Personal Life and Beliefs
Sen's first wife was Nabaneeta Dev Sen, an Indian writer and scholar, with whom he had two children: Antara, a journalist and publisher, and Nandana, a Bollywood actress. Their marriage broke up shortly after they moved to London in 1971. In 1973, he married his second wife, Eva Colorni, who was Jewish, who died from stomach cancer in 1985. They had two children, Indrani, a journalist in New York, and Kabir, who teaches music at Shady Hill School.
Sen married Emma Georgina Rothschild in 1991. Sen usually spends his winter holidays at his home in Santiniketan in West Bengal, India, where he likes to go on long bike rides, and maintains a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he and Emma spend the spring and long vacations. Asked how he relaxes, he replies: "I read a lot and like arguing with people."
Sen is a self-proclaimed agnostic and holds that this can be associated with Hinduism as a political entity. In an interview for the magazine California, which is published by the University of California, Berkeley, he noted:
| “ | In some ways people had got used to the idea that India was spiritual and religion-oriented. That gave a leg up to the religious interpretation of India, despite the fact that Sanskrit had a larger atheistic literature than what exists in any other classical language. Madhava Acharya, the remarkable 14th century philosopher, wrote this rather great book called Sarvadarshansamgraha, which discussed all the religious schools of thought within the Hindu structure. The first chapter is "Atheism" – a very strong presentation of the argument in favor of atheism and materialism. | ” |
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