An observation by Amartya Sen has become a cultural and political aphorism. In his book, The Argumentative Indian, Sen quotes from a poem by Raja Rammohun Roy to define the true horror of death: "Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to argue back." In the Bengali imagination, life matters because it presupposes the ability to answer back to whatever is said. That right is central to the Bengali tradition of public debate and democratic engagement. Sen wrote all this years ago.

His words have resurfaced in the context of the Assembly elections in West Bengal. Reflecting the warm afterglow of Renaissance Bengal's influence on the rest of India, Manoj Kumar Jha, a Bihari Member of the Rajya Sabha (the Upper House of the Indian Parliament), writes in The Telegraph: "To understand why Bengal is different, one must begin with what Amartya Sen famously called the argumentative Indian, the idea, drawn from two millennia of Indian intellectual life, that public reasoning and democratic dissent are not Western imports but indigenous habits of mind.

"Sen argues that this tradition is critically important for the success of India's democracy, the defence of its secular politics, the elimination of inequalities related to class, caste, gender and community, and the pursuit of subcontinental peace. Bengal has been the most sustained institutional expression of this tradition. It gave us the adda, the informal but politically-charged conversational gathering, as much a form of public sphere as any newspaper or Parliament. The infusion of politics into every domain of Bengali life, spanning literature, cinema, commerce, and the domestic sphere, is a civilisational achievement." Jha's words bring back to mind how I described the adda once: as an intimate conversation among consenting adults.

So, to resume Sen's (and Rammohun Roy's) argument, death is bad because it silences the human's sentient right of reply, which is critical to debate, which logically requires dissonance, and which in turn is crucial for the unbounded democracy of thoughts and deeds to exist, even in the smallest measure. Interestingly, for the secular Bengali, death perhaps is not so much about salvation in a Heaven lying beyond his or her will, or damnation in a Hell where devils tear him apart in endless pain (a questionable assertion given that the body itself has ceased to exist, which is the whole point of death).

As for the soul being toasted or roasted, a wit (French, I believe - who else?) did say that you don't have to have a soul unless you really want one. Atheist Bengalis would not want souls: They would insist, in fact, that they have none. However, some or many or most Bengalis, including agnostics, may want souls, even if only as a kind of after-life insurance, but purely on condition that they could argue back eternally to the universe (preferably in Bengali, of course). All in all, what is terrible about death is less the fact itself and more the notion that there are no addas in the afterlife. How then would one decide that one has actually died?

There are many ways for a Bengali to die. It has been said that, if you ever need to die in West Bengal, simply use the choicest expletives in your command against Mohun Bagan or East Bengal. Or fish. Or Satyajit Ray. Or Sourav Ganguly. Or Rabindranath Tagore. Death would constitute just punishment.

Now, there is a happy catch. The quip about not having a soul unless you need one was countered by the person who said: "You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily." This formulation poses a way out of the silence of death. If I am a soul and speak Bengali (which I do), it means that the soul which is me speaks Bengali as well. The soul is indestructible. This means that the Bengali language in me is eternal. Since the Bengali language in me grants me the right to answer back, the soul-that-is-me logically will have to ensure that I get to speak even after I am dead. In that case, I have no problem with death.

The soul-that-is-Asad will strike up a conversation with the soul-that-is-Rammohun on whatever remains of the Bengal Renaissance today. The great Raja would probably agree with me that the Renaissance exists like the Cheshire Cat's vanishing smile in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The smile is a trick whereby the cat fades away in stages, leaving only its grin floating in the air - before that, too, disappears. Alice exclaims: "I've seen a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat!" Much of intellectual Bengal today is a grin without a cat. But even disappearance produces memory. Rammohun would remember his Bengal; I would remember mine. We would compare notes. We would quarrel. He would call me a dead fool; I would call him a dead elitist. We would fight - with words and not with weapons.

We would fight like Bengalis.

Everything would be fine.

But what if death were indeed the end of all addas?

Nothing would be fine then.

So, do I want to die?

No, not really.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com