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Influential Indologist
ROLAND LARDINOIS, The Hindu, Published: February 27, 2010
Updated: February 27, 2010 18:25 IST
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Special Arrangement Quest for truth: Madeleine Biardieau
The passing away of the French scholar Madeleine Biardeau, translator
of the Ramayana and an outstanding specialist of the Puranas,
is a loss to understanding Hindu India…
Madeleine Biardeau, the widely respected French Indologist, passed
away on February 1 in France. She was 88. Born in Niort, in the
West of France, in 1922 into a middle class family of small entrepreneurs,
Madeleine Biardeau joined the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure
of Sèvres (restricted to girls then) at Paris, in 1943,
where she studied philosophy. There she discovered the classical
heritage of Indian culture with a group of young Christian women
who were attracted by the so called spirituality of the East.
Madeleine Biardeau, who was close to the Left Catholic milieu
and had a strong secular feeling in spite of being herself a practising
Catholic, departed from her friends and started learning Sanskrit
intensively in order to study Hindu philosophy to which she devoted
a great part of her academic life. But she did not intend to consider
Hinduism only from her academic milieu far from India. Aware of
the ancient tradition of scholarship that was still alive there,
and very curious about the country and its people, she joined
the University of Travancore for two years, in the1950s, learning
much from the Pandits with whom she read Sanskrit texts. It was
the beginning of a lasting intellectual and personal relationship
with India, which she visited almost every year until the 1990s.
Rigorous thought
Her works can be broadly divided into three parts. First, she
focused on Advaita Vedanta and translated the works of Mandana
Misra, Vacaspati Misra and the grammarian Bhartrhari, which she
commented in her doctoral dissertation on The Theory of Knowledge
and the Philosophy of Speech in Classical Brahmanism (1964, in
French). Elaborating on the notion of orthodoxy, Madeleine Biardeau
sketched out the religious and intellectual principles that framed
the Brahmanical mind-set of the tenants of Advaita Vedanta. These
authors, who stressed the strict observance of sacrificial practices
inherited from the Vedas, were concerned with the quest for salvation,
moksha, considered as a way of escaping from the cycle of death
and rebirth. Thus at the heart of Hinduism is set a structural
tension between the man-out-of-the-world, the renouncer whose
samnyasi is the typical example, and the ordinary man-in-the-world
who bears the burden of his destiny, his karma. Furthermore, Madeleine
Biardeau showed that this tension should be located within a wider
cosmological representation of the word embedded within the main
goals (purushartha) that structure the idealised life of the orthodox
Hindu man. Brahmanism can be considered as expressing an anthropological
understanding of the Hindu civilisation, as she put it a later
book Hinduism: The Anthropology of a Civilisation(1994 for English
translation).The second part of the work that Madeleine Biardeau
conducted deals with the study of the Puranas, to which she devoted
erudite books edited by the French School for the far East (Ecole
française d'Extrême-Orient). Yet, her interest for
the Puranas was part of a larger concern with Hindu literature,
mainly the Epics, which constitute the third main area of Madeleine
Biardeau's scholarship. In collaboration with two French Sanskrit
scholars, Marie-Claude Porcher and Philippe Benoit, she translated
into French the Ramayana of Valmiki (1999). Yet her last and major
achievements remain the two edited volumes of the Mahabharata
that she published in 2002. In this impressive work, which took
her four decades to complete, she presented a detailed resume
of the whole Epic that she completed by her own interpretation.
Briefly, Madeleine Biardeau considered the Mahabharata as an intellectual
and religious reaction against Buddhism whose appeal to the layman
was upsetting Brahmanical values by dislodging the Brahmans from
their privileged position in the mundane world. More generally,
she used to say that the Epics, as well as the Puranas, should
be read as a particular theological and philosophical genre which
is eschatology, as both deal with the ultimate endings of cycle
of events whether at the individual level or that of the cosmos.
Madeleine Biardeau not only worked in close association with
Pandits either at the Deccan College at Pune or at the French
Institute at Pondicherry (which was founded by the French Indologist
Jean Filliozat in 1956), she relentlessly visited temples and
places of worship in towns and small villages, questioning people
from all castes, and enquired about their contemporary cults and
rituals. Her book Stories about Posts: Vedic variations about
the Hindu Goddess (2002 for the English translation) combines
varied studies on the Sanskrit Epics, the Hindu Goddess, Vedic
sacrifice and the interpretation of Hinduism.
The main argument that Madeleine Biardeau constantly belaboured
in her work deals with the unity of Hinduism (see her contribution
to T. N. Madan's edited volume The Hinduism Omnibus, 2003). As
she recollected it in a rare published autobiographical statement
: “From the beginning of my Indological studies I have been
quite convinced that Hindu society was much less divided ideologically,
that the top and the bottom were not so utterly alien to each
other than was usually contended.”
Associates
Her own interpretation of Hinduism is close to the view expressed
by Louis Dumont in his Homo Hierachicus (1966 for the French edition),
which remains the most impressive understanding ever published
on the caste system. This intellectual association of a Sanskrit
scholar and of an anthropologist who both did fieldwork (mainly
in South India), was long considered as typical of the French
scholarship on India, although this blending of skills was not
at all uncommon among Indian scholars since the very beginning
of the 20th century. Yet the intellectual framework which underlines
both Madeleine Biardeau's and Louis Dumont's understanding of
Hinduism has been, and still is, debated among scholars of India
who questioned the unilateral Brahmanical grounding of their scholarly
approaches. Madeleine Biardeau was Directeur d'études at
the fifth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at Paris,
the stronghold of Indologists since the end of the 19th century,
and in 1969 she succeeded Louis Dumont as head of the Centre for
Indian and South Asian Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales. Her death marks almost the complete disappearance
of a whole generation of French scholars who profoundly redefined
the intellectual understanding of (classical Hindu) India in the
second half of the 20th century.
Roland Lardinois is a Sociologist at the French National Center
for Scientific Research, is affiliated with the Centre d'Etudes
de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud (EHESS, Paris). He is currently
at the Centre for Human Sciences at Delhi.
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