The complete radio interviews can be consulted on the archives site.
TRANSCRIPTION
Presenter: I would like to remind you that this evening, around this table, we have Mr Daniélou, who is a specialist on India, Mr Pasquier, who is going to talk about ecology in the light of Mr Daniélou’s thinking, and Mr Cloarec.
Interviewer: Let‘s come back to the world of India, which for many French people is associated, let’s say in a very flat way, with less aggression, less sectarianism, less open hostility to other dogmas. For you, Mr Daniélou, is India synonymous with tolerance?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes. I wouldn’t say non-violence, but tolerance, certainly, fundamentally. That’s why all the persecuted peoples took refuge in India. India is where the first Christian churches were founded, India is where the oldest Jewish colonies were established, India is where the Parsis, driven out of Persia by Islam, found refuge. So it’s a country that has always been open to all religions, all ethical groups, etc., because of its unique system of cohabitation rather than assimilation. So it’s a system where each and every group retains its individuality, its freedom, its religion, its customs, its language and so on. The result is a mosaic of peoples, cultures and religions. Basically, this has worked marvellously well for thousands of years.
Interviewer: When you read the history of India, you think of the old proverb “Happy people have no history”, because there has been an extraordinary succession of conquest and foreign domination. Basically, India’s national reigns are the exception rather than the rule. We have the slight impression that the Indians came out of the domination of the Mongols to fall into that of the English and, in the end, India’s independence seems to us to be a rather recent idea and an imperfect reality because you also mentioned the conditions of division that still exist between India and the Muslims who make up Pakistan.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, but this was a completely artificial thing that was part of the British Empire’s theory of ‘Divide and Rule’ and which was prepared. It was for the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims who lived perfectly well in the same neighbourhoods while remaining in a way very separate and collaborating without any problem. This hostility was created very artificially and then used as a pretext to divide India. When in fact all the great Muslim leaders were absolutely opposed to this division and a character was invented who had never been to India, who had never entered a Mosque, who was called Mr Jinnah and it was decided that he would be the leader of a new Islamic nation called Pakistan.
It’s all very artificial, but I think it’s been done more or less everywhere. We see these divisions in different countries, which are perhaps very clumsy because they create insoluble problems.
Interviewer: Yes, the world will never stop reaping the divisions sown by the British Empire, whether it’s Palestine, Cyprus, India or Nigeria. It’s poisoned fruit everywhere.
This is the first question that comes to mind insofar as, in effect, the world of Pakistan and Bangladesh are part of India, they are Muslim parts. In the minds of the Hindu nationalists and traditionalists to whom your sympathies lie, is this division temporary or is it ultimately accepted as the lesser evil?
Alain DANIÉLOU: I don’t think they could really accept it, but the Germans did.
Interviewer: First cousin.
Alain DANIÉLOU: The first cousin. Obviously, when you create divisions like that, it can be very difficult to resolve them because you end up with problems like war, conflict, persecution and so on, which create difficult divisions.
Interviewer: Irreparable.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, but the rest of India is still very divided. The provinces each have their own language, culture and even script. So there’s no difficulty in involving other provinces.
Interviewer: What do you find most striking about the general history of India since antiquity as you describe it in your book? Do you think that there is a guideline that the West and France, who like simple ideas and rationalisations, things that fit on a little card and that fit comfortably in a memory, do you think that there is a guideline or would you prefer to thumb your nose at it by saying that the guideline is wrong?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Perhaps, but I think you could say it’s the principle of tolerance, certainly. After all, it’s the only religion, if you call Hinduism a religion, that doesn’t proselytise, that absolutely doesn’t try to convert people, that respects different ways of believing and that doesn’t at all claim that one conception of religion, of the divine, of morality, is better than another because, in fact, there is this fundamental doubt that can allow itself to consider that it holds the truth. And this, I believe, is an absolutely fundamental thing that differentiates Hinduism from all other religions, is not to claim that there is one truth and that there is someone who possesses it.
Interviewer: I think you were saying that when a Hindu meets someone from another religion, he congratulates them because he feels that they are both searching for the truth.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, exactly. What’s more, and I admit it, there’s an effort involved in converting someone. But you say: “You have rituals, you believe in divinities, but follow your own path”.
Interviewer: For an ecologist like Louis Pasquier, isn’t this ultimately a kind of path that leads us back to the respect, even the divinisation of nature to which I’ve often heard you allude?
Louis Pasquier: Absolutely. In fact, when we spoke a little with Mr Daniélou during our trip, our little trip to get here, he said and we say: “Let’s save nature! That’s the cry, that’s the current archetype of various ecologists. But in fact, we need to be saved by nature, we need to reverse the problem. At least, the question must be reversed. Here again, “let’s respect nature”. In fact, we don’t have to respect nature, we have to respect ourselves through nature. Nature speaks to us and brings us with it. If we really want to preserve it, and I’m using a bad word here, it’s important that we try to understand it, to understand these subtle forces that Mr Daniélou was talking about. I’d just like to make a brief aside, at least as far as the Cardinal is concerned.
I spoke about it with Mr Daniélou when we first met, but he probably doesn’t remember, it was quite trivial, although it is important in front of a microphone, it seems to me. I’ve had the privilege of seeing Mr Your Brother twice, and once with my son. These questions of polytheism with a small ‘p’, let’s say, were not foreign, or perhaps it was due to the influence of Mr Alain Daniélou, and in any case, he was not hostile to them.
People like, I remember, at the time, I spoke to him about Gurdjieff, of course, he didn’t ask me to join the group, but he saw with a certain sympathy the research approach that was advocated at the time by Gurdjieff. It was simply a small incidence, concerning nature which is the number one problem at the moment, which is the fundamental question that should agitate everyone. There is only one way to save it, and that is to consider it using the method advocated by Mr Daniélou.
Mr Daniélou, of course, regardless of his intelligence, has taken the lessons of Hinduism, but in my opinion this is the only way, the one and only way, to be able to adopt a behaviour that will enable us to live in a certain harmony, because we ourselves will have developed in a harmonious way. It’s not a question of taking advantage, it’s a question of taking advantage of the lessons we are constantly being taught.
Interviewer: Let me remind you that this is Radio Courtoisie. Our guests this evening are : Mr Alain Daniélou, who is a well-known India specialist, author of the history of India and a book entitled Shiva et Dionysos. I’ll remind you of Mr Daniélou’s bibliography at the end of the programme, as well as President Louis Pasquier and Mr Cloarec.
I’m going to give the floor a bit to the listeners who ask us questions, some naive, others extremely pertinent, which we’ll try to use to say a little more about all this.
A listener asks: “Aren’t the angels of monotheistic religions avatars or evolutions of the gods of polytheism?
Alain DANIÉLOU: In any case, in some cases they have correspondences. Some archangels correspond to divinities that can be substituted for one another. They are in fact vestiges of divinities that have a particular role. Angels are not vague entities, but they each have a domain in the natural or supernatural world that corresponds in fact to a divinity.
Interviewer: You could also extend that to part of the cult of the saints, but that’s a personal reflection.
A listener asks us the question that was obviously going to come up this evening: “What is your position on reincarnation?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Personally, I know that many people in India believe in reincarnation, which comes from a very particular religion called Jainism and which has been taken over by Buddhists. But in the philosophical circles I’ve frequented, basically, reincarnation appears to be an impossibility because what reincarnates? You see, it’s this idea, this vanity of man to want to continue as he is. In fact, just as in the concept of Shiva philosophy, our body dissolves and is used to form other bodies, so our spirit, etc., but there is no person, there is no self with a memory that can be transported from one being to another.
Interviewer: Basically, you don’t believe in reincarnation, you don’t subscribe to the idea.
Alain DANIÉLOU: No, nor to karma.
Louis Pasquier: What I mean is that this is a very specific theory from a certain Shiva world, which is a branch of Hinduism that you may have heard of, but 90% if not more of Indians believe in reincarnation. So Mr Daniélou is in a dissident branch, I mean, of classical Hinduism, not a dissident branch. It’s a fundamental branch.
Interviewer: You’ve attributed this to a particular thing that’s on the fringes completely.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, and it’s incorporated into Hinduism, but it wasn’t part of either Vedism or original Shivaism.
Interviewer: You consider this belief to be an aberration.
Alain DANIÉLOU: And which is, in short, a sort of theory to justify the fact that men are not all born with the same advantages, so to speak. Some are born beautiful and intelligent, others stupid and ugly, and then, in search of an explanation, we say: “It’s because they behaved badly in their previous life”.
Louis PASQUIER: You explained this Shivaite theory very well in your book.
Interviewer: The book is “La Fantaisie des Dieux et l’Aventure Humaine”, based on the Shiva tradition, by Alain Daniélou, published by Editions du Rocher.
Another question: “What do you think of Evola’s work? Are you interested in Evola’s work and particularly in his book on tantric yoga?”
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, it’s a good approach for a Westerner. I’m always a bit surprised because I know things from the other side. But it does contain a lot of interesting elements.
Interviewer: What do you think of Orientalist Westerners?
Alain DANIÉLOU: That’s often a disaster.
Interviewer: Because it’s more or less the point of view, for example, of a man who belongs to a different tradition, who is Idries Shah, who rebels somewhat against a whole current of Orientalist Westerners, saying that the great wisdom of the East that Sufism represents is rather the search for a common reflection with Europe and the West.
Alain DANIÉLOU: In other words, it’s a question of deep knowledge. I also believe that a man like Corbin had a real knowledge of Sufism because he practised it, because he was a Sufi.
Interviewer: Of course, but with Idries Shah, there are a lot of Westerners. There was Robert Graves, for example, who was an Englishman. By orientalist Westerners, he didn’t mean Westerners who really practised the Eastern world from the inside, whether they were Sufis or Hindus, but Westerners who dabble in orientalism without looking for the profound truth, it’s bazaar orientalism.
Alain DANIÉLOU: The worst is perhaps the academic, because he is the most closed-minded, the most pretentious and the most ignorant, if we always fall into docte ignorance. And then there are all those very nice people who dream of India but know nothing, so they fall prey to commercial gurus who have nothing at heart. We don’t know, perhaps it’s of some use to them, but it’s so far from a deep and real search for Hinduism that it’s hard to say.
Louis Pasquier: You said the other day that the problem was that many people going to India were looking for experience.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, indeed. And that’s a terribly Western flaw. People want experience, not knowledge. But what’s interesting is to know, to understand. There’s a certain exotic romanticism that’s almost like a drug, it immerses you in a species. We make them fast, we stop them eating, we turn them into vegetarians and so on. We create conditions in which they are somewhat drugged. And they find a certain satisfaction in it and we tell them: “That’s transcendental meditation”. What do you want us to say?
It’s sad, because there are so many fascinating things to know and explore in a civilisation like India. Goodwill is being diverted towards extremely superficial experiences.
Louis PASQUIER: And always in English.
Alain DANIÉLOU: I’ve never met people who claim to be interested in India and who speak an Indian language, even at university. They can doodle a bit. They do… you’re amazed. I can’t use publications from the Sorbonne Institute because what? Because they can’t read Sanskrit, they transcribe it in Western script, which for me is completely illegible. How can you claim to teach a culture? I mean, someone who teaches Greek and can’t read Greek, I’d say that’s…
Interviewer: It’s paradoxical.
Louis Pasquier: What is a tragedy for us, what may seem stupid to a European or a Westerner in the broad sense, is even worse for you. One of the things I learnt from your book is that the Indian elites know how to speak English better than their Indian language.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, they were completely distorted. In fact, this is the case in many countries.
Louis PASQUIER: No, but that was obvious.
Alain DANIÉLOU: In the former colonies, we like people because they speak French very well. We don’t say that he speaks Swahili very well or anything. He’s a very cultured guy, he speaks French very well.
Louis Pasquier: Yes, but in your book, it goes further because you say that they spoke English because we did everything to make them speak English, to make them forget their culture, we killed them, it was a massacre, it’s much worse than…
Jacques CLOAREC: But we still need to define the word elite, because when you talk about Indian elites, what you really mean is a modernised India. Because you could say that India’s elite are the great, extremely literate pandits.
Louis PASQUIER: Of course.
Jacques CLOAREC: And they are at an extraordinary level of knowledge, and I’m grateful for that.
Louis PASQUIER: Of course. In my mind, their elite is the one you just mentioned. But the one we were told about, when I learnt that Gandhi or Nehru spoke Indian badly and that they spoke English better, that’s incredible.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Nehru gabbled Hindi rather than Urdu, but as an English NCO, it was scandalous to hear him.
Interviewer: I have to say, well, the questions from listeners are piling up. For example, I came across this comment from a listener who is a young woman we know, who is very close to the radio and who is studying theology at the Catholic Institute, who pointed out that it’s not the cult of the saints but the devotion to the saints that recovers a pagan sensibility, there’s a nuance. We’re not going to play the game of how much paganism is in Christianity. Besides, I don’t think you’re a specialist in this question.
I think we’re getting into something where, personally, I feel terribly European, i.e. I’d like to say that India would need, for example, Hindi in the Indian script to become a kind of national language imposed from north to south. Do you think all these concepts can be transposed to India?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Why would you want English or German to be imposed on all European languages, to do away with European languages, that seems completely absurd. India is a continent with very diverse cultures and very ancient civilisations.
Interviewer: But is it legitimate for them to speak to each other in English?
Alain DANIÉLOU: That’s an accident of history. For a time, they spoke to each other in Persian because during the Mongol Empire, the national language was Persian.
Interviewer: It’s more chic, though, Persian.
Jacques CLOAREC: Why not English, it’s easier now. It’s cut like that, why not?
Alain DANIÉLOU: No, in other words, the people of the south have been refusing to accept taxation from the countries of the north for centuries.
Interviewer: It’s not just in India.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Forcing Hindi on them is worse. They prefer an international language which, at the end of the day, they also use to communicate with the outside world.
Interviewer: There won’t be an Albigensian crusade, India isn’t in the process of building its unity, its power. Is it possible to transpose this type of concept to the history of India that is about to unfold? Because after all, there is an Indian tolerance, there is an Indian tradition, but I’d like to say, isn’t there an element of, not commonplace, I wouldn’t want to use a word like that, but of illusion in relation to a nation that is going to try to… that makes war for example and doesn’t do it all that badly.
Alain DANIÉLOU: No, and even too well. Look, you have a small country like Switzerland, where I frequently live, where there are four national languages and that poses no problem. And I don’t see why people shouldn’t continue. I don’t see why Basques and Bretons should be forced to speak French.
Interviewer: We made them do it.
Alain DANIÉLOU: They were forced to, and how? But that’s not an advantage. In the end, you can always speak several languages, you can always have a common language, you can choose, it doesn’t matter, but above all you can’t always impose the cultural and linguistic domination of one population over another. That is very contrary to the spirit of India.
Interviewer: So we can’t imagine that unification is becoming stronger, that there is any rationality. In any case, the language of unity will remain English.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Not necessarily. For the time being, it’s simply a convenience because it turned out to be a language that everyone had to learn and it’s convenient for communication. But I don’t believe that the ideal language would be to go back to Sanskrit, which is a superb and admirable language.
Interviewer: That’s the question I was going to ask you. If I want to encourage my children to get to know this country, which perhaps has a great future, which is probably a very important partner for the France of tomorrow, to perhaps give them a source of inspiration, their conception, let’s not talk about learning English. Is it better to learn Hindi or Sanskrit?
Alain DANIÉLOU: It’s not the same thing. I think that for an easy language, a language that everyone spoke very fluently and in which there are newspapers, speeches, conferences, etc., Hindi is a very good introduction, but it can be Hindi, or Bengali, or Marathi, a modern language. And then it also helps you to study the learned language, which is Sanskrit.
I have a Hindi dictionary and a Sanskrit dictionary on my table and they’re almost the same thing. It’s just that the grammar is completely different: Hindi grammar is very simple, whereas Sanskrit grammar is very complex. So I think that if you want to get closer to India – and for easy contact with ordinary people, who are very important, you shouldn’t just be dealing with great scholars – I would say without hesitation to anyone who wants to get closer to India: “learn Hindi or Bengali”.
Jacques CLOAREC: Because Bengali is as close to Sanskrit as Hindi?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Closer for the pronunciation.
Jacques CLOAREC: But not for the vocabulary?
Alain DANIÉLOU: The vocabulary is the same.
Interviewer: These two languages are close to Sanskrit.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes. In practical terms, the vocabulary for learned things was identical, but then on completely different grammars and very simple grammars that were very easy to learn and even to speak badly, which is important when you’re learning.
Interviewer: Knowing slang.
Alain DANIÉLOU: No, not just knowing slang, but being able to make mistakes, to speak a bit wrongly like you speak, I don’t know, Spanish, four words, you can. It’s not easy to do that with Sanskrit.
Louis PASQUIER: How many languages did you speak yourself?
Alain DANIÉLOU: I speak Hindi in principle, like French, and Sanskrit naturally. Then I studied a little Bengali, a little Tamil, but really only Hindi.
Interviewer: There’s a listener who asks us the following question, and I think his logic is perfectly sincere. He says: “Are we to conclude that without the practice of Sanskrit, no spiritual benefit can be obtained from India? In that case, all Christians should learn Hebrew.
Does the logic of the West consist precisely in going from one thing to an approximation to another approximation? Do you conclude from this that we must learn Sanskrit at all costs before…
Alain DANIÉLOU: No, certainly not. If you want to learn more about a country and its culture, you obviously need to speak a language. You wouldn’t want a Chinese person living in France to study French culture who doesn’t speak a word of French. That sounds very childish. But that’s more or less what expensive Westerners do when they go to India.
Interviewer: You could say to this gentleman that, for example, if you want to sell French equipment in Germany, you’d better learn German.
Alain DANIÉLOU: It’s better to learn German.
Interviewer: Perhaps it’s because we don’t learn enough German and Italian that we have trade deficits with these two partners. Obviously, it’s not easy to learn the sacred languages.
For example, I’d like to answer the gentleman’s second question by saying that if all Christians start learning Hebrew, they should start by studying Latin.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, exactly.
Interviewer: Latin and Greek eventually, because we correct French with Latin, Latin with Greek. Hebrew is very secondary.
Alain DANIÉLOU: The Gospels are in Greek.
Interviewer: That’s a big question. Carmignac’s books show – there are a number of works – that we learned it in Greek and Latin. In fact, it’s true that to understand Christianity properly, to understand patristics properly, you need to know Latin and Greek.
Why should learning a culture or religion be easy? Everything would be in French, we’d have to speak French or Esperanto like everyone else. Were the sacred texts of India translated into Esperanto?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Of course not the sacred texts of India. The Bible, yes. I’m not familiar with that.
Interviewer: Is there no interest in Esperanto in India?
Jacques CLOAREC: They have enough language as it is. They’re drowning in…
Louis PASQUIER: The spirit and the letter, Sir. In fact, we’re talking about the letter, the spirit is something else. It can be approached without really knowing the language in its entirety.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Esperanto is essentially a Western language, a mixture of French, English and Spanish.
Interviewer: Bad Latin, with fake Portuguese.
Alain DANIÉLOU: I can’t think of any vocabulary that would help you translate Sanskrit.
Interviewer : I’m not an Esperantist, not at all. I place hope elsewhere than in Esperanto. There are obviously lots of curious questions, one of which is typical of my own curiosity because I don’t even know what it’s about. I’ll read it to you as it is, it comes from a listener: “Mr Daniélou, what do you think of Brunton? When did he die? And Yogananda? What does this question suggest to you? What do you think of Brunton?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Paul Brunton, yes, he wrote a book about India. But really, I don’t remember him at all.
Interviewer: You think more of it than I do, because I don’t know who it is.
Jacques CLOAREC: And the other one? Yogananda?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yogananda, that must be Swami of the Ramakrishna Mission or something like that, which is called something like that.
Interviewer: That’s a sect we could talk about. Hare Krishna, what…
Alain DANIÉLOU: Hare Krishna is something else, and Ramakrishna is something else. Ramakrishna was a kind of holy man who lived on the banks of the Ganges, a bit like Diogenes in a completely isolated hut, who was a kind of extraordinary mystic. He had nothing written down, but he had admirers, people. Then he had a disciple called Vivekananda who took that name and turned it into a religious order of all these swamis in orange, walking around, not the ones now jumping up and saying: “Hare Krishna, this is a kind of new sect”. Many swamis who played a certain role in Ramakrishna, I think. My brother knew one of them. They were people who were quite esteemed, although obviously this was already a Hinduism very much adapted to Western tastes.
Interviewer: I’ll continue with the jumble of questions. I’m sorting them out with a bit of hypocrisy, I’ll tell you. What can you say about Sikhs?
Alain DANIÉLOU: The Sikhs are a Hindu warrior sect that formed at the time of Muslim domination to fight the Muslims, saying: “It’s only by behaving like Muslims that we can fight them. So it’s a religious sect with gurus, people who wear daggers and iron bracelets, and so on. It’s a warrior brotherhood formed to defend Hinduism against Muslims. Half the Sikh country was already given to the Muslims in Pakistan. Then, when there were refugees, the Hindus: “Let’s put that with the Sikhs.”
Louis Pasquier: In your opinion, one of the major problems facing India today is the transplantation of romantic socialist ideas from the 19th century to India, which was not at all…
Alain DANIÉLOU: Absolutely, and it doesn’t fit at all. You have all the people who live on two levels, on the one hand pretending to be democrats and egalitarians, etc., and socialists and I don’t know what, and on the other hand, secretly, of course respecting the rules of caste, the rules of religion. They wouldn’t agree to marry their daughters off to someone who wasn’t from the same ethnic group, with the same horoscopes and everything you need to make a happy marriage. At the same time, they’ll talk about it as if it were something abominable.
Louis PASQUIER: Then you’d think we were in France.
Interviewer: Yes, it’s like the France of tomorrow.
Jacques CLOAREC: I think that all the observers who have managed to penetrate India a little, we see a lot of Italians who manage to come back from a fairly traditional background and they all have the same argument. They find that traditional Indian society is not changing at all. The caste system, despite the modernism that the government wants to impose, is still very much a caste society.
Interviewer: That’s reassuring for our listeners.
Louis PASQUIER: This is a question we’ve been wanting to ask for two hours.
Interviewer: It’s a society based on the most abhorrent principles of contemporary ideology, so to speak.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, respect for others is quite extraordinary.
Interviewer: It’s unbearable because it’s respect for others.
Alain DANIÉLOU: We want to colonise it, we want to assimilate it, we want to force it to be something other than what it is. This is absolutely revolting from the Hindu point of view. We must respect each person’s…
Interviewer: The right to be different.
Alain DANIÉLOU: The right to be different, one’s race, one’s religion, one’s social conceptions, one’s marriage system, one’s inheritance system and all one’s groups. We must not believe that even the so-called underprivileged castes, the poorest, etc. are as attached to their groups, their nations, to what they are, as people who are in theoretically higher circles.
Interviewer: Basically, the troops, for example, of the Hindu nationalist party, there’s the Jana Sangh, these troops are public and are recruited, for example, from the so-called upper classes, from Brahmanism, or are they found among the Pariahs?
Alain DANIÉLOU: I can tell you quite simply. I had a boatman, boatmen are one of the lowest classes because on the Ganges, they transport the dead. In India, they are what we call untouchable. He was a handsome boy who did a lot of gymnastics with the high priest of the temple, who was a friend of mine.
Jacques CLOAREC: So Brahman?
Alain DANIÉLOU: The high priest, of course. If you want to fight, there are no such restrictions. He was imprisoned by Nehru because he was part of the Jana Shangh. He was part of the active people of the orthodox party.
Interviewer: But we’re getting closer and closer to a familiar pattern. There’s no need to…
Presenter: I remind you that you are on Radio Courtoisie, the free radio of the real country and the French-speaking world, 95.6 Mhz. Around this table are Mr Daniélou, Mr Pasquier and Mr Cloarec, whose main topic is India.
Interviewer: There’s another question from the same young girl, a theology student at the Catholic Institute, because there’s a paradox here. She asks us this question, which I find a little insidious: “To which caste does Monsieur Daniélou belong, or would he belong?
Alain DANIÉLOU: On principle, you can’t change what you are. So, if you were born in a certain world, in a certain place, you belong to that group. People like me are considered Mleccha, we’re barbarians. It’s a caste, it’s not dishonourable at all, but it’s among the lower castes.
At that point, what’s going on? What are the problems?
People of any caste can study. They can’t officiate, they don’t have the right to teach the Vedas, which are ritual texts. But apart from that, if you want to study philosophy, religion or cosmological texts, there’s no need to respect the student’s data. In other words, during all the years when I worked with the great scholars in Benares, it had to be quiet that I took my bath in the Ganges, that I was a vegetarian because you have to be a vegetarian as a student, that I wore clothes without seams and that I would never try to touch anyone and that if I was with a respectable master, I wouldn’t try to sit next to him, but I would sit lower down. So it’s just a question of simple politeness. Provided that’s the case, there’s no problem. Here, teaching is open to everyone, and there are only questions of rules of behaviour between the different castes.
Interviewer: But there’s no aggression. For example, you use the word barbaric. I think it’s important to remember that there’s a bit of a paradox in saying – as we’ve done over the last few days in a context that has nothing to do with India, but we wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with India – that we denounce barbarism and at the same time want to denounce all forms of racism, because basically, what is more racist than the very concept of barbarism? In this sense, what is a barbarian? It’s a foreigner who doesn’t share the same civilisation.
Among polytheistic peoples, or in India or in the ancient world, is the term barbarian not a pejorative? It’s a very special kind of foreigner. For example, a Roman is not a barbarian to a Greek, but a Persian is. And for a Chinese person, for example, I don’t know if the Japanese is a barbarian. But the Indians and the Portuguese are the brown barbarians, we French, so you too, are the white barbarians, curiously enough. And the English are the red-headed barbarians, which is picturesque. But barbarian is not a pejorative word for an Indian. That’s the way it is.
Alain DANIÉLOU: I say barbarian, the word is Mleccha. Mleccha is well…
Jacques CLOAREC: As long as you weren’t born in India. It’s as simple as…
Alain DANIÉLOU: For example, the Yavanas, the Vionians, played a major role in Indian culture because they had a lot of contact with Greece. There are treatises on Iranian astrology, treatises on the Ionians, treatises on theatre inspired by the Greeks and so on. So it wasn’t considered that they weren’t part of the culture, but they could be in the ritual functions, there were limitations.
Interviewer: You have to be Indian. You have to be Hindu, Brahmin.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, you have priests here who officiate in churches.
Interviewer: It’s not a hereditary caste.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Recruitment is different. But in other professions, it’s often been hereditary, even here, I think, for shopkeepers.
Interviewer: Yes, to be part of the Gallimard house, we’ve just been reminded that you have to be called Antoine Gallimard. Even Michel Déon has written a very nice article in which he describes the anonymous and vagrant fortune that claims to be taking the place of the Gallimard caste, and it’s very shocking.
Louis PASQUIER: Companions, sir, companionship.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, but companionships are also associations. They’re like monastic orders.
Louis PASQUIER: Yes, in castes.
Interviewer: There are some questions I can’t ask because I admit I don’t know what they mean. And there’s one question that many listeners ask us, since we’ve been talking about castes: “Which caste did Gandhi belong to?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Gandhi belonged to a merchant caste. He was a merchant.
Interviewer: He wasn’t a slave trader, was he?
Alain DANIÉLOU: No, listen, not all merchants are. Your sausage merchant is not a slave trader. And whose father had a small technical post with a small raja and sent him to study in England.
Interviewer: Mr Daniélou, we’re going to come back to a question we should have started with, asked by a listener. Now you know what you found, but what motivated you to go to India in the first place?
Alain DANIÉLOU: The gods. It never occurred to me to go to India. I was invited because the son of an Afghan ambassador had been entrusted to my family for some time. And when his father became king, he said to me: “Why don’t you come and see me, etc.? So I was invited to a… it’s great fun, why not?
Interviewer: It’s very Celtic of…
Jacques CLOAREC: To go to Afghanistan?
Alain DANIÉLOU: To go to Afghanistan. Some people have never heard of India.
Interviewer: The Gauls had practices like that.
Jacques CLOAREC: The former king of Afghanistan then?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, he lives in Rome and I see him often, he’s a friend. And to get there, I had to cross India, which I found to be an astonishing country. After Afghanistan, I went back to India and met people I knew in Calcutta who said to me: “Why don’t you go and see the priest Tagore? Why not? So I went to meet Tagore, who was a charming and very kind man, and he said to me, “Since you’re going back to Europe, why don’t you go and see some of my friends, and try to do something for my institution?” We said yes. Then the friends were André Gide, Paul Valéry, Benedetto Crocce (0:51:52), Paul Morand and so on.
After that, I went back almost every year to visit Tagore. And then, after a few years, I said to myself: “It’s a Hindu world that’s basically very open, very modern, very Westernised in a way”. That’s why I went to live in Benares, to really try and study this civilisation, this culture. And then I stayed. Then a war broke out. So I was on the banks of the Ganges, I didn’t see anything of this sad period here.
Jacques CLOAREC: What’s really surprising is that, on the face of it, you were a dancer and a painter when you went to Afghanistan and nothing, neither philosophical nor religious, attracted you to India. You didn’t have a…
Alain DANIÉLOU: Except music. I’ve always played music and I was already interested in oriental forms of music. So I also began to study Indian music for years. In fact, one of my first great books, which unfortunately doesn’t exist in French, is a great book on ragas, which only exists in English. There, simply because I was interested in doing something, without ever having any plans, I suddenly found myself knowing a lot of things that apparently very few people know. And also, after independence, when these movements in favour of Hinduism were created, there was, I think, on the part of some of the great scholars this idea that, after all, I could be useful in presenting the reality of Hinduism. So I had every facility for all the teachings without ever having done anything for that, it just happened.
Interviewer: Couldn’t we – because in the end it’s quite a fascinating destiny – come back to a kind of French European rationality, and there’s a problem of knowledge of India in France and also of important traditional teachings. Doesn’t it seem to you that an effort needs to be made to improve the French people’s knowledge of India?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Certainly. I know very few things that are valid.
Interviewer: Is the Indian government concerned about this?
Alain DANIÉLOU: No. In a way, the Indian government did. But at the same time, it was very much against the great scholars and traditional teaching. It was following in the footsteps of colonial ideas. I think things are improving now.
Interviewer: You mean, the Congress party represents a perhaps superficial form but a system of government in India. But it’s not the essence of the Indian tradition, it’s even antagonistic.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Now, after all, it’s the Hindu parties that have taken power. The Congress is now in the minority.
Interviewer: Since Rajiv Gandhi lost the elections.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes.
Interviewer: I noticed in your book that you said that India had never known misery before, before colonisation. Yet what shocks everyone in India today is the extreme poverty of certain individuals. How do you explain this rift?
Alain DANIÉLOU: It was crazy colonial exploitation. Because when the British arrived in India, the standard of living was the highest in the world and there was absolutely no poverty.
Interviewer: Absolutely no misery?
Alain DANIÉLOU: No. But then, I know that there is a part of it, I’ve known an India that was a lot less miserable than it is today, but it was above all the division of India. Millions of refugees arrived from Pakistan.
Interviewer: There are demographics perhaps. There is a demographic problem.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Here too, all the Indian laws and systems for limiting the population were condemned in such a way that…
Interviewer: Well, not even Gandhi.
Alain DANIÉLOU: No. Not the British first.
Jacques CLOAREC: You can’t judge India’s traditional system by the appearance of its big cities, which are completely ravaged by overpopulation and by the problems created by partition, because the problems of partition have not yet been resolved in India.
Louis Pasquier: In fact, India today is suffering from the English colonisation of the last century.
Interviewer: Listeners may need to be reminded that the British banned Indians from the textile industry.
Alain DANIÉLOU: They even cut off the thumbs of the weavers.
Interviewer: We shouldn’t confuse colonisation with colonial policies, which are not quite the same and which did not have the same objectives. In this case, it was purely financial and economic.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, as well as a lack of knowledge of the system, of the whole social system, which has led to a mess in the population.
Louis Pasquier: When you say lack of knowledge, I mean that to create Pakistan you have to have a very acute knowledge of what you are going to do. While almost all Indians, whether Muslim or Hindi, did not want this partition, they nevertheless imposed it so that today the situation is ungovernable.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Of course.
Louis Pasquier: I don’t entirely agree with you when you say that it’s a lack of knowledge. I think it’s cynicism or…
Alain DANIÉLOU: No, I was speaking first.
Louis PASQUIER: And that’s very ill-intentioned.
Alain DANIÉLOU: I was talking about a lack of understanding of the whole social system, of all the institutions, which means that nothing works any more, because once again, the justice systems were imposed, laws that were contrary to…
Louis PASQUIER: And now that the nationalist party is back in power, what decision…
Alain DANIÉLOU: I don’t know at all because it’s very recent. We don’t know to what extent they will be able to re-establish certain values, certain structures, especially that once you’ve created such a mess, you want to give power back to the people from whom it was taken and then say to them: “Deal with the mess”.
Interviewer: You don’t create order in the same way that you create disorder.
Jacques CLOAREC: I think it’s a bit the same in Afghanistan.
Alain DANIÉLOU: That’s what the King of Afghanistan said. They’ve created an insane mess and then they say to me, “Don’t you want to come back and put things right? But how can I? If they put things right, I’ll be happy to come back.
Interviewer: You could even draw a comparison with Russia. I was surprised to hear a question from a gentleman who finds it strange that what I find very good in Africa and for Africans, colonisation, is prohibited for India. I would like to say to this listener, and this is an incident that concerns me, that I think that the problem of Africa and the problem of India are two very different things, to begin with. And secondly, on several occasions, including when Bernard Lugan was our guest, we concluded that colonisation, particularly French colonisation in Africa, should not be cursed because it did not do that, it did not cut off the fingers of weavers. On the contrary, it sought more or less intelligently to create the conditions for progress in black Africa. Personally, my reasons were a little different from those of Bernard Lugan. Personally, I would like to say that I consider the colonial experience in Africa to be negative for France, firstly, which seems to me to be the most important thing. But also from the point of view of Africa, I would like to say to this listener that I am what you might call “a right-wing anti-colonialist”.
But that has nothing to do with India, because with India there is a spiritual breath that I confess my sensitivity does not lead me to look much more towards Africa. Because Lanza del Vasto’s pilgrimage to the sources goes there, not to Africa.
Alain DANIÉLOU: It’s not the same thing at all.
Interviewer: Comparison is not reason.
Louis PASQUIER: Could you please explain or rather tell me about the oral transmission that the Brahmins consider to be the only valid one?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, like the druids. But that also poses a whole problem of writing. Basically, Hinduism in India is based on two elements: the shruti, what is heard, and the smriti, what is remembered, but not the book. And basically, that’s very dangerous. I believe that all the religions of the book fall into a kind of superstition of a text that is fixed at a certain time and becomes god in a way, and that is extremely dangerous.
Interviewer: I would have said a neighbour who is Confucius who said: “Beware of the man who is the man of a single book.”
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes.
Interviewer: We’re going to take a moment to thank you because these minutes have gone by rather quickly. And this concludes with two questions from our listeners. First, a decisive question. The listener says: “Can you explain Veda? Is it true that it is the language of the Aryans? This is the wrong question. The real question is: “What is Sanskrit?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Careful. The Veda, first of all, there are four Vedas: the Rig-Veda, the oldest, these are hymns brought by the Aryan tribes who conquered India around 1800 BC, I don’t think.
Interviewer: And which was transmitted orally?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Which was transmitted orally. They were not written down until many centuries later, because the Aryan Indians refused to write.
Interviewer: So Sanskrit is a creation.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Sanskrit is a language that is derived to some extent from Vedic, with all sorts of contributions from older Indian languages, and which was then refined in an extraordinary way by genius grammarians, who created an artificial language that was to last forever.
Interviewer: It’s the perfect language.
Alain DANIÉLOU: It’s the perfect language, and one that has remained identical to itself. This was done by Panini in the 5th century BC and has not changed since.
Interviewer: You say there are about twenty ways of expressing the self?
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, of course.
Interviewer: It’s an extraordinary finesse.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Finesse in all areas. In some texts that we try to translate, we don’t know how to do it because we have 20 words in Sanskrit and only half a word validated in French. French is very poor.
Interviewer: This question of Sanskrit, I think it’s very interesting to point out, is something that has absolutely no equivalent in the world. It’s a people who have reinvented their language. It’s the oldest known Indo-European language, the closest to the language of our Indo-European ancestors, and in fact we would like to see its study developed in the West. That seems one thing…
Alain DANIÉLOU: Not just the language, because it represents an immense body of literature in terms of cosmology and philosophy.
Interviewer: It gives you access to these four Vedas. The Rig-Veda, which we’ve been talking about, and then the other three.
Alain DANIÉLOU: The Sama-Veda, which are hymns to be sung, which are (1:08:10) inaudible. The Yajur-Veda, which is the third. The Atharva-Veda is much later and is a collection by the Aryans of previous knowledge, the knowledge of the Dravidians.
Interviewer: Another question. I’m going to start with a very small reference that a listener asked us for, I think the reference was extremely important. You say that the English cut off the thumbs of Indian weavers to force them… Can you give us a reference, a text? What can we send listeners to in order to cite this terrible example?
Louis PASQUIER: I’d like to say something. They were the ones in place. There’s no reason to find many texts. In general, we find texts of the ‘atrocities’ committed by the Indians during their rebellions in 1857, but only in the other direction…
Interviewer: You mention this in your history of India.
Alain DANIÉLOU: I don’t know if I mentioned that.
Interviewer: In your history of India, you say that the English tied Indian princes to the end of cannons to make them pay for their…
We’ll look for the reference and say so in 15 days’ time. I must conclude by mentioning the books to which our listeners can refer. Firstly, there is a book called “Les Contes du Labyrinthe”, which has just been published by Editions du Rocher. There is a second book, also published by Editions du Rocher. Finally, there’s a previous book, ‘La Fantaisie des Dieux et l’Aventure Humaine’, also by Alain Daniélou, published by Editions du Rocher. “Shiva et Dionysos”, which, alas, is not currently available in bookshops from Fayard.
There’s your translated novel, Manimékhalai ou le scandale de la vertu du prince-marchand Shattam, translated from Tamil and presented by Alain Daniélou. Then there’s Louis Pasquier’s book Rencontre avec Gurdjieff et Alain Daniélou et Schwaller de Lubicz. And finally, your Histoire de l’Inde, published by Fayard.
Alain Daniélou, thank you very much for coming here this evening and telling us about this fascinating country, India, to which we will continue to refer even if Mr René Rémond doesn’t like it.
Alain DANIÉLOU: In any case, I was delighted. It was a great pleasure to talk to you.