BHAGWAD GITA AND THE CHARACTERS CREATED BY ALBERT CAMUS

                                                                             

                                                ('The Stranger' Portrait of Albert Camus by an artist  )

BHAGWAD GITA AND SOME CHARACTERS IN THE NOVELS OF ALBERT CAMUS

Certain characters in the novels of Albert Camus embody attitudes that can be meaningfully compared to the central teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, namely, action without attachment (nishkama karma), especially when considered in light of the indirect intellectual influence of his teacher cum friend Jean Grenier, who was familiar with and receptive to Indian philosophical ideas. The presence of such ideas within his formative intellectual environment allows for a plausible line of influence, not as direct borrowing but as a philosophical resonance shaping his ethical imagination. The closest figure in this regard is Meursault from ‘The Stranger’. Meursault lives without appeal to higher meaning, social conventions, or future-oriented justification; he acts, experiences, and accepts consequences with a stark immediacy. Although this is not the Gita’s disciplined and consciously realised detachment grounded in a cosmic order, there remains a structural similarity in his indifference to outcomes and external judgement. The crucial distinction, however, lies in the foundation: in the Gita, detachment emerges from insight into eternal reality as revealed by Sri  Krishna, whereas Meursault’s detachment arises from the absence of such metaphysical belief, rendering it an expression of existential clarity rather than spiritual knowledge.

A more compelling parallel may be found in Dr Rieux from The Plague, whose conduct more closely approximates the Gita’s ethic of duty. Rieux persists in treating the sick and resisting the plague despite knowing that suffering cannot be definitively overcome and that no ultimate victory is assured. His action is sustained not by hope of success or divine sanction, but by a sense of obligation intrinsic to the human condition. This bears a striking resemblance to the Gita’s teaching to Arjuna: to act according to one’s duty without attachment to the fruits of action. Given that such an ethical posture is relatively uncommon in the Western tradition outside certain Stoic strands, its appearance in Camus, mediated through an intellectual milieu shaped in part by figures like Jean Grenier, strengthens the case for an affinity with Gita-like thought. Finally, the figure of Sisyphus in The Myth of Sisyphus provides a symbolic culmination of this pattern. His endless labour, undertaken without hope of completion, reflects action entirely stripped of expectation, echoing in abstract form the Gita’s ideal of non-attached action. Yet, where the Gita resolves this discipline into transcendence and liberation, Camus deliberately refuses such closure, insisting instead upon immanence and defiant acceptance. Thus, while it would be overstated to claim direct doctrinal influence, the convergence of these character-types, combined with Camus’s intellectual proximity to thinkers acquainted with Indian philosophy, allows one to argue that the Bhagavad Gita forms part of the wider, indirect background against which his vision of action, detachment, and endurance takes shape.

 

Camus’s teacher and early mentor at the  University of  Algiers, Prof  Jean Grenier, was a figure of considerable intellectual breadth, whose writings reveal a sustained engagement with non-Western traditions, including Indian philosophy. In works such as Les Îles, Grenier reflects upon themes of detachment, inwardness, and the search for a form of truth that lies beyond the confines of conventional Western rationalism. His attraction to the Gita was not philological or systematic in the academic sense, but philosophical and existential: he was drawn to its emphasis on inner clarity, the renunciation of ego, and the ideal of action performed without attachment to its fruits, an ethic that resonated with his own contemplative disposition.

(Avtar Mota )

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