Dialogue  January - March, 2008 , Volume 9  No. 3

France's Discovery of India

Michel Danino*

France’s discovery of India rarely figures in English-centred Indological studies, because of the language barrier and because of a widespread obsession with the colonial masters. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, French and German languages were Europe’s favoured vehicles of culture, not English. Any study of India’s impact on Europe during and after the Enlightenment will therefore be severely incomplete without a look at France’s and Germany’s considerable contributions to the spread of Indian literature, philosophy and spirituality in the West. This paper proposes an overview of the former’s role as a vahana for Indian culture.

Terra Incognita

French studies of India go back to early French travellers to this exotic and mysterious subcontinent. Their testimonies are as important but as flawed as those of other European travellers, mixing fact and fancy, sympathy and prejudice, inquisitiveness and condemnation. From the eighteenth century onward, travellers1 became more frequent, less inventive, and brought back more reliable material — including, in 1731, the first complete manuscript of the Rig-Veda (in Grantha script), deposited with the Royal Library in Paris.2 A few years later, Father Pons, a French Jesuit, sent a large number of manuscripts from Chandernagore to Paris. However such treasures would remain unrecognized for decades, as no one could read them.

Thus the first serious French writers on India had to sift through travellers’ accounts and rely on scraps and pieces, sometimes also on forgeries by missionaries such as the Ezour-Vedam. Abbé Dubois’s jaundiced Hindu Customs (first published in English in 1817, its French version following eight years later) remains better known than genuine accounts like those of Le Gentil or Anquetil-Duperron. From 1754, the latter ran the length and breadth of India in search of the Veda, but instead collected manuscripts of the Zend Avesta, of which he gave the first French translation (in 1771). Anquetil-Duperron was moved by the Indians’ plight while their country was plundered for its wealth rather than its knowledge:

If the British ... neglect any longer to enrich Europe’s scholars with the Sanskrit scriptures ..., they will bear the shame of having sacrificed honour, probity, and humanity to the vile love for gold and money, without human knowledge having derived the least lustre, the least growth from their conquests.3

British scholars finally became able to read Sanskrit, largely thanks to the work of William Jones and the Asiatic Society he founded at Calcutta in 1784. “Orientalism” was finally respectable. Alongside Jones, Charles Wilkins (the first translator of the Gita), Henry T. Colebrooke, and their successors such as H. H. Wilson and James Prinsep, partly made up for Britain’s neglect of Indian culture in the eighteenth century. Germany followed with a far more massive output: Schlegel, Bopp, Rosen and Max Müller among others (the last two working from England). India was no longer terra incognita: the floodgates of her literature, philosophy, spirituality and religion, science and governance had opened, although British Indology, from the 1830s onward, would become tainted with the twin evil of colonialism and evangelism, while the German scholars allowed themselves to be swayed by a rising nationalistic pride that was to heavily colour their readings of Sanskrit texts. On the whole, France followed a more disinterested line.

The Birth of French Indology

Anquetil-Duperron’s Latin version of fifty Upanishads (published in 1801, with a few in French in 1786), under the title Oupnekhat, was a landmark event in Europe’s intellectual life. This text, dedicated to the “sages of Asia,” remained unrivalled for almost a century, and was the one that so deeply struck Schopenhauer. However, it was translated not from the original Sanskrit, but from a Persian version prepared by Varanasi pandits for Dara Shukoh, Shah Jahan’s son. (Dara was a keen student of the Upanishads and found in them proof of the oneness of God; his brother Aurangzeb used this deviation from Islam as a convenient pretext to have him executed.)

Among other pioneers we should mention Colonel le Polier, a Swiss of French descent, who went to India in 1757 as a teenager and returned some thirty years later, with copious notes on the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Bhagavatam received from a Pandit; based on his notes, a cousin of his published in 1809 a Mythologie des Indous4 which included, for the first time in Europe, a fairly reliable narrative of the three texts. Unfortunately, the book did not receive the attention it deserved.

Though Anquetil-Duperron certainly learned rudiments of Sanskrit, it was only from 1803 that French scholars penetrated the “sacred language.” An inventory of numerous Indian manuscripts collected at the Bibliothèque nationale (the National Library, formerly Royal Library) began in earnest, which was to provide material to generations of “Orientalists.” France’s chair of Sanskrit, created in 1814 at the Collège de France, was the first in Europe. The Société asiatique de Paris was born in 1821, two years before London’s. German scholars would come to Paris to study India, some staying on, others on their way to England: the Schlegel brothers, Lassen, Bopp, Max Müller, Oppert, Hillebrand.... The trend was not limited to Orientalism, since Paris was then regarded as “the heart of every noble élan; the world of intelligence and art would land there from every corner.”5

In the following decades, Sanskritists like Langlois, Burnouf or Bergaigne produced a considerable number of translations of Indian texts, including the Vedas, the Epics, the Gita, several Puranas, many Buddhist texts, the Panchatantra, works of Kalidasa, Panini, Bhartrihari, all of which had a deep impact on the European mind. It was indeed the discovery of a “new continent,” to use Hegel’s famous phrase.6

The limits of French Indology

But the “Oriental renaissance” a few had predicted failed to gather momentum. Unlike England, France did not have to go through a phase of “Indophobia,”7 but the late nineteenth century did see a marked decrease in French interest in Indian thought and texts.8 As Louis Renou noted,

Gradually, however, excitement subsided. The advances of science made the public distrustful. France’s growing disquiet at the German threat unjustly created a certain distaste for the Orient, of which Germany had been the herald.9

Europe witnessed “the oblivion of India,”10 as French philosopher Roger-Pol Droit called it in a masterly essay. In the twentieth century, though no longer in the limelight, the French school of Indology nevertheless continued to produce important studies with the likes of Sylvain Lévi, Louis Renou, Jean Varenne, Jean Filliozat or Olivier Lacombe. Among many other works, the monumental Classical India — a Manual of Indian Studies11 by Louis Renou and Jean Filliozat remains a much-consulted reference. Mention should also be made of the poet René Daumal, who learned Sanskrit alone, translated fragments from different scriptures, and wrote insightful essays on the Natyashastra, Indian poetics, music, art,12 before death snatched him at the age of 36.

This rich harvest was going in turn to sow seeds in French minds curious about other cultures. Yet, more often than not, French Indologists were unable to shed their Judeo-Christian worldview and, consciously or not, used it as their reference and the yardstick for India. The biblical time-frame, for instance, led many to misunderstand the Indian concept of time and, as a result, to relay the British prejudice that Indians have “no sense of history.” Worse, perhaps influenced by Renan, they accepted without evidence the divisive myth of an Aryan invasion of India, its constricting chronology of Indian civilization and literature, and the resulting racial reading of the Vedic texts. Even a great savant like Louis Renou, who thought that India “sums up since prehistory a whole immense human effort and represents a unique example of an uninterrupted tradition,”13 failed to question the Aryan invasion dogma, which is still found in almost all recent studies of India.14

But the most damaging effect of the Western approach of India has been that, like their British or German counterparts, we find French scholars often baffled, unable to penetrate the Indian mind. They note the different species of trees but cannot grasp the forest, sometimes even deny it exists or has any value. A few (e.g. Grousset) did not conceal their conviction that Asian peoples were completely decadent before the colonial times; others were openly hostile to the object of their studies, like Barthélémy Saint-Hilaire with Samkhya or Buddhism. As the scholar Jean Biès, who did much in the last three decades to popularize Indian civilization in France, noted perceptively:

You catch yourself wondering if it is worth dedicating a whole life’s efforts to a cause one seems neither to love nor to defend, perhaps does not even believe in. In fact, the attitude of these [French] experts all too often remains that of scholars and theorists dissecting Asia as a scientific object.... Almost none of these savants ... seems to have questioned themselves about the portion of truth contained in doctrines which they have studied to the last detail ... or tried to embark upon and practice one of the experimental paths a multiple Orient proposes.15

This, in the end, is the question facing much of Indology even today. Still, perhaps because of its reverence for culture, something in the French mind was touched. Let us trace a few channels of India’s influence on French literature and thought, and note the curve now unfolding.16

The Pioneers

Voltaire deserves a special mention, as he showed remarkable intuition of what India stood for despite writing before any genuine translation of Indian texts were available. Several of his works reflect his enthusiasm for most things Indian as much as his well-known abhorrence of all things Judeo-Christian:

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc....17 The Greeks, in their mythology, were merely disciples of India and of Egypt.18

Voltaire’s fascination led him to write a whole essay, Fragments historiques sur l’Inde (1773), and to devote to India two chapters of his influential Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, where we read this unexpected thought:

If India, whom the whole earth needs, and who alone needs no one, must by that very fact be the most anciently civilized land, she must therefore have had the most ancient form of religion.19

Showing himself to be well ahead of his times, Voltaire also repeatedly criticized Europe’s greed and brutality in the colonization under way:

We have shown how much we surpass the Indians in courage and wickedness, and how inferior to them we are in wisdom. Our European nations have mutually destroyed themselves in this land where we only go in search of money, while the first                 Greeks travelled to the same land only to instruct themselves.20

In many ways, Voltaire the sceptic, the champion of reason, opened in France a first door to India. Among others, Diderot, the mainstay of the epoch-making Encyclopédie, included in it a few serious and sympathetic articles about Indian religion and wisdom. By offering an alternative, however hazy at first, to the biblical worldview (and a chance to cock a snook at the Church), by showing that Greco-Roman, Hebrew-Christian Europe did not have the monopoly of wisdom or civilization, India provided such thinkers with ammunition and indirectly nurtured the new currents of thought that were going to upset the neo-classical, but still deeply Christian order.

The Romantic Craze for India

More than the Vedas, Panini, the Laws of Manu or Buddhist texts, it was the first translations of the two great Indian epics and of Kalidasa’s works (especially his Shakuntala), also the Gita and a few Upanishads, that kindled the imagination of nineteenth-century France’s intelligentsia, especially the Romantics. Those texts were widely read, feverishly exchanged, avidly commented upon.

Victor Hugo, half attracted, half repelled by Asia, perhaps more at home in an Arabian Orient, dotted his vast work with Indian themes and gods, composed a whole poem (“Suprématie”) based on the episode of the Kena Upanishad that sees Agni and Vayu failing to conquer a blade of grass, and declared:

Oriental studies have never been so intensive.... In the century of Louis XIV one was a Hellenist, today one is an Orientalist.... The Orient has become a sort of general preoccupation.... We shall see great things. The old Asiatic barbarism may not be as devoid of higher men as our civilization would like to believe.21

Edgar Quinet, a strongly anticlerical historian, venerated India:
India made, more loudly than anyone, what we might call the “declaration of the rights of the Being.” There, in this divine self, in this society of the infinite with itself, lies clearly the foundation, the root of all life and all history.22

Quinet’s more renowned friend Michelet, the prolific chronicler of France’s history, went deeper. Nothing moved him so much as the Ramayana, and his outburst in La Bible de l’humanité deserves to be quoted at some length:

The year 1863 will remain cherished and blessed. It was the first time I could read India’s great sacred poem, the divine Ramayana.... This great stream of poetry carries away the bitter leaven left behind by time and purifies us. Whoever has his heart dried up, let him drench it in the Ramayana. Whoever has lost and wept, let him find in it a soothing softness and Nature’s compassion. Whoever has done too much, willed too much, let him drink a long draught of life and youth from this deep chalice.... Everything is narrow in the Occident. Greece is small — I stifle. Judea is dry — I pant. Let me look a little towards lofty Asia, towards the deep Orient. There I find my immense poem, vast as India’s seas, blessed and made golden by the sun, a book of divine harmony in which nothing jars. There reigns a lovable peace, and even in the midst of battle, an infinite softness, an unbounded fraternity extending to all that lives, a bottomless and shoreless ocean of love, piety, clemency. I have found what I was looking for: the bible of kindness. Great poem, receive me!… Let me plunge into it! It is the sea of milk.23

Hugo, Quinet and Michelet were part of the Romantic movement in one way or another. So were the poets Lamartine, de Vigny, Leconte de l’Isle, and many others who liberally drank deep at India’s fountains, some to the point of inebriation. Lamartine, for instance, said of Hindu philosophy, “It is the Ocean, we are but its clouds.... The key to everything is in India.”24

The symbolists also found their inspiration stimulated and expanded by the new world India offered them: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine (who wrote a poem on “Çavitri”), Rimbaud, the “accursed poets” like Nerval or Lautréamont. Some of France’s best-known novelists followed suit, from Balzac to Jules Verne (who located a whole novel, La Maison à vapeur, in India). Rodin lavished praise on bronzes of Shiva’s dance. The mood was decidedly oriental and the nineteenth century saw a strong presence of India in France’s creative life and imagination.

The Twentieth Century

France’s exploration of India therefore saw a generous adhesion of the heart, the emotions and the aesthetical sense, but without strong intellectual moorings it risked drifting on the “Indian ocean.” Few French philosophers, for instance, felt the Indian wave, with notable exceptions such as Renouvier or Taine.25 Hindu and Buddhist thought and message did not mesh well with French thinking, except for a few distant echoes here and there, for instance in Bergson, whose defence of intuition would surprise no Indian. Thus, with the reaction against Romanticism and the utilitarian and materialistic trends precipitated by the two World Wars, India receded into the background.

Still, her indirect influence could be felt in Surrealism, its search for a higher reality and its rejection of blind chance. She had spokesmen of varying talent in Romain Rolland (with his famous lives of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda), René Daumal, Maurice Magre or René Guénon. Henri Michaux put India’s inner quest at the centre of his poetry; André Gide translated Tagore’s Gitanjali into French. André Malraux read the Gita in the original, visited India several times, was fascinated by her art, and probably understood her central message better than any of his contemporaries (with the exception of Daumal):

… The deepest opposition [between the West and India] rests on the fact that the fundamental evidence of the West, whether Christian or atheist, is death, whatever meaning the West gives to it, whereas India’s fundamental evidence is the infinite of life in the infinite of time: “Who could kill immortality?”26

Indeed, Malraux’s conversations with Nehru and the former’s almost naive attempts to draw the latter back to India’s roots make poignant reading.27

Despite such great names coming to her rescue, India’s slide continued in the French mind, even as some of her thoughts became so internalized as to be unrecognizable. Her epics or sacred texts were no longer in fashion with French students, and French Indologists became an isolated circle on the margins of the academic mainstream. Materialism reigned supreme, with a tinge of Christianity here and a dash of Marxism there; it had no more use for “mysticism,” especially of the Oriental kind. “The whole earth” no longer needed India, at least France did not. Non-European cultures were, once again, regarded as inferior and unworthy of study, except at best to satisfy a momentary curiosity. Even today the French educational system, moulded in that attitude, gives them virtually no place. Roger-Pol Droit has eloquently shown28 how a French teacher or professor of philosophy will likely be perfectly ignorant of thought systems originating from India; to them, all begins in Greece and nowhere else.

Something of a reaction took place after World War II, perhaps precisely because the War confronted Europe with a radical failure of its ideals of humanism and pacifism. Several sympathizers of India had a significant impact: Arnaud Desjardins, Alain Daniélou, Alexandra David-Neel, Jean Herbert, Guy Deleury or Jean Biès deserve mention, among many others. From the epics or Shakuntala, the vogue now turned to the words and writings of India’s living yogis, for instance Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi, Swami Ramdas, Ma Anandamayi. Among them, right from 1914 when he published his monthly Arya in both English and French editions, Sri Aurobindo was a crucial — but discreet — bridge between India and France, and probably the only Indian seer ever to be formally honoured at the Sorbonne.29 His vision of evolution and his method of integral yoga appealed not only to the aspiring heart but to the intellect weary of the shallowness of Western psychology or the brilliant but ephemeral edifices of existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, modernism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and the endless sequence of isms and post-isms built upon each other’s ruins. Sri Aurobindo thus prepared the ground for a renewed acceptance of non-Western thought; Mother, his French-born companion, kept the stream living.30

All these undercurrents resurfaced powerfully in the 1960s in the wake of the so-called New Age, which in France represented a determined, if clumsy and mixed, challenge to the rule of Cartesianism. As a popular movement, it chafed at the inadequacies of Western ideas, ideals, culture and society, and once again looked eastward. Hatha yoga and various meditation techniques spread, so did Buddhism whether Tibetan or Zen. (Let us note that in the 1990s, Buddhism became the “fastest-growing religion” in France, although its followers generally do not view it as a formal religion, rather as a practical method for self-discovery.) A whole literature exploded (pioneered in part by the famous magazine of the 1960s, Planète), producing a cocktail of yoga, esotericism, health techniques or search for past lives.

A good deal of distortion, appropriation and misappropriation followed, but that was unavoidable, especially when France’s academic and scholarly milieu was so unmindful of India, and when in addition Indian intellectuals interacting with France often appeared tied to the apron strings of a Sartre, a Lacan, a Foucault or a fashionable Derrida.

Today ... and tomorrow?

In the last few years, however, a new development appears to have started. More and more serious scholars have taken to writing about India.31 Some of the old misconceptions or preconceptions remain, although less stained with a sense of European superiority than in the nineteenth century, more imbued with a sincere effort to understand this world apparently so different, yet so intimate at times. At the very least, it means that the old fascination with India’s heritage is not dead; it is reviving with fresh vigour and finding new voices.

If, in these times of monocultural magma, a nation still symbolizes some aspect of the human spirit, then France represents the higher intellectual quest, and also an élan in the adventure of self-discovery. That is what makes its encounter with India so pregnant with possibilities: Is the human mind doomed to forever turn in the same circle, catching no more than one new glimmer of the Truth at every turn? Or can it muster enough honesty and humility to acknowledge its intrinsic incompleteness and the need for a higher consciousness to lead it beyond this stumbling from semi-error to semi-truth, beyond this irremediable incapacity to fulfil man’s potential? Can it finally open itself so much as to grasp what exceeds it — a vaster, more essential quest that India symbolizes?

That, beyond all Indological learning, is the question raised by the meeting of France and India; it is the question that impelled a Voltaire, a Michelet or a Malraux. The bridge will have to be strengthened and broadened if the common deeper roots of India and Europe are to be nourished, and if the West is to rediscover a durable foundation for its culture. India can choose to help in the process: the timeless creator and tireless giver she is should shed her passivity and effectively project all that is precious in her heritage; when her own intelligentsia is today failing so dismally in this task, it is not just “the whole earth that needs India,” but also India that does need some fraternal comprehension from other cultures, because her central preoccupation was always the very essence of what culture is all about

Notes & References

       1  See the excellent Les Indes Florissantes — Anthologie des voyageurs français (1750-1820), by Guy Deleury (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991) for accounts of eighteenth-century French travellers to India.

       2  Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale, p. 38.

       3  A. Anquetil-Duperron, Voyages du père Paulin de Saint-Barthélémy (1805), in Les Indes Florissantes, p. 997.

       4  See Georges Dumézil, Le Mahabarat et le Bhagavat du Colonel de Polier (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).

       5  Sylvain Lévi, Mémorial, p. 150, quoted in Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale, p. 56.

       6  Quoted by Léon Poliakov in Le Mythe aryen: essai sur les sources du racisme et des nationalismes (Paris: Pocket 2nd ed., 1994), p. 246. Let us however note that Hegel had a poor opinion of Indian thought.

       7  The term is Thomas R Trautmann’s in his study, Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1997)

       8  In this connection, see Roger-Pol Droit, L’oubli de l’Inde — Une amnésie philosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989).

       9  Louis Renou, “The Influence of Indian Thought on French Literature,” p. 13.

     10  Roger-Pol Droit, L’oubli de l’Inde — Une amnésie philosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989).

     11  L’Inde classique — Manuel des études indiennes. Volume I: Paris: Payot, 1947, republished Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1985; volume II: Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1953, reprinted 2001.

     12  His translations and essays were collected in Bharata — L’origine du théâtre, la poésie et la musique en Inde (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).

     13  Quoted in Jean Biès, Littérature française et pensée hindoue des origines à 1950, p. 105.

     14  With the notable exception of Jean-Claude Carrière’s Dictionnaire amoureux de l’Inde (Paris: Plon, 2001). See under the heading “Usurpations”, p. 431.

     15  Jean Biès, Littérature française et pensée hindoue des origines à 1950, p. 104.

     16  I have referred to a number of works, but two stand out in the field: (1) Raymond Schwab’s remarkable and wide-ranging La Renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950); I have not seen its English translation, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680-1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), which is said to be below par; (2) Jean Biès, Littérature française et pensée hindoue des origines à 1950 (Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1974) which, to my knowledge, is unfortunately yet to be translated into English. Note that in this paper, English translations of passages originally in French are mine.

     17  Voltaire, Lettres sur l’origine des sciences et sur celle des peuples de l’Asie (first published Paris: 1777), letter of 15 December 1775.

     18  Quoted in Les Indes Florissantes — Anthologie des voyageurs français (1750-1820), by Guy Deleury (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991), p. 663.

     19  Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (Paris: Bordas, Classiques Garnier, 1990), p. 237.

     20  Voltaire, Fragments historiques sur l’Inde (first published Geneva: 1773), in Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Hachette, 1893), vol. 29, p. 386

     21  Quoted by Jean Biès, op. cit., p. 108.

     22  Ibid, p. 100.

     23  Michelet, La Bible de l’humanité, volume 5 of CEuvres (Paris: Bibliothèque Larousse, 1930), p. 109-110.

     24  Lamartine, Opinions sur Dieu, le bonheur et l’éternité d’après les livres sacrés de l’Inde (Paris: Sand, 1984), p. ix.

     25  See two essays by François Chenet and Roger-Pol Droit on these philosophers in L’Inde inspiratrice — Réception de l’Inde en France et en Allemagne (XIXe & XXe siècles), eds. Michel Hulin and Christine Maillard (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1996).

     26  André Malraux, Antimémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 339.

     27  See, in addition to Antimémoires, the well-documented bilingual Malraux & India: A Passage to Wonderment (New Delhi: Ambassade de France en Inde, 1996).

     28  See note 1 above.

     29  See Séance commémorative de Sri Aurobindo à la Sorbonne le 5 décembre 1955 presided over by Jean Filliozat (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram). Several collections of articles paid tributes to Sri Aurobindo, e.g. “Hommage à Shri Aurobindo” in France-Asie (Saigon: Nos. 58 & 59, March and April 1951) and “Hommage à Sri Aurobindo” Synthèses (Bruxelles: December 1965).

     30  Satprem’s Sri Aurobindo et l’aventure de la conscience (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1971; in English: Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, Mysore: Mira Aditi, 2000) provides an excellent introduction to Sri Aurobindo and Mother
31             Among the numerous books published in France or in French about India, and in addition to a few titles already above, I mention here chronologically a few recent ones (without offering any assessment): Guy Deleury, Le modèle indou (Paris: Kailash Éditions, 1993); Jean Biès, Les chemins de la ferveur (Lyon: Terre du Ciel, 1995); Kama Marius-Gnanou, L’Inde (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1997); Jacques Dupuis, L’Inde — Une introduction à la connaissance du monde indien (Paris: Kailash Éditions, 1997); Jean Biès, Les grands inités du XXe siècle (Paris: Philippe Lebaud, 1998); François Gautier, Un autre regard sur l’Inde (Genève: Éditions du Tricorne, 1999); Odon Vallet, Les spiritualités indiennes (Paris: Gallimard, 1999); Ysé Tardan-Masquelier, L’hindouisme — Des origines védiques aux courants contemporains (Paris: Bayard Éditions, 1999), Guy Sorman, Le génie de l’Inde (Paris: Fayard, 2000); Guy Deleury, L’Inde, continent rebelle (Paris: Seuil, 2000); Jackie Assayag, L’Inde — Désir de nation (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 2001); Michel Angot, L’Inde classique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001); Jean-Claude Carrière, Dictionnaire amoureux de l’Inde (Paris: Plon, 2001).