THE MESSAGE OF BHAGAVAD GITA CAME TO CAMUS VIA ROMAIN ROLLAND

                                      

THE MESSAGE OF  BHAGAVAD GITA CAME TO CAMUS VIA ROMAIN ROLLAND 

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) was a prominent French author, pacifist, and one of the first major Western thinkers to popularise Eastern spirituality in the early 20th century. His connection to the Bhagavad  Gita stems from his deep interest in Indian philosophy and his friendships with iconic spiritual leaders. Romain Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1915. Rolland was 49 at the time.  This is also the same period when he was studying Indian philosophy, yoga, and Gandhi — which later led him to write  Vie de Vivekananda 1929 and bring the Gita to France. 

Romain Rolland’s reading of the Bhagavad Gita  was a great inspiration on Albert Camus. Camus grew up in Algeria reading Rolland  especially Jean-Christophe and  La Vie de Vivekananda at a time when Rolland had made the Gita known to the French public as “the Gospel of Action.” For Rolland, the Gītā’s teaching of niṣkāma karma  to act without attachment to results  was the moral answer to war and ideology. That same ethic reappears in Camus: the demand to revolt, to act with lucidity, and to refuse both despair and illusions of historical victory. When Rolland died in 1944, Camus wrote in  Combat that he had taught a generation “to refuse to hate without ceasing to fight.” In this sense, Rolland was the bridge: he brought the Gita to France, and Camus carried its spirit into the literature of the absurd and the rebel.

( Avtar Mota )

Key sources 

1.  Romain Rolland, La Vie de Vivekananda (1929), Gallimard

2.  Albert Camus,  Carnets I (1935-1942)  on reading Rolland as a youth

3.  Albert Camus, Combat, 31 Dec 1944 , Obituary for Romain Rolland

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