The Sage of Montpellier: Why Any Serious Study of Camus Must Include Siddheswarananda and Jean Grenier
Any purposeful research on Camus' thought is incomplete unless one knows about Swami Siddheswarananda and Jean Grenier.
Who they were ?
Swami Siddheswarananda, 1897 to 1957, was born Gopal Marar of the princely House of Cochin in Kerala. Initiated by Swami Brahmananda, a direct disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, he served the Ramakrishna Order at Madras, Mysore and Bangalore, where he guided the young poet who would become Kuvempu, one of Kannada literature's greatest figures. Sent to France in 1937 at the invitation of French friends of Indian thought centred on the Sorbonne, he arrived with almost no French. Fluent in French with remarkable speed, hec mastered it as a working philosophical language, lectured at the Sorbonne, Montpellier and Toulouse, and founded the Centre Vedantique Ramakrishna at Gretz-Armainvilliers . He lived, taught, wrote and died in France. He was a monk who made Vedanta speak in French. He taught at a time when Europe itself was collapsing.
Jean Grenier, 1898 to 1971, was a French philosopher, professor and essayist, a man of islands, solitude, melancholy and Mediterranean light. He taught philosophy at the Lycee in Algiers from 1930 to 1938. There a young Albert Camus, son of a poor family, became his pupil and then his lifelong friend. Grenier wrote a chapter called L'Inde in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise in 1930, later included in his book Les Iles, a book Camus said had touched the very core of his sensibility and given him both a terrain for reflection and a form. In February 1940 Grenier published a sustained essay, Reflexions sur la pensee indienne, in issue 317 of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, an essay serious enough that even Rene Guenon felt obliged to attack it. He continued to move between Greece, Taoism and India for the rest of his life. For Camus, Grenier remained the master, the confidant, the measure of intellectual honesty, the man who taught him to look at the sea and at death without lying.
France itself provides the necessary context, because French interest in Vedanta was not marginal in the nineteen thirties. Romain Rolland, fresh from his work on Gandhi, had brought Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda into French letters with two influential biographies in 1929 and 1930 that were read by the entire French intelligentsia. In 1936 the Musee Guimet and the Sorbonne honoured both figures with commemorations. By 1941, Gallimard published the substantial collective volume Message actuel de l'Inde with contributions from Rene Daumal, Jean Herbert, Jacques Masui and others, signalling that Indian thought was being taken seriously as contemporary philosophy, not as exotic decoration. Les Cahiers du Sud, based in Marseille and one of the most important literary reviews in the south of France, became a natural meeting point for writers interested in comparative spirituality and literature. It is in this constellation that Grenier and Siddheswarananda moved, met and recognised each other. Their meeting at Montpellier, where Grenier taught and the Swami was invited to lecture, was therefore not an accident of curiosity. It was the meeting of two men who both believed that philosophy must become a form of life and not merely an opinion.
The decisive document is a letter, modest in appearance, immense in implication. On 18 October 1942, Grenier sat in Sisteron in the Basses Alpes, in what was then the unoccupied zone, and wrote Letter 66 to his former student. The letter is published in Correspondance Albert Camus Jean Grenier, Gallimard, 1981, pages 81 to 82. At that moment Camus was twenty nine, living between Lyon, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and Paris in occupied France, having just finished L'Etranger and Le Mythe de Sisyphe, two books that would make his name after the war. Europe around him was nihilism made political, occupation, collaboration, resistance, murder justified by absolute ideas. In the letter Grenier reflects on Lao Tzu and the Tao and on the Chinese idea of non action, wu wei, which he finds admirable as an attitude before a world that wants to turn everything into ideology and frantic action. Then, in the middle of that philosophical reflection, without any social preamble, without gossip, he adds a sentence that any historian of Camus and Indian thought must underline. He writes in French: Je corresponds aussi avec un Hindou, un Sage bien entendu, que j'ai connu a Montpellier, le Swami Siddheswarânanda. "I also correspond with a Hindu, a Sage of course, whom I knew at Montpellier, Swami Siddheswarananda."
The placement of that sentence is everything. Grenier does not mention the Swami among travel anecdotes or mutual friends. He mentions him while asking what attitude can answer what he calls the profound and tragic nihilism of Europe. He places Vedanta and Taoism together as living alternatives, as attitudes to existence, at the exact moment when Camus is moving from the solitary lucidity of the absurd towards the problem of solidarity, limits, revolt and community. The date matters for another reason of archival discipline. Camus destroyed much of his correspondence received before 1940. The full published exchange between master and pupil therefore begins in 1940. From that point onwards Grenier remains the one person to whom Camus can write without self censorship about his deepest uncertainties. To tell Camus in October 1942 that he corresponds with a living Hindu sage in France is not casual gossip. It is to open a door and to say that there exists, here, now, in France, in French, a living tradition concerned with consciousness, detachment, liberation, measure and freedom without consolation that stands remarkably close to their shared questions.
Swami Siddeshwarananda
Swami Siddheswarananda arrived in 1937 with little French. Within a few years he was lecturing, debating, answering questions and publishing in French. His lectures at the University of Toulouse in 1942 were published as "Quelques aspects de la philosophie vedantique", a book that still reads with clarity. His later French works include Le Yoga et Saint Jean de la Croix, pensee indienne et mystique carmelitaine, Meditation selon le Yoga Vedanta, Rambles in Religion, Metaphysique et Realisation, Dieu existe-t-il, and the periodical Vedanta conducted in French from Gretz. Contemporary notices and library records describe him precisely as well known in France as an author and lecturer because he spread the message of Vedanta in the French language. His major French works were only later translated into English by disciples such as William Buchanan and Andre van den Brink, which explains why English speaking readers often encounter him in translation and forget that the originals were French. For Camus, who lived, thought, taught and wrote in French, this fact meant that Vedanta was not a distant Sanskrit text requiring mediation through English Orientalism. It was present in his own linguistic world, in the universities where his teacher taught, in the review culture he read, spoken by a man in ochre cloth who could discuss Shankara and Saint John of the Cross in French.
At this point Camus' Carnets, his notebooks, become crucial evidence and they must be handled with care. Camus kept notebooks from 1935 until his death in 1960 as a laboratory for his work, a place for reading notes, landscapes, aphorisms, moral calculations and ideas for fiction. Among those jottings there is a striking entry where he imagines creating a character who would be both Hindu sage and western hero, a man who would possess eastern detachment and western action in the same life. He poses it not as exotic decoration but as a moral and dramatic problem. How would such a man live in a city struck by plague. How would he act without thirst for results. How would he preserve compassion without illusion. How would he avoid both cynicism and fanaticism. That entry belongs to the gestation period of La Peste and L'Homme revolte, precisely the period of Grenier's letter about the Swami. It shows that the synthesis of sage and hero was actively present in his imagination at the very moment when he learned that his teacher corresponded with a living sage who spoke his language.
That imagined figure later takes flesh as Jean Tarrou in La Peste, published in 1947. Tarrou is a man with notebooks of his own, a visitor who watches Oran with the attention of an anthropologist and a saint. He wants to be a saint without God, a phrase Camus uses first in his own notebooks and then gives to his character, a phrase that has puzzled readers for decades. Tarrou seeks a secular saintliness through absolute self discipline, vigilance and service. He combines the western hero who organises sanitary squads, who says no to plague, who acts in solidarity, with the eastern sage who understands that the essential work is upon the self, upon learning how not to be a plague carrier, upon dissolving ego and refusing to add to the world's evil. He dies, as a sage might, having learned his lesson. In L'Homme revolte, published in 1951, Camus argues for revolt that preserves limits, for revolt that refuses to become murderous revolution, for measure, for moderation, for mesura, a Mediterranean concept with deep affinities to the Gita's teaching of action without attachment to fruit, nishkama karma, and to the Vedantic critique of egoic inflation. The resonance is not proof of borrowing, but once we know that Vedanta was present in his immediate environment through a teacher who corresponded with a living monk of the Ramakrishna Vivekananda lineage, who spoke and wrote in French and lectured at Toulouse in 1942 in the very period when La Peste was being conceived, the resonance ceases to be coincidence and becomes history.
None of this makes Camus a Vedantin, and it would be historically irresponsible to claim that he became a disciple or that he borrowed directly from a specific Upanishad or verse of the Gita. The possibility cannot be excluded until the archives at Montpellier, Toulouse, the Centre at Gretz and the Grenier papers are fully explored. What the record does show is proximity, access and documented transmission, which in intellectual history is often more important than speculation about influence. Grenier knew Siddheswarananda. Grenier corresponded with him. Grenier called him a Sage, a rare category in his vocabulary, not a polite adjective but a judgement about a form of life. Grenier told Camus. Grenier told him in French, about a monk who spoke and wrote in French, at the moment when Camus was asking whether any wisdom could survive nihilism. And Camus, in his notebooks, began to imagine a character who would be both Hindu sage and western hero. That chain is modest and therefore strong.
The story therefore ends not with conversion but with a more subtle and more truthful conclusion that replaces speculation with evidence and that widens our understanding of Camus' Europe. Swami Siddheswarananda lived in France from 1937 until his death in 1957, teaching, writing, translating, answering letters, building a small but serious centre at Gretz that would become a permanent home for Vedanta in Europe and a place where French seekers could encounter Indian thought without leaving France. Jean Grenier continued to move between Greece and India and Taoism, between the Mediterranean and the inner island, and remained for Camus the measure of intellectual honesty, the man who had taught him to look at the sea and at death without lying. Camus continued to walk his own path between absurdity and revolt, between sun and plague, between Sisyphus and Nemesis, until his accidental death in 1960. What connects the three men is not a secret lineage but a documented chain of transmission. That chain does not make Camus a Vedantin. It proves that Vedanta stood considerably nearer to his philosophical world than conventional accounts of his exclusively European formation have acknowledged. For any serious study of Tarrou, of the ethics of revolt, of Camus and Indian thought, for any purposeful research on how a French Algerian moralist imagined saintliness without God, that proximity must now be part of the record. It also reminds us that the history of Indian thought in Europe was not only about books arriving from afar. It was also about a prince from Cochin who learned French and taught in French in occupied France, and about a philosophy teacher from Algiers who had the discernment to call him a sage and the generosity to tell his most famous pupil.
Prof Steven F Walker writes this :-
"Centre Védantique Ramakrichna) from 1947 until his death in 1957. The center is an hour’s train ride from Paris, and has long attracted spiritual seekers from all over Europe, not to mention a number of American devotees. The origins of the center may be traced back to the 1936 centenary celebration in France of the birth of Ramakrishna, which resulted in an accrued curiosity about Vedanta and thus in Belur Math’s decision to send Swami Siddheshwarananda to France. The interest generated by his discourses, including some at eminent French universities, eventually led to the foundation of the Gretz center in 1947.
Siddheshwarananda’s essay entitled “From anxiety to union, or, Ramakrishna’s spiritual experience” (“De l’angoisse à l’union, ou l’experience spirituelle de Rama-krishna1”) contains a number of interesting insights and observations, some of which seem to me to be startlingly original."
( Avtar Mota )
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