ÉDITO

ALAIN DANIELOU ET LE MAHATMA

Alain Daniélou has often been unjustly blamed and criticised for his somewhat acerbic view of modern India’s greatest iconic figure, Mahatma Gandhi, whom he mentions to a greater or lesser extent in several of his works, viz. his autobiography, The Way to the Labyrinth, New Directions 1981 ; A Brief History of India, Inner Traditions International 2003 ; and in an article published in the French review Historia (Avril 1983) under the title “Le Prince et les Trois Larrons” (The Prince and the Three Thieves), which may be less widely known to English readers.

The recent publication of Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Lelyveld’s “Great Soul : Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India”, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011, has received wide attention and caused a great stir on the Internet for its revelations of a Gandhi not entirely in keeping with the standard pious picture of the Father of Modern India. Furthermore, the picture painted by Lelyveld totally vindicates the negative view published by Daniélou decades earlier.
Daniélou’s views on Gandhi may be illustrated by an excerpt from his A Brief History of India, p. 311 : “[...] shrewd and ascetic, ambitious and devout - one of those gurus who seem to exercise an incredible magnetism over the crowds and often lead them to disaster. [...]Practically, it was with him alone that the British Government ultimately decided the future of India, in which independence came about in the most disastrous way imaginable, leading to the partitioning of the country, one of the greatest massacres in history, the elimination of the social system and traditional culture, the suppression of the princely caste, the genocide of primitive tribes and the ruin of the artisan castes and their transformation into a miserable proletariat. All this was presented as progress.”
And from The Way to the Labyrinth, p. 179 : “[...] Every day he had his legs massaged by young girls and insisted on sleeping beside one of them in order to test his chastity”. This report is borne out at length in Lelyveld op. cit., pages 303-307, “Perfection would be achieved if the old man and the young woman wore the fewest possible garments, preferably none, and neither one felt the slightest sexual stirring.