The love that did not fail

They say behind every successful man, there is a woman. May be, sometimes in a not so Moravian way - two women. Here is Professor Nabaneeta Dev Sen, former wife of Professor Amartya Sen, who helped Sen clamber up the stiff ladder that has marked his tribe. Ms Sen who, in our view, matters a lot in the making of the Nobel Laureate in the most struggling and yet the most normative stage of his life. Is she just as happy as everybody else ? "O, of course !" -"But a little more, maybe ?" "Maybe !" She smiled a clear smile. NABANEETA DEV SEN spoke to our correspondent PRASENJIT CHOWDHURY this Friday.

INTERVIEW

Clad in dhoti, chappal and panjabi, the tall, handsome, suave professor used to drive a green
Fiat to Jadavpur University all the way from Iron Side Road. Little did the girl in her pristine 20, a first-year student of Comparative Literature in the university in 1956 understand that the youngest (ever) professor would take a fancy to her. "How could I ? I found a boyfriend in my Presidency College days. We broke off but with he still in mind, I was just an admirer of the natural darling, like hundreds of his students and senior colleagues", recalls Nabaneeta Dev Sen, former wife of the Nobel Laureate and a professor of Comparative Literature in Jadavpur University. Sen's scholarship, a wee bit disproportionate to his age, had already began to make waves. "When his feelers started pouring in, for me it was like a dwarf who was being being approached by the moon", she laughs in a tone of happy nostalgia. But the relationship grew. He often used to take her for tea to his colleagues, like Paramesh Roy and Mrinal Datta Chowdhury and occasionally dropped in at her 72, Hindustan Park residence. It was Datta Chowdhury to whom Sen first broached his liking for Professor Sen, five years his junior. Before he left Jadavpur to return westwards as a prize fellow to Trinity, Cambridge, he made up his mind. They met again in England in 1959. "He came to meet my boat train with Barun De, Partha Sarathi Gupta and Jashodhara Sengupta (now Bagchi) and took to Cambridge. He proposed to me and I was nonplussed even though my mind was set in tune". She asked Jashodhara (her childhood friend and Amartya's cousin) about what to do. YB was forthright: "Aare raajee hoye jaa" (accept the proposal at hand). But Dev Sen, asked Amartya to approach her parents. So he did. "Our parents advised him to obtain the permission of his parents. And then

parents. So he did. "Our parents advised him to obtain the permission of his parents. And then my father asked me ' kiire oke biye korbi ?'(do you agree to marry Amartya ?). I said a meek 'Hmmm...' (a very muffled and coy yes)" "Thus the issue was clinched, they got engaged in Cambridge, UK. "I remember we two had gone to see a play by Brendan Behan, The Hostage , which in 1959 was quite a success. But we did not see the play till the end", she mulls like a dove, "but we spent hours together beside the Thames instead". They were mutually held in hostage the following summer in India. In wedlock. They settled for a life in togetherness in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "But we were not rich by any way", she recalls. She had a fellowship to Harvard and Sen was a young assistant professor in MIT. "Life was modest but happy in the formative years. We kept on frisking from one place to another". He moved back and forth between Trinity, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Delhi and LSE. And Nabaneeta followed him around. "But we could hardly save a penny those days". "Amartya was a good economist but a bad money manager. Every month we had to borrow from his friend and colleague, Romesh Ganguly, then a Cambridge 'Wrangler' in mathematics". "After three months a desperate Romesh sternly allocated a budget for the family and lo and behold, running on the threadbare budget really worked ! "We finally managed to buy a second-hand Chevrolet next January." He moved back to Trinity College in 1961, Nabaneeta followed him to Newnham College, Cambridge. By the end of 1963 she managed to get her Ph.D. and their first child, Antara. But Prof VKRV Rao was setting up the Delhi School of Economics and persuaded AKS (Nabaneeta loves to call him that way) to serve his country. The next year they went off to Berkeley, with an Associate Professorship and she with a Post Doctoral Fellowship. She soon got involved with the free speech movement -- a great moment in the history of student politics. But this was an extraordinarily important year for AKS academically -- he had previous plans to write several papers -- to achieve his target. But they always found time to go off on the weekends for a break. They returned to DSE a year later, as the Director of DSE. He was drawing a salary of Rs 1,500 and she had a UGC fellowship of Rs 500 - money wasn't much but they had a comfortable life - and became a two car family and two-daughter family as well ! Between 1968 to 1973 Prof Sen worked at DSE, Harvard, DSE and LSE. Nabaneeta followed him and, keeping his house for him, taking care of the kids and their father. Then a moment came, when Sen changed his mind. Nabaneeta rushed to Jadavpur, to start her career as a working woman, as a single mother. And developed as one of the major writers in Bengali literature. Does she feel a sense of loss as the man, her ex-husband and now feted by the world community, no longer belongs to her ? "I am fully enjoying this glorious moment like everyone else - no, I've no sense of loss whatever. Over the years I've developed a sense of detachment, but the warmth and goodwill are still there. I was very happy when he won the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize in Ethics eight years back, the prize money of which was nearly its Nobel equivalent". Does Sen still keep tab with her ? "In January this year he broke the news of his becoming Master of Trinity first to me". He drops in at her place

when is in the city. "When we met in New York in May this year, Amartya invited me to spend a weekend at the Master's Lodge with him and his wife Emma, a wonderful woman, who has helped to bring my children closer to their father". Did she go ? "Sure ! And had a grand time watching him functioning as the Master - though a clumsy one, unmindful of the medieval rituals - which he does not take too seriously, but the butler surely does ! I shared his formative years as an international scholar. Quite a contrast to our struggling days in Cambridge, on Trinity Street, where our first child was conceived !" She laughed a hearty smile. How was he as a father ? "a clumsy one", she laughs, "until they grew old enough to be his students". Now both the daughters have "excellent" relationship with Sen. "My sons-in-law, one German and another Bengali, have a good rapport with him as well". Her elder daughter, Antara Dev Sen, is presently in Oxford with a Reuter Foundation Fellowship. "As Amartya was in New York, I had called up Emma Rothschild (his present wife) in Trinity. Antara and Pratik are waiting to celebrate the moment of joy." Unfortunately, the younger one, Nandana is currently in Montreal, Canada, working in a film Seducing Maria, an Indo-Canadian project, in the lead role with Mohan Agashe by her side. "I'm yet to hear from Nandana. She may be plain too busy till she comes back home next month". Were their daughters ever aware of the father as a celebrity ? "Not really, Amartya never let them feel that way. But they got the idea as they grew up". Prof Dev Sen was by a quirk of fate away from Calcutta on Wednesday at Gadiara in Howrah district. She first sensed that Amartya has finally made it, "after so many years of wistful anticipation", when she saw a proud Ms Amita Sen beaming on an unobliging TV screen with her son as inset. Is she a bit sulky over the projection at the role of Amartya's mother, Ms Amita Sen, in the media ? "- Of course not. A mother deserves that much attention". "I tried to give Amartya a steady companionship within my abilities", she looked away, "during the days of real struggle". Small wonder, that's precisely why so many people are congratulating her ! The phone didn't stop ringing ! What were the common threads between then apart from their wry sense of humour and their flair for debating ? "- Our sense of values. Our political, ethical judgments were similar like our interest in human rights. We were both with the Student Federation in Calcutta. I was an anti-Vietnam activist in the UK and the USA as a part of the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament. I walked the aldermeston March led by Bertrand Russell, with our friend Kumari Jayawardena -- although Amartya did not have the time to come with us, but I had his full support." She stopped, smiled and said, "and we both loved a cup of good coffee, and a good long drive ! Besides, we were both named by Rabindranath." "I am happy as we are - I'm proud of him today as he is the Master of Trinity College, but I was equally proud of him when I had married a struggling, young Prize Fellow of Trinity College", said she with a warm smile - "not to speak of the Nobel Laureate !"