Daily Inspiration Quote by Amartya Sen

Identity, Sen suggests, is less a stable possession than a switch that can be flipped when politics, fear, and rumor heat the room. The line’s power sits in that clipped aside - “quite suddenly” - which refuses the comforting story that sectarianism is ancient destiny. Instead, it frames Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh identification as an emergency mode: narrower, louder, easier to weaponize than being “Indian” or “Asian” or simply human.

Sen is writing out of the trauma of Partition and the broader history of communal violence in South Asia, where neighbors could become enemies with terrifying speed. The intent is diagnostic, not sentimental. He’s tracking how a multi-layered self gets edited down to one identity category when institutions fail and when leaders (or mobs) find advantage in simplification. “Gave way” is doing subtle work: it implies displacement, not disappearance. National or universal identities don’t vanish; they’re crowded out by a more combustible allegiance that promises protection and belonging while licensing suspicion.

The subtext is a warning about the modern habit of treating people as single-issue beings. Sen’s larger project argues for plural identities and for the civic conditions that let them coexist: law, economic security, public reasoning, a media ecology that doesn’t mainline grievance. When those conditions erode, identity becomes a sorting machine. The quote isn’t just about India; it’s about how quickly any society can be taught to forget its broader story and cling to the smallest, sharpest badge available.