This past week, I relied on Google Maps to navigate to Purbo Dashora, a neighborhood in the Manikganj municipal area that I had never visited before. It was a business trip. After a brief detour due to ongoing road development, Google Maps prompted me that I was almost there just as I passed Dr. Amartya Sen Sarak. I began to wonder what had prompted a road to be named after the great Nobel laureate in this otherwise sparsely inhabited, quiet, semi-rural neighborhood. Soon, my car cleared the road, and I reached my destination for the day: the Gono Kallayan Trust (GKT) headquarters.
Once my business was concluded, I asked GKT training institute manager Allen Austin de Silva what connection the area had to Amartya Sen. He replied, “I heard Amartya’s ancestral home was here.” Intrigued, I asked him for directions to the place. He mentioned there wasn’t much to see except a secondary school and a decaying Hindu hermitage, or Math. Seeing my eagerness, however, Allen pointed me in the right direction, noting it was within walking distance, and kindly provided a local guide – Mohammad Delwar – to accompany me.
A short walk brought me to Matto village, where I found a 250-odd-year-old, derelict Math on the bank of a large pond (dighi). Across the road stood Matto High School, founded by local elites barely three months before our War of Liberation ensued in March 1971. I questioned the students and a few locals gathered near the school gate, but no one had any clue about Amartya Sen’s ancestral home. Fortunately, a teacher stepped out of a classroom and gave me clear directions.
Following his guidance, I walked for another five minutes until I reached a cluster of old, tin-roofed village homes enveloped by lush greenery. An elderly man named Moyezuddin ushered me in, and his cousin, Idris Ali, invited me to take a closer look at the house and snap some photographs. Nearby, Idris's wife was preparing a midday meal in an adjacent tin structure that served as their kitchen. They were landless and poor, living there under a government lease arrangement. They recalled that Amartya Sen had actually visited this ancestral home in Matta many years ago.
Standing there, I realized how this visit connected the final dots of a puzzle I had been chasing for years. On various occasions and timelines, I have had the privilege of visiting this great Bengali luminary’s maternal roots in Sonarang, Munshiganj; his father’s house in Santiniketan in Bolpur, India; and in Wari, Dhaka, where Amartya spent his childhood at a house called Jagat Kutir.
On my way back from the Matto village home of Amartya’s parents, Ashutosh Sen and Amita Sen, I stopped for a while opposite the Matto High School, where a Hindu religious tower (Matta Math) still stands some 50 feet high. It has fought decades of weathering from sun and rain, remaining a steadfast witness to a local landlord’s (Hem Sen) last tribute to his father and a testament to rich terracotta artistry. Local lore claims Hem Sen brought artisans from Iraq to build the Math on the pyre where his father was cremated. Fascinated by the beauty of the structure, I kept wondering why our authorities never feel the urge to preserve such heritage establishments.
While Amartya Sen was born in Santiniketan, India, his deep ancestral and familial roots trace back entirely to the same influential estate and lands managed by Hem Sen and his relatives in Manikganj. Amartya traveled from his earliest days, as his father, Ashutosh Sen—a chemistry teacher at Dhaka University—kept moving from place to place. One of Amartya’s earliest memories was moving to Burma as a young child when his father took a visiting professor role in Mandalay. After his childhood in Burma, he returned to Dhaka, but then moved again fairly soon to live and study in Santiniketan, where Rabindranath Tagore, the visionary poet, had established his experimental school. Tagore was a massive influence on him, and the title of his memoir—Home in the World—is inspired by one of Tagore’s books, The Home and the World.
In his memoir, Amartya recalled that his family was living in the city of Dhaka when he was born in the autumn of 1933, though he notes, “I was not in fact born there.” He later came to live at the Wari house as well. In his words: “We lived in the old, historic part of the city called Wari, not far from Ramna, the campus of Dhaka University, where my father, Ashutosh Sen, taught chemistry. My early memories include going to my father’s laboratory, and the huge excitement of seeing that one liquid mixed with another in a test tube could generate something altogether different and unexpected. My father’s assistant, Karim, used to show me these absorbing experiments – and I thought his demonstrations were always wonderful.”
In one of his interviews, Amartya once expressed his craving for hilsa fish, but quickly added that it had to be cooked in what he dubbed "Dhaka style," with ground mustard. He said: “I knew I belonged to Dhaka, but like many urban Bengalis I too saw my home as the village from which the family had moved to the city, in my case two generations earlier. My home village, the ancestral home of my father’s family, is a tiny one called Matto, in a district called Manikganj. It is not all that far from the city of Dhaka, but when I was a child it used to take the best part of a day to get there – travelling mostly on boats through a network of rivers… We used to go there once a year, just for a few weeks each time, and I would then feel totally relaxed, thinking that I was back home.”
About their Wari residence, Amartya said he loved sitting next to the fragrant champa tree on the upstairs veranda of Jagat Kutir, listening to exciting tales of travel and adventure, which he hoped someday would come his way as well.
I remember visiting Sonarang village in Munshiganj once, where a few elderly locals told me of Amartya’s maternal ancestry. Amartya once noted that his mother, Amita Sen, and their family shared a very close bond with Rabindranath Tagore. His mother played the lead female roles in several of Tagore’s dance dramas in Calcutta at a time when women from "good families" did not appear on the stage. His maternal grandfather, Kshiti Mohan Sen, was something of a lieutenant to Tagore, helping him shape Visva-Bharati as an educational institution, and contributing greatly to its academic standing because of his extraordinary reputation as a scholar. Kshiti Mohan Sen later succeeded Rabindranath’s eldest son, Rathindranath, as the vice-chancellor of Visva-Bharati.
Amartya Sen, a Professor of Economics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, is now 93 years old but remains remarkably active. He splits his time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his home, Pratichi, in Santiniketan. When I visited Pratichi back in November 2019, I checked for his availability but was unlucky on that occasion, as he was away for the autumn.
He served as the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1998 to 2004, and won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998. His many celebrated books, including Development as Freedom (1999), The Argumentative Indian (2005), Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2007), and The Idea of Justice (2010), have been translated into more than forty languages. In 2012, he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama, and in 2020, he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade by President Steinmeier.
Last week, as I was leaving Matto, the current residents of Amartya Sen’s paternal home recounted how the great economist who theorized famine had visited his roots as recently as the late 1980s, walking the grounds and admiring the courtyard vegetable gardens of Idris Ali and Moyezuddin. I left Matto for now, but with a promise to myself to revisit the wider vicinity—including the area called Bokjuri—which produced luminaries like Hiralal Sen and Dinesh Chandra Sen, the pioneers of Bengali cinema and folklore respectively.
