The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity by Amartya Sen

432pp, Allen Lane, £25

EP Thompson once wrote that since "all the convergent influences of the world" - Hindu, Muslim, Christian, secular, Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian - run through India, "there is not a thought that is being thought in the west or east that is not active in some Indian mind". This sounds true, and indeed there have been Indians, such as the polymath Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri, who appeared to hold in their minds almost all of the important thoughts thought in the west or east. But holding them is, perhaps, not enough, or is only a tiresome form of pedantry, as Chaudhuri himself often proved. It is certainly rare to see them as elegantly synthesised as they are in the cosmopolitan mind of Amartya Sen.

Long celebrated as an economist with a compassionate face, Sen has published several articles and books exploring such philosophical and political concepts as democracy, development, freedom and reason. He develops these themes further with his usual clarity and wisdom in his new book. There are interrelated essays and lectures here on the Bengali poet and essayist Rabindranath Tagore, the links between India and China, gender inequality, class and caste relations, calendars, secularism and identity, India and the nuclear bomb, the Indian diaspora, and western views of India.

Sen was born in Bengal, and remains, despite long stints in western academia, an Indian citizen. Unlike VS Naipaul, another interpreter of India for western audiences, Sen largely absents himself and his Bengali bhadralok (elite) background from his pages; his rare venture into autobiography is hemmed in by apologies to the reader. Sen also seems incapable of rage or even very strong opinions. After expressing a mild objection to Salaam Bombay!, he seems keen to stress that Mira Nair is "one of the leading directors of our times". His prose is benignly professorial, always measured, and occasionally rises to dry irony, such as when he writes about James Mill, who, in his history of India, managed to describe the deceitful and perfidious character of Hindus without knowing any Indian language or having visited India. "He evidently did not want," Sen remarks, "to be biased by closeness to the subject matter."

Sen's more illuminating differences with Naipaul are political. Naipaul sees India as damaged by Muslim invaders and emasculated further by an otherworldly and hierarchical Hinduism - a wounded civilisation that has only recently been revived by contact with western political philosophy and industrialism. Sen points instead to an old tradition of reason and scepticism, which, beginning with the Vedas, was upheld often by India's Muslim rulers, and which he thinks forms the basis of Indian democracy and secularism. According to him, "seeing Indian traditions as overwhelmingly religious, or deeply anti-scientific, or exclusively hierarchical, or fundamentally unsceptical involves significant oversimplifications of India's past and present".

By highlighting Indian achievements in mathematics, astronomy, linguistics, medicine and political economy, Sen also wishes to challenge the commonplace prejudice that the west has "exclusive access to the values that lie at the foundation of rationality and reasoning, science and evidence, liberty and tolerance, and of course rights and justice". He writes about the third-century BC emperor Ashoka, who renounced empire-building and attempted a new form of governance based on Buddhist principles of compassion and tolerance. He also presents the example of the 16th-century Moghul emperor Akbar, who by arguing for a religiously neutral state, set up the "foundations of a non-denominational, secular state which was yet to be born in India or for that matter anywhere else". As Sen is fond of pointing out, Akbar was stressing religious tolerance and upholding reason over blind faith at a time when, in Europe, Giordano Bruno was being arrested for heresy prior to being burned at the stake.

Sen wishes to undermine the "dominance of contemporary western culture over our perceptions and readings". This is not easily done. Most contemporary philosophers and intellectual historians in the west appear to know little about Asian or African cultures and do not seem troubled by their ignorance. The triumphalist histories of 19th-century Europe - which drew neat little lines from Antiquity to the Renaissance and Enlightenment - still shape western self-perceptions and assumptions of superiority. The cold war mythology, in which the west featured, contrary to much evidence, as the defender of individual freedom against totalitarian evil, can delude even liberal intellectuals into seeing the Bush administration's wars as human-rights campaigns.

Sen does run the risk of sounding like a culturally defensive nationalist, arguing, behind a veneer of modesty, for the superiority of Indian civilisation, especially when he asserts that "a great many departures in science and mathematics occurred in India from the early centuries of the first millennium which altered the state of knowledge in the world", or that "some of the earliest open public deliberations in the world were hosted in India".

But Sen believes in an idea of India that, he writes, quoting Tagore, militates "against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one's people from others". What he is really trying to describe is an interconnected world rather than societies splendidly isolated from each other. He questions whether western modernity would have been possible without Arab, Indian and Chinese contributions in mathematics and science. He believes, and his essay on India and China displays this most vividly, that "it is through global movements of ideas, people, goods and technology that different regions of the world have tended, in general, to benefit from progress and development occurring in other regions".

Sen often offers such views as an antidote to Samuel Huntington's crude but damagingly influential notion of self-enclosed and necessarily antagonistic civilisations defined by religion. He is at his best examining over-used concepts such as democracy, which recently has appeared to consist almost entirely of elections, even when they are supervised, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, by occupation armies. Sen points out how public debate and discussion and decision-making as much as balloting lie at the core of democracy.

In places such as India, such democratic practices can assume a life-and-death significance. Recently celebrated as a success story of globalisation by Thomas Friedman, India has a terrible record in tackling hunger and undernutrition. Sen has repeatedly pointed out how the "very poor" in India get a small - and basically indirect - share of the cake that information technology and related developments generate. He wants to see how the argumentative tradition in India can be deployed against "societal inequity and asymmetry" and what actual use can be "made of the opportunities of democratic articulation and of political engagement".

Sen does not say much about how the argumentative tradition is faring in India in the age of globalisation. The one "quintessential argumentative Indian" he names, the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, is little known in India. And even if he had named others, it would still have to be asked, if only for the sake of argument, whether they can be heard above the din of a media increasingly influenced by the Murdoch model, and preoccupied with stock markets, information technology tycoons, beauty queens, Bollywood starlets, fashion models and other celebrities. "Silence is a powerful enemy of social justice," Sen writes. But so are the celebratory shrieks of minorities empowered by globalisation.

Acutely sensitive to class in his analysis of economic inequality, Sen rarely considers it in his political commentary, which often has a certain abstract quality: "The enthusiasts for religious politics in India ... have worked mainly through generating societal frictions in which the demographic correlates of religion have been used to separate out the communities for selective roguery." The human agents that appear absent in this slightly mechanical view are the members of the new Indian middle class, who form the support base of the Hindu nationalists and who murdered Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 in between carting off DVD players from looted shops. Sen deplores the xenophobia and megalomania of the Hindu nationalists, while approving their "outward-looking economic programme" for globalisation. But are these cultural and economic projects really so far apart? As the Bush-voting American middle class most recently proved, ultranationalism, religious fundamentalism and a belief in free markets are not only fully compatible but can feed off each other.

One closes this stimulating book wishing that Sen would say more, from his unique vantage point, about the more unprecedented aspects of globalisation today: the all-powerful forms of corporate capitalism, for instance, that threaten much of what he cherishes - democracy, development, human diversity, traditional wisdoms - while trying to turn us all into desperate, if passive, consumers.

· Pankaj Mishra's most recent book is An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (Picador). To order The Argumentative Indian for £23 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.