The complete radio interviews can be consulted on the archives site.
TRANSCRIPTION
Maurice FLEURET: Over the past few days, we’ve looked at society, religion and India’s recent history, but now we have to look at the relationship between India and the West, a relationship that is very fashionable, very much in the air, but which I imagine goes back a long way.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, in fact, if we really go back probably to the most important civilisation that has ever existed, which is a great civilisation of protohistory, stretching from the Indus Valley to Sumer, to ancient Egypt, to Crete, it’s a completely unified civilisation. We have here a very large body of thought, culture and religion, which is probably the basis of many of our institutions and concepts, but which we are only just beginning to discover. Although in India, where of course everything has survived, we have some quite extraordinary documents on this civilisation, the great antiquity.
Then came the great catastrophe of the Norse invasions. I call it a catastrophe and, in fact, almost all our historians claim to begin their history with these dreadful invaders. So we only talk about Greece from the time of the Achaeans and the Dorians. Iran is only mentioned from the time of the Scythian invasions. In fact, the millennium of Iran because it was Cyrus who demolished everything, who destroyed everything, who was an awful Scythian, who is a barbarian from the north, who came and established this empire. The same thing happened in India with the so-called Vedic Aryans, who were also a warlike people, quite primitive, who for centuries waged war to destroy this ancient civilisation and, like everywhere else, gradually civilised themselves with the remains of what they had destroyed. But obviously, India being so vast, the destruction was much less extensive than it might have been in much more limited regions such as Greece, or what we know of Italy at that time, or Iran, which were small countries. In India, of course, ancient civilisation remained with its great religion, Shivaism, which corresponds to the Dionysian religion.
Maurice FLEURET: Well, India has preserved texts that bear traces of these historical events, haven’t they, and of this background of thought as in the Mediterranean basin and this whole region of the world.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, and it’s absolutely incomprehensible to me that these texts called the Puranas, the ancient chronicles, have never been translated into any language. They exist in Sanskrit, sometimes only in manuscripts. And Westerners have always refused to take an interest in these texts, which is an attitude that I find extraordinary. Obviously, they have been reworked, they are full of interpolations, many have been translated into late Sanskrit, etc. because they were in other languages, but they represent a mass of documents that would give us astonishing information about the sources of our civilisation.
Maurice FLEURET: In particular, we would find justification for the historical periods of the Mediterranean basin, Egyptian, Greek and so on.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, above all.
Maurice FLEURET: And even Judeo-Christian.
Alain DANIÉLOU: No. Most of these texts are very, very early. In fact, their references go back as far as the 6th millennium BC.
Maurice FLEURET: Yes, but would we find traces of a fundamental thought that has reached us today?
Alain DANIÉLOU: In particular the Dionysian religion, which is a branch of Hindu Shivaism. So we know everything about Shivaism in terms of thought and all its forms, but we know very little about the Dionysian religion because Christianity was essentially opposed to the Dionysian concept, even though it probably assimilated almost all its rites and many of its concepts.
Maurice FLEURET: Do you think that India still has a role to play in this relationship between East and West, between an India that is now geographically and politically fixed and in the very orbit of a global civilisation that is finally becoming Western? How can we today see the contribution of this eternal India, in short, to a West that is becoming universal?
Alain DANIÉLOU: I think that not only does India have a role to play, I think it has the main role to play. I believe that in the kind of dead-end situation we are in on many levels, India has to propose solutions and concepts that could enable us to revise our thinking, our structures, our artistic conceptions and that they would enable an extraordinary renewal, something like what Greek thought was for the renaissance.
Maurice FLEURET: Give a few examples, because now we need to do some visionary forecasting.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Listen, I think you’re interested in music. One quite extraordinary phenomenon is the impact that Indian music is beginning to have on a whole section of young people in the West. Precisely because it corresponds to a notion of what music can be that is fundamentally different, a music that is something that is essentially lived, that is essentially felt, that cannot be fixed in forms and that follows a very learned, very elaborate grammar, but whose discourse is always new, and therefore does not need to evolve, to change. And I believe that this music, which creates a climate that you experience, that you feel, corresponds in an extraordinary way to the deep need of a large part of today’s youth, who are looking for it in similar forms that came from African jazz, but at a very primitive level, and who are suddenly discovering that this way of thinking and experiencing music can exist at an extraordinary level of refinement.
Maurice FLEURET: However, the hippy phenomenon of today’s youth, which draws a lot of its inspiration from the East and India in particular, is a bit of a passive phenomenon. How can it become active and more or less change our societies or at least our conceptions, even our mentalities?
Alain DANIÉLOU: This is the whole problem of teaching. It almost brings us back to the problem of universities. Why do we teach people today, let’s say, in conservatoires that musical conceptions that are of no use to them, that have nothing to do with what interests them, if poor boys and girls bewildered by the emptiness in which they find themselves clumsily and sometimes even stupidly try to get closer to something that they feel has value? I believe that this movement is extremely important and entirely valid, even if they are completely wrong, but it is heading in the right direction and all they need to do is find the teaching and explanations they need so that, instead of being an absurd and mediocre thing, it can flourish in a very important cultural, mental and moral development.
Maurice FLEURET: Yes, but for the moment, we’re just on a pilgrimage to our roots, aren’t we? It seems that the example of Lanza del Vasto walking to India with his pack still prevails in the eyes of young people who see it as a way of escaping Western reality.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, but this is true of all travel. You wouldn’t travel, you wouldn’t go anywhere if you were perfectly satisfied with your surroundings, and it’s by chance on a journey that you come across certain values and one fine day discover that the whole meaning of life lies elsewhere, in another conception of the world. And the fact that there are lots of charlatans who take advantage of this to deviate from it in all sorts of ways, to profit from it in all sorts of ways, is a secondary phenomenon and perhaps not that important.
Maurice FLEURET: But to take your example, how did you make your way, your pilgrimage to Indian sources? By what route? By what chance and how far did it go?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Precisely, I think it was in a way, I could say, a success because I assimilated deeply into the Hindu world because I went there by chance and without any kind of preconceived idea, interested only in questions of music. And it’s because I don’t think I had any prejudices, any intention of changing my way of thinking and being that I was completely, you could say, innocent. I was completely free when I suddenly encountered a world that seemed to me to be of absolutely prodigious interest on every level and I tried to penetrate it, and that’s what I did.
Maurice FLEURET: It was in the 30s, wasn’t it, roughly?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, first I spent some time with Rabindranath Tagore, with whom I was very good friends, who was a marvellous man but who, after a while, seemed to me much too modern, much too much already belonging to the world of people deformed by the West. Then I settled in Benares, in the city of the learned, and it was there that I studied Sanskrit, philosophy and music in the traditional schools, as a Hindu boy should, taking my bath in the Ganges every morning at sunrise and being dressed exactly as you should be dressed, and seamless clothes because I wouldn’t have been able to enter my masters’ house if I’d had clothes with seams, and manners, all the dietary disciplines that had to be observed and all the ways of life. And I think it’s tremendously enriching because you don’t have a contrary reaction, but it creates this sort of dual personality that I have, i.e. I think differently when I think in Hindi and when I think in French or English, and I never try to synthesise.
Maurice FLEURET: And when you were director of the Madras library, you were an Indian among Indians, a Hindu by nature and a scholar by profession.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, in other words, I was very interested in this question of saving a very large library of manuscripts, which fascinated me. I published Sanskrit editions there, as well as a very important Sanskrit journal. But for me, when I was in Madras, there was already a certain compromise. It was already the first step towards my life in Benares, where I had virtually no contacts, because no other Europeans were entering Benares at that time.
Maurice FLEURET: If I’m hearing you correctly, the return to India must be an active return. It has to involve action, doesn’t it? As you did yourself on the ground.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, it shouldn’t be an escape. On the contrary. I think perhaps there is an aspect of flight at the start, a concern about the world in which we find ourselves. But when it comes down to it, you only become part of a civilisation and get to know it if you like it and are prepared to accept all its aspects. I think it’s the same for an Indian who wants to live in France and become, I don’t know, a composer or a conductor. He has to completely forget everything that was his past and integrate fully into all the habits and ways of seeing of the country where he wants to live.