet he remained a good writer. I have to revisit the 'Clash' every semester I teach because someone always prescribes it. And each time I am stunned by his clarity, his unwavering style and the no-nonsense way in which he clearly always laid out whatever theory he wanted to present. Perhaps that is half the reason why he was so convincing.

And the philosopher in me wonders about passports to immortality through the written word and also thinks ... can we actually really grieve for someone we never knew?