In her granddad’s footsteps: Author retraces a forgotten Indo-French story | India News
Standing in a book-lined room at Le Cercle Littéraire in Kala Ghoda last week, Céline Malraux is trying to solve a family mystery.The French author never met her grandfather André Malraux, who died two years before she was born. Now, fifty years after the death of the celebrated novelist, Resistance fighter and France’s first culture minister, she is retracing a journey that took him from New Delhi to Elephanta caves and Ellora monuments, and beyond.“I yearn for a serendipitous moment where suddenly I get it,” she says. “His fascination with Indian mythology, how he felt when he first saw the Elephanta caves. I’d really like to see India through his eyes.”For many Indians, Malraux is now little more than a footnote. But when he travelled through the country at Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru‘s invitation in 1958, he was one of the most influential Western voices arguing that Indian art and civilisation deserved to be viewed on the same terms as those of Greece and Rome.That fascination, Céline explains, stemmed from questions that occupied him throughout his life. “Malraux was deeply interested in the human condition: death, suffering, absurdity of life,” she says. “He thought the answer lay in spirituality, in finding the sacred within art.”But she is wary of reducing his relationship with India to a familiar Western search for enlightenment. “Malraux didn’t see India simply as a land of spiritual quest. He always believed the country could connect spirituality and action.”The connection feels unusually tangible in Mumbai. Le Cercle Littéraire, where Céline was on Friday, is a short ride from Gateway of India, where ferries leave for Elephanta. The caves were one of the stops on Malraux’s 1958 state visit to discuss cultural exchange. “Nehru didn’t want Malraux to meet ascetics and sages,” Céline says. “He wanted him to see the potential of modern India. And Malraux understood that.”His itinerary reflects that. Hosted by the prime minister, he visited not only Elephanta caves and the rock-cut complexes of Ellora, but also Bhakra Nangal dam, one of the great symbols of India’s post-independence ambition.She pauses before quoting him. “Malraux once said that India’s fate is inseparable from the fate of the world. He knew that India’s experiment, modern statehood built upon an ancient civilisation, had significance far beyond its borders.”The visit deepened a friendship that had begun more than two decades earlier. Nehru and Malraux first met in Paris in 1936 and then in 1958. They then remained in touch until Nehru’s death, through years that would transform both men into global figures.“My grandmother, who accompanied him on the India trip, told me that only a few people can meet after twenty years and continue the same conversation,” Céline says.It is, in many ways, an unlikely friendship. Nehru was a rationalist and moderniser. Malraux, though politically engaged, was drawn to religion, mythology and the spiritual questions he found reflected in texts such as the Bhagavad Gita.Malraux described Nehru as a man who remained at “an enigmatic distance from India”, and yet each saw something in the other. “There was a kind of brotherhood,” Céline says. “They shared the same values on freedom and human dignity.”Nehru travelled to France several times after that, and on one visit Malraux walked with him personally through his landmark 1960 exhibition, Treasures of India: 5,000 Years of Indian Art, a show that introduced countless Europeans to Indian sculpture and painting, and quietly rewrote how the West understands Indian civilisation.Yet despite all this, Malraux has largely faded from Indian memory. “There are so many people who are more influential in shaping India’s own history,” Céline says. “What he shared with India was a one-sided love affair,” she laughs.What she has not made peace with, and perhaps does not want to, is how relevant some of his battles still feel. Malraux first made his name as an anti-fascist intellectual during the Spanish Civil War, warning about the rise of fascism before many others recognised the threat.“Last year marked fifty years since Franco’s death, and I saw people celebrating him,” she says. “You see this everywhere, a nostalgia for fascism. It is the perfect moment to speak about people who dedicated their work and risked their lives to fight it.”Art, she says, remains part of that struggle. “He made a film about Spanish war. It was Top Gun of 1930s,” she says with a laugh. “Art can be political. Sometimes it needs to be. We are at a moment when artists are very aware of that. Malraux was too.”As the evening in Kala Ghoda draws to a close, the conversation keeps returning to India: to Elephanta, to Ellora, to the places she is still moving through.For Céline, this trip is not simply about commemorating a famous intellectual. It is about following a trail left by someone she never knew, through a country that never forgot what he saw, even if it forgot him. “I’d really like to see India through his eyes,” she says.
