L’Événement indien de la littérature française by Guillaume Bridet (review)

Recalling in the second volume of her autobiography the euphoria experienced by the French Left in the autumn of 1929, Simone de Beauvoir stresses the importance of Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience in India, which appeared to signal the end of European colonial empires (La Force de l’âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 22). The central contention of Guillaume Bridet’s monograph is that the French fascination with India after 1919 was not solely centred on the non-violence of Gandhi’s methods, but was, rather, part of a wider phenomenon that constituted an événement in French literature. Using Michel Bertrand’s definition of an événement, and postulating that a literary event is more than simply a new publication, being something that changes not only discourses but ways of thinking, Bridet explores what he views as the ‘activation’ of the Indian Other at the very centre of French literature in the interwar period. Informed by Spivak’s notion of redefining area studies as a deterritorialized discipline, and of displacing globalization with planetarity (Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)), his aim is to write an ‘histoire planetarisée’ of French literature of the 1920s, demonstrating that the Indian Other ‘n’est pas en dehors de ce qui serait la littérature française mais qu’il la constitue aussi’ (p. 27). For Bridet, the événement indien is a phenomenon of the 1920s, when, after the Great War and the Peace Settlement of 1919, established ideas were contested and Indian spirituality, made available through the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore (who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913), offered a solution to the problems of the West. In the third chapter, Bridet circumscribes his dating of the événement indien even further to 1924–25, identifying these two years as the moment when a valorization of Indian civilization moved from the confines of academic writing to wider intellectual and literary debates. Such dating is not new: as other authors have explored at length, 1923 saw Barbusse’s article on Gandhi (published in Clarté in July 1923) stimulate a wide-ranging debate about Hindu spiritualism and revolutionary thought that persisted throughout 1924 and 1925 (with Romain Rolland publishing his brief biography of Gandhi in 1924). Bridet does not, however, confine himself to these years alone, nor to the mobilization of India in anti-colonial debates. Instead, he interrogates anti-colonial writings (Rolland, and various authors in the journal Europe) alongside colonial novels, the ‘oriental’ tales of Marguerite Yourcenar and Maurice Magre, and Michaux’s series of portraits of India and Indians in Un barbare en Asie (Paris: Gallimard, 1933); he also discusses the reception of Rabindranath Tagore in France. In doing so, he successfully achieves his objective and shows how certain notions of ‘Indian-ness’ were deployed in French literature in the decade after the First World War. His account of intercultural exchanges between France and India in the interwar period is laudable, demonstrating an extensive knowledge of primary sources. However, his analysis of what his chosen authors said about India — his postulating of a focus on ‘la grandeur perdue’ (p. 110) of French colonial influence, and on orientalisme réflexif (p. 182) — has been done elsewhere, predominantly by anglophone academics. It is to be regretted that, in his own literary criticism, Bridet does not engage in the kind of transnational exchange that he celebrates in literary texts.