“If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.”
Romain Rolland
ROMAIN ROLLAND (1866-1944) was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art and music historian. In 1912, after a brief carrerin teaching art and musicology, he devoted most of his time in writing. He first published his best known for 10 volume epic novel “Jean Christophe,” (1904-1912) for which he was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 1915 his passion for music and literature led to biographies on Beethoven (1903) who was for Rolland the universal musician above all the others. His other biographies include life of Michel-Angelo (1905) and Leo Tolstoi (1911) among others.
In the 1920s he turned to Asia, particularly to India, seeking to interpret it’s mystical philosophy to the West through works such as his biography on “Mahatma Gandhi” which he published in (1924). Rolland’s vast correspondence on Alber Einstein, Bertrand Russell and Rabindranath Tagore was published in the Cahiers Romain Rolland (1948) and his posthumously published Memoires on India came out in (1956). He met Mathma Gandhi in Switzerland in 1931 earlier Rolland had published a biography on Gandhi in (1924). As an intellectual and a philosopher, Rolland embraced the work of philosophers of India. His coversations with Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore are well known. However, Rolland was strongly influenced by the philosophy of Swami Vivekananda and Ramakrishma and published essays on Ramakrishna in (1929) and Swami Vivekananda in (1930). The Vedantik philosophy has many admirers in the West.
“The Romain Rolland Book Prize” is an initiative by the French Institute that aims to support the translation of French literery works into various Indian languages incuding English.
( Dilip Roy is a cultural researcher and a Fellow of Royal Asiatic Society of United Kingdom )
