Originally, Sanskrit

Estimating the age of texts handed down by oral tradition on the basis of the movement of the stars or the ebb and flow of a long-gone river is a highly romantic, yet very serious idea. Indeed, scholars have no choice but to read between the lines to date the appearance of the "Veda" (translated, imperfectly, as "vision"), the collection of revelations made by a people from Iran to the Indians of the northern sub-continent. From their encounter, in this region of blurred borders renamed Āryāvarta, a religion was born, Vedism, the foundation on which Brahmanism and then Hinduism would later be built. In other words, this corpus - whether it dates back to the 15th century B.C. or is twice as old - is as old as the Vedas themselvesC. or twice as old, as some believe - is of the utmost importance, recognized today by Unesco, which has included it on the list of the world's intangible heritage and has defined its division into Rig Veda (sacred hymns), Sama Veda (musical arrangements), Yajur Veda (prayers and sacrificial formulas used by priests) and Atharna Veda (set of incantations and magical formulas).

The time at which these "books" were set down in writing remains equally uncertain, as the original manuscripts have not survived the centuries, but it is usual to date this transcription to the beginning of our era. It marked not only the birth of Indian literature, but also that of Sanskrit, a language of Indo-Aryan origin, as confirmed by its similarity to ancient Iranian. First liturgical, then scholarly, like Latin in the West, it served as the basis for a multitude of dialects (notably in northern India), and remains the official language in the state of Uttarakhand, bordering Nepal. Doubtless a little more recent - the clue this time being in the language, "archaic" Sanskrit having given way to "epic" Sanskrit - two other texts are considered to be foundational in India and followed the same path, carried by orality and then by writing: the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata. These two mythological epics are inseparable from Hinduism.

The first recounts the life of Prince Rāma, who reigned (again according to astronomical data) nearly twenty centuries before the birth of Christ, and was the seventh incarnation of the god Vishnu on Earth. The second is considered to be the longest poem in the history of world literature: with its 250,000 verses, it rivals by far the work of Homer! No less was needed to recount the internecine wars between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, each clan determined to take over the Aryan country north of the Ganges. According to tradition, this epic was dictated by Ganesh to the sage Vyāsa, the "Compiler", who is said to have been born between 200 B.C. and A.D. 450, depending on the source. Finally, it is said that Sanskrit literature reached its most evolved form with mahākāvya poetry, in which description took precedence over narration, while drawing inspiration from the themes of the epics. In addition to five landmark works - from Kumārasambhava to Shishupāla Vadha - several famous authors are associated with this poetic art, including Ashvaghosha (c. 2nd century) and Kālidāsa (c. 4th century). Both were also dramatists.

Tamil appeared more or less at the same time, and developed in its classical form with the "Sangam literature". Without getting into the controversy as to which came first, Sanskrit or Tamil, it should be stressed that their geographical areas are different - the former developing in the North, the latter in the South - and their origins are equally distinct: as we have seen, Sanskrit is an Indo-Aryan language, while Tamil belongs to the Dravidian languages, i.e. those of neither Aryan nor Himalayan origin. These two groups will give rise to multiple dialects, and if there is any porosity, it will be mainly in one direction: Sanskrit irrigating most Indian idioms, particularly in terms of vocabulary.

Indo-Aryan languages

The devil is in the detail, but sometimes there are terms that are flexible enough to be used without going into over-complicated explanations: this is the case with the word " prākrit ", which encompasses the totality of Indo-Aryan languages as well as the dialects derived from Sanskrit, without having to question their proximity or anteriority. This being said, the question of languages in India remains a truly complex subject, so numerous are they, sometimes only written, other times only spoken. In the geographical area of North India that interests us alone - in addition to the two official languages, English and Hindi - many states have their own linguistic particularities: gujarati is used in Gujarat, Kashmiri in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, Urdu in Uttar Pradesh, Nepali in Sikkim, Odia in the east, in Odisha... Obviously, each language has generated its own literature, but these remain more or less foreign to us, because translations are rare, because the subjects - sometimes religious - require a culture far removed from our own. In this respect, Odia is a significant case in point: at first glance, there is no French translation of this language... which dates back to the 4th century BC, it also boasts a large number of notable poets, several newspapers from the 19th century onwards, hundreds of works of fiction from Rebati (published in 1898 by Fakir Mohan Senapati) onwards, writers' associations and writings in all the literary currents with which we are familiar: romanticism, modernism, realism, fantasy.. To be honest, this brief example gives an idea of the sheer size of India - Odia is, after all, the mother tongue of 37 million people - and of our fragmentary knowledge of it..

But since we have to choose, and therefore give up, it's rather Hindi that we're interested in here, firstly because it's common to a large number of speakers, and secondly because it's now the country's second official language, which distinguishes it from the twenty-two other languages recognized by the Constitution... and from the 270 languages that make up the sub-continent. It is customary to date it back to the 12th century and an exercise in admiration dedicated by court poet Chand Bardai to King Prithivīrāja Chāhumāna, but sources are uncertain, many have been destroyed, most are difficult to date precisely. From the 14th century onwards, royal or war chronicles seem to give way in favor of devotional poems, which are part of the Bhakti movement, an important period of reform in Hinduism that also coincides with a development of vernacular languages, these now being preferred for preaching, in order to reach the greatest number of devotees. The form of the poems also evolved, as did their themes, which diversified into as many rasa, a Sanskrit term meaning "sap" and equivalent to our "genres", from the Vatsalya rasa (rasa of love) to the Vir rasa (rasa of heroism), via the Prema rasa (rasa of romance), and so on. The Nirguna school believed in an abstract god, while the Saguna school lent him venerable attributes. The poets Kabīr and Gurū Nānak belonged to the former, while Surdas and Tulsīdās belonged to the latter. The next period begins in the eighteenth century according to our calendar, and is that of the Rītikāvya when, to put it crudely, form prevails over substance, description over sentiment, eroticism replaces romanticism. The most remarkable and renowned work of this trend, which lasted until around 1900, is the poet Bihārī's Satasai. Subsequently, Hindi literature - and, indeed, Indian literature as a whole - entered "modernity", thanks to or because of the various waves of colonization, which opened up frontiers, made literary movements travel, and imported new forms and themes as well as innovative printing techniques: the first printing press was set up by Christian missionaries in Kottayam (Kerala) in the mid-nineteenth century. The person who personified this radical shift in Hindi literature, and embodied realism, was Dhanpat Rai Srivastava, better known by his pseudonym Premchand (1880-1936). Several of his works have been translated into French, notably by L'Harmattan (Godan: le don d'une vache, L'Ashram de l'amour, Le Grand Pèlerinage et autres nouvelles). This modernization enabled another Indo-Aryan language, Bengali, to take on a new literary dimension. As its name suggests, Bengali originated in the region of Bengal.

This development was no accident: Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, was built by the British East India Company. The city was to become the seat of colonial power, from British India to the British Raj. It was also the birthplace of the only Indian ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1913): Rabindranath Thakur (1861-1941). Born into the Brahmin caste, the man we came to know as Tagore was born into a family of reformers where art played an important role. At the age of 16, he published a long poem that already brought him a certain renown, and he later abandoned the law studies he had begun in England to become administrator of his family's estates. A fulfilled husband and father, this period was particularly fruitful for his literary work, but the new century marked a turning point in his life: he lost his wife and two of his children, his father also died, and his preoccupations changed: he founded an ashram and a school in 1901, and twenty years later a university. Sensitive to the plight of the underprivileged, opposed to the caste system, a militant for independence, an unrepentant idealist and curious about everything to do with travel and science, his death left a mourning region that has observed a time of recollection in his memory every August 7 since 1941. Translator, poet, essayist, his work has many entries: his collection L'Offrande lyrique à la République des Lettres is one, Nationalisme en Classiques Garnier, another.

Tagore always wrote in Bengali, but since he was perfectly bilingual, he himself translated his writings into English, versions on which André Gide based his discovery of this major writer in our language. This is an indication of the growing interest in India and its literature in the West from the mid-19th century onwards, following in the footsteps of the German Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900), who devoted twenty-five years to producing a critical edition of the Rig Veda, or the Belgian missionary Camille Bulcke (1909-1982), who "rediscovered" the poet Tulsīdās.

English-language literature

However, Tagore's writing in two languages is also the sign of a movement that will intensify and endure after Independence, one that will lead a large number of Indian writers to choose English, a choice that will ensure them a better audience on the international literary scene. An essential female voice, Anita Desai hails from the state of Uttarakhand, where she was born in 1937 to a German mother and Bengali father. An accomplished polyglot, she turned to English from an early age - she wrote her first short story at the age of 9! - She considered English more literary and better suited to expressing herself in an abundant body of work, which she began in 1963 with Cry, The Peacock. Although she is a perfect link between East and West, having lived on two continents and reflected on our divergences, her books are difficult to find in French today. The Mercure de France nevertheless has Le Jeûne et le festin in its catalog. His daughter, Kiran Desai, moved with her to the United States, where she also became a writer. In 2006, she received the Booker Price for La Perte en héritage (published by Fidès). Salman Rushdie also became an expatriate, leaving Bombay, where he was born in 1947, for the UK in his teens. It's impossible not to associate him with Indian literature, even if he also preferred English to his mother tongue, Urdu, spoken in northern India and Pakistan, and in 2016 became an American citizen. Coming from a middle-class background and a secular Muslim family, his prolific work has been marred by a fatwa that has threatened him since 1989, the year following the publication of The Satanic Verses. This daily danger, confirmed by the new attack on him in 2022, inspired him to write the fictionalized autobiography of his literary double, Joseph Anton, but the range of his inspirations is much wider, as confirmed by his other texts, from Enfants de Minuit published by Plon in 1997 to Quichotte published by Actes Sud in 2020.

Salman Rushdie's literary work is representative of what Indian literature has become in the 20th century: open to the world thanks to its universal themes, centered on the novel, a typically Western genre. In fact, it was thanks to a novel - a river! - that Vikram Seth made his name: published in two volumes by Le Livre de Poche, Un garçon convenable runs to some 2,000 pages! It tells the story of four families in 1950s India, a saga that offers a truly interesting panorama of such a complex country, in all its variations. Born in 1952 in Calcutta, the author has traveled extensively, and while he is interested in his native country in this work, it is San Francisco that he set the scene for in Golden Gate, his first novel... written in verse! On the benches of the elitist Doon School in Dehradun (Uttarakhand), Vikram Seth rubbed shoulders with his fellow citizen Amitav Ghosh, four years his junior, who also chose to write in English. His Ibis Trilogy is celebrated, the first volume of which, Un océan de pavots (published by 10-18), evokes the departure of "coolies", Indians who left for Mauritius to replace slaves on the plantations following the abolition of slavery. This "voluntary commitment", so misnamed, has been remembered in literature as part of the "coolitude" movement, which is not specifically Indian, but also Reunionese, Chinese... Beyond belonging to this movement, Amitav Ghosh is considered to be one of the most important Indian writers of the second half of the 20th century, thanks to the historical and societal themes he has drawn on. Lignes d'ombre was awarded a prize by the highly reputed literary institution Sahitya Akademi, founded in 1954 by Nehru, which not only strives to maintain dialogue between different linguistic zones, but is also a publisher (publishing a new book every 19 hours, as its website proudly announces!) Finally, without attempting to provide a complete panorama of India's abundant English-language literature, Arundhati Roy remains an obvious choice. Born into a Catholic family in Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya in northeast India, she earned her international reputation as much for her novels - Le Dieu des petits riens is a bestseller - as for her pacifist activism.

Literature from the diaspora is also part of this continuity - Londoner Jhumpa Lahiri, for example, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 for L'Interprète des maladies (Folio) - but it should be pointed out that some writers have chosen to turn away from English - the "language of the colonist" - following the example of Shumona Sinha, born in 1973 in Calcutta, who discovered her passion for French, to the point of settling in our country, where she has won several prizes. Published by Gallimard: Apatride (2017), Le Testament russe (2020), L'autre nom du bonheur était français (2022). Nor should we forget that Indian languages have also reached a sufficient degree of maturity to enjoy a wide audience, both within and beyond the borders of the Indian subcontinent, despite the accentuated difficulty of translating "rare languages". That's why we can only salute De la forêt by Calcuttien Bibhouti Bhoushan Banerji, for its literary quality and because its translation from Bengali, commissioned by the fine Zulma publishing house, was awarded the Grand Prix de la Ville d'Arles in 2021. Translated or not, authors expressing themselves in Hindi, Bengali, Kashmiri, Urdu or even Sanskrit have found their audience, if the recipients of the prestigious Jnanpith Prize, which rewards writers of Indian languages, are anything to go by.