Newsletters on Alain Daniélou
Dear Friends,
With the launching of the new “Alain Daniélou” website, Artistic and Intellectual Dialogue have revisited the steps that have marked the diffusion and realisation of the Alain Daniélou Foundation’s activities, from the earlier Newsletter format, through ‘Indialogues’ and Cahiers de la fondation to the current online review Transcultural Dialogues.
The first Newsletter appeared on March 1st, 2003, with the aim of updating readers on Alain Daniélou: new publications, reprints, translations, exhibitions, conferences, etc. The Newsletter gradually went beyond its original remit and ceased to be solely informative, introducing readers to a diversity of interests: specific works, artists linked to Alain Daniélou and their own works: photographs, paintings, literature, etc. The last edition of the Newsletter in January 2013 announced coming changes in the Foundation’s structure: from “Fondation Harsharan”, it was to become “Alain Daniélou Foundation”.
The first issue of Indialogues appeared in May 2013, maintaining the spirit of the Newsletter, while expanding multi-disciplinary aspects with echoes and links, not only between the work of Daniélou and his contemporaries, but also with current research. With the sixth edition of Indialogues, a turning point was reached and the concept of Cahiers de la Foundation was born. Cahiers de la Foundation is the outcome of discussions between Artistic/Intellectual Dialogue and the Scientific Committee, spurred by the arrival of Adrián Navigante as Director of Intellectual Dialogue. Its title reveals the editorial line of the new publication: “high-quality articles on various dimensions of Indian culture, unknown aspects of the European heritage, as well as the memory and thought of Alain Daniélou”. Gradually, the activities of Intellectual Dialogue (workshops and seminars as well as the integration of the Alain Daniélou Foundation’s grantees in the network of activities) transformed Cahiers de la fondation into an instrument independent of the newsletter. The Cahiers offered stimulating quality articles free from an hermetic style of academic papers, and they covered various fields related to the work of Alain Daniélou in the spirit of the author himself.
This is also how we view the on-line publication of the Alain Daniélou Foundation’s Intellectual Dialogue’s new cultural organ: Transcultural Dialogues. This review also has something new: it no longer centres, like the Cahiers de la fondation, on the Indo-European axis that characterized of the Alain Daniélou Foundation’s previous efforts, but opens a trans-cultural horizon beyond India and Europe. This broadening of horizon intends to do justice to the best intuitions of the later Alain Daniélou: the development – in the latter period of his life – of a Philosophy of Life whose frame reaches far beyond the Indian-Subcontinent and extends not only to ancient European culture, but also to divers manifestations of what Daniélou succinctly called “religion of Nature” (a term encompassing African, Australian and Amerindian traditions), including conceptions such as animism and shamanism.
Transcultural Dialogues is issued thrice yearly.
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