Some lives are truly blessed. French scholar and journalist, Come Carpentier de Gourdon, travelled to India with his father, the Indologist Jean Carpentier, and availed of the opportunity to be in the close company of the creamy layer of intellectual society in myriad disciplines. And now, he has compiled his experiences, observations and insights in the form of a book for posterity.
Memories of a Hundred and One Moons — An Indian Odyssey covers the author’s travels across India from 1975 to 1983, one of the most turbulent and transitional phases of Indian history when every event that happened still affects the nation. As the author says in his introduction, “This book does not claim or try to give a precise account of eight years spent roaming across India more than three decades ago; rather, it seeks to evoke the experiences lived in the course of that odyssey across places and times and around personalities that sometimes played important parts in shaping the world then and now.” This makes the book a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the personalities that played an important role during that time of great transition.
Prof lokesh Chandra, Chairman, ICCR, in his foreword, points out, “As India of the intellect stands in doubt of its roots of thoughts, western mathematicians and quantum physicists speak of the uncanny convergence of world-views emerging from quantum physics with those of Indian sages… Dr Come brings to us the message that philosophical antecedents in India’s millennial intellectual history have to be seeding of our today so that we may rise to our highest potential.”
At a time when the battle for the soul and mind in India is raging between the old, tired, discredited, Nehruvian elites and the common traditional Indians, this book brings out many facts which might cause great discomfort to the Nehruvian elites. In an interesting vignette, the author recounts meeting with President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed along with his father. In the course of a long discussion, the President recalled his varied lineage, starting from Afghanistan and on to Assam.
Yet in today’s Pakistan, everyone denies his Indian bloodline; either the whole country got a blood transfusion en masse, or everyone is a direct descendant of the Prophet! It is a joke, but the syndrome was found in large parts of pre-Partition Bengal as well. The business of Muslims of South Asia denying their roots seems to stem from the elites who apparently justify their class superiority by asserting a Central Asian or even Arab bloodline. In fairness, it is not clear if the President was merely tracing the geographical movement of his family or deriving prestige from his non-Indian bloodline and attributing his rise in life to it.
Come Carpentier notes, “my father told him (President Ahmed) about our expedition to India by road and explained our campaign for the revaluation of the dharma, in its universal, trans-religious significance. The President was intrigued by our long stays in Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan and asked us a few questions on our impressions about the situation of those states. He was more reserved on the issue of Dharma which he probably did not wish to comment upon. It was not the first that we noticed the feeling among Muslims that Dharma is a Hindu religious notion tied to a specific pre-Islamic heritage that they had been taught to regard as pagan.”
One does not know if that was a hasty conclusion. The fact is that Muslims in India are quite well informed about Hindu ideas and concepts, especially the epics, though naturally they know less about other texts in the huge repertoire of religion and philosophy produced by this civilisation across the landmass of India. As a Muslim President of a largely Hindu nation, Mr Ahmed may have felt reticent about sharing views with strangers, no matter how erudite they were. The father and son duo found the President to be a gentleman with old world manners and courtesy.
The book has several such insights into people and times of that era. Come Carpentier has brought his deep understanding of Indian thought and history along with his understanding of the history, language, culture and religions of the world to bear on his musings over the role of the individual in history and society. Throughout, he explains Hindu thought and philosophy with great acuity, providing the ordinary reader a deeper understanding into the tradition, with utmost simplicity.
As Prof Chandra enthuses, “along with his great sage-like father, Come Carpentier was enthralled by the ‘India of the Imagination’, which is everywhere and yet exists nowhere. The present memoirs record their quest for the frontiers that are everywhere and also in ourselves. To the author, India is not just a place, it is also a state of being. He inhabits Homer’s world as well as Kalidasa’s and gives a voice to Indians in most feelings that are being lost in the minimalistic trivia imported under the shroud of modernism or post modernism. This book is homecoming for Indians, the home being everywhere.”