Politics & Power Quote by Amartya Sen

“Also” is doing quiet but loaded work here. Sen isn’t simply noting that Presidency College students were “politically most active”; he’s placing that activism on a continuum, as if politics was one strand among several forms of intensity already expected in that milieu. It reads like a clinician’s understatement, the kind that signals: if you know, you know.

The specific intent is to normalize student politics as a defining feature of an intellectual ecosystem rather than an aberration. Sen, a philosopher-economist who has spent a career arguing that public reasoning shapes real outcomes, frames activism as part of education’s operating system. Presidency College in mid-20th-century Calcutta wasn’t just a campus; it was a pressure chamber where anti-colonial aftershocks, Partition’s violence, famine memory, and left organizing collided with a serious culture of debate. In that setting, “most active” is less a boast than a sociological observation about where the arguments of a city were being rehearsed at full volume.

The subtext resists two caricatures at once: the romantic myth of student radicals as pure idealists, and the conservative trope of students as unserious troublemakers. Sen’s phrasing implies competence and continuity. Political engagement isn’t a youthful phase to be outgrown; it’s a training ground for citizenship, a way institutions teach people to contest power, interpret injustice, and build solidarities.

As an intellectual, Sen keeps the sentence cool, almost archival. That restraint gives the claim credibility and invites the reader to infer the larger story: a college culture where ideas didn’t stay in seminar rooms because history wouldn’t let them.