Sen at the London book fair (a Telegraph picture)

London, April 20: Calcutta has the lowest crime rate in the world because of the civilising effect of books, Amartya Sen said today in his keynote opening address at the London Book Fair.

Even by Sen’s exacting standards, it was by common agreement one of the Nobel Prize winner’s most brilliant speeches when he spoke on “India in the Modern World”.

With India chosen as the “market focus country” at the London Book Fair this year, the economist and moral philosopher examined the possible relationship between a love of books and low crime.

After his speech, Sen told The Telegraph: “I don’t know the answer but it is something worth looking into.”

This year the British Council has brought nearly 50 authors from India who, between them, represent 15 languages. Nearly 100 publishers from India have also made the journey to the Earl’s Court exhibition centre in London.

It was pointed out that India is now the third largest publishers of English books in the world. This works out to 15,000 titles a year.

The Indian book market, now worth £625 million, is growing at 10 per cent a year, with Hindi titles making up 26 per cent of the market.

Sen, however, did not deal with dry statistics. His speech made Calcutta sound the most exciting literary city in the world.

The question he posed was: “Does the culture of books influence the life of the city in any profound way?” He then offered an intriguing theory which even the people of Calcutta might not have considered.

“To consider one remarkable feature, Calcutta has, by a long margin, the lowest crime rate in the world, including the incidence of homicide and murder,” he said. “While the number of murders per hundred thousand people per year varies between 2 and 10 per year in many cities in Europe and America, and between 15 and 50 per year in many cities in Africa and Latin America, the homicide rate in impoverished Calcutta is only 0.3 per cent — a fraction of the rate in any other city in the world.”

He then drove him his point: “Indian cities generally have low murder rates, around 2.7 on the average (rather like London but much lower than American cities like New York or Chicago), but Calcutta in particular beats them all — even the famously peaceful towns of Singapore and Hong Kong — in terms of the lowness of homicide rates.”

He came round again to his fundamental question: “Does the peculiar love of books and culture, and here I would add Calcutta’s fondness for theatre, too (often produced at very low cost), have a role here? I don’t really know, and there is no rigorous work on this that has properly tested any of the possible hypotheses.”

He had cleverly planted the germ of a revolutionary thought: “It is abundantly clear that the standard explanation of crime in terms only of economic poverty does not tell us much about the incidence and causation of violent crime, including homicide. There is certainly some research to be done here.”

Sen appeared to speak not so much about modern India but why Calcutta was just about the most fantastic city in the world bar none. In terms of the number of people who attended, the Calcutta Book Fair was the biggest in the world — bigger than even Frankfurt, he stressed.

He said that “the city I came from, namely Calcutta, has a huge book culture”.

He remembered the pavements in College Street with their spread of books and nearby stores jammed with volumes of every description. “I should perhaps mention here, in these precarious roadside shops that the future film director, Satyajit Ray, read publications on films from across the globe, which introduced him to the traditions of world cinema. A considerable part of Satyajit Ray’s affection for the city that he loved despite finding it ‘monstrous, teeming, bewildering’ (perhaps because of that) related to the book culture that expanded his horizon so radically, even on the sidewalks of Calcutta.”

He also disclosed how his own life had been changed by Calcutta’s book culture. “It was in one of the College Street bookshops, called Dasgupta’s, that my friend Sukhamoy Chakravarty found at the end of 1951 a copy of a recent book by a brilliant economist Kenneth Arrow.”

On his friend’s recommendation, Sen read the book “which would radically influence my direction of work. I often wondered whether my life would have gone very differently had my friend, Sukhamoy, not been such a book hound.”

Perhaps Sen’s keynote address should have been called, “Calcutta: why you should book your ticket this afternoon.” Sadly, there are no longer any direct flights from London to Calcutta, a city increasingly isolated from the rest of the world by political and economic Luddites, most analysts would say.

During the question and answer session, Sen demolished the logic behind Mulayam Singh Yadav’s manifesto commitment to downgrade the English language. He argued this would only serve to increase the admitted inequalities between those who knew English and those who did not. The answer, as far as Sen was concerned, was to ensure more people had the opportunity to learn English.