MY POEM ,"THE LONELIEST ILLNESS "

                                              

THE LONELIEST ILLNESS

There comes an illness

for which medicine has no name.

The body burns.

The fever rises.

The night keeps its own counsel.

But none of this

is the worst.

The worst

is not knowing

whose name to utter

when pain becomes heavier

than the body.

A closed door.

An unanswered call.

A chair beside the bed

that remains

more faithful

than any friend.

Pain can be endured.

Silence cannot.

The flesh heals

according to its season.

Loneliness

has no season.

There comes an hour

when suffering

no longer asks to be cured.

It asks

to be seen.

One hand

upon the forehead.

One voice

breaking the silence.

One human being

to stand between us

and the emptiness.

That is all.

Without it,

even hope

forgets the way.

Perhaps that is why

the deepest illness

is never the one

the physician discovers.

It is the one

that leaves no wound,

only an empty chair,

and a silence

that outlives the fever.

( Avtar Mota )

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NEW HISTORIANS AND SIKANDER BUTSHIKAN

(Ruins of Martand Sun Temple in Kashmir , photo taken in 1868 by John Burke.The Temple was one among hundreds of temples demolished during the rule of Sultan Sikander Butshikan )

 NEW HISTORIANS  AND SIKANDER BUTSHIKAN

The reign of Sultan Sikandar Shahmiri, 1389–1413 CE, occupies a position of considerable clarity within the extant historiography of medieval Kashmir, notwithstanding recent attempts to obscure it. In both the Indo-Persian annalistic tradition  :Baharistan-i-Shahi, Tarikh-i-Firishta, Tohfatu’l-Ahbab and in the Sanskritic continuation of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini by Jonaraja and Srivara, he is recorded under the epithet Butshikan,  the Idol-Breaker. The convergence of Persian and Sanskrit testimony on this point is seldom encountered and ought to command the historian’s attention. To recast him as a ruler of toleration by recourse to tendentious translation, and in the absence of any competence in Persian, Sanskrit, or Sharada, is not scholarship but sophistry. Such endeavours do not illuminate the past; they darken it. They constitute a disservice to historical inquiry and to the public understanding of Kashmir’s medieval past.

The Historical Record

Sultan Sikandar's rule  is detailed in Baharistan-i-Shahi, Tarikh-i-Firishta, and Tohfatu’l-Ahbab, and many more texts .  

As in the Persian texts, the Sanskrit continuation of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini by Jonaraja, and thereafter by Srivara, record with consistency the destruction of temples, the levy of jizya, and measures of religious coercion during his reign. These accounts, written within living memory of the events, constitute our principal indigenous testimony.  To disregard these texts, or to read them through third-party translations alone, is to abandon the basic tenets of historiography.

 The Methodological Failure

A number of present-day commentators who style themselves as intellectuals and historians proceed without competence in the requisite languages : Sanskrit, Sharada, or Persian. Their arguments are constructed upon selective English renderings, taken out of context and made to serve a narrative conceived in advance.  This is not critical history. It is an exercise in presentism. By substituting supposition for textual engagement, they do not clarify the past. They obscure it. In doing so, they perform a positive disservice both to history as a discipline and to the public, whom they render more ignorant rather than enlightened. It is darkness masquerading as light.

Whereas historians employ epigraphy, stratigraphy and scientific dating to test such evidence, the present tendency is one of selective citation and tendentious translation by those without competence in Persian, Sanskrit, or Sharada. This constitutes not revision but fabrication , a narrative of limited circulation that collapses upon first scholarly examination beyond a geographical space . It is a disservice to history.

 The Greater Disservice: The Erasure of Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin

What makes this distortion particularly egregious is that it simultaneously belittles the singular legacy of Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin, r. 1420–1470 CE.  Within the Shahmiri lineage, Zain-ul-Abidin stands apart. The Persian and Sanskrit sources alike : Baharistan-i-Shahi, Tarikh-i-Kashmir, and the later portions of the Rajatarangini tradition  record his policies of religious toleration, the recall of exiled Pandits, the remittance of jizya, patronage of Sanskrit learning, and the translation of the Mahabharata and Rajatarangini into Persian.  

He is the only ruler of that dynasty whom both traditions acknowledge, with near unanimity, as liberal and just. 

By attempting to project the attributes of Zain-ul-Abidin backwards onto Sikandar, these so-called intellectuals do a twofold wrong. They misrepresent Sikandar, and they diminish Zain-ul-Abidin. They collapse the distinction between an iconoclast and a conciliator, and thereby rob Kashmiri history of its nuance. To deny Zain-ul-Abidin his unique status is to do violence to the very record they claim to uphold.

Conclusion 

The reign of Sultan Sikandar Shahmiri, 1389–1413 CE, is consistently recorded as one of iconoclasm. Persian chronicles and the Sanskritic Rajatarangini continuations concur in designating him Butshikan.The archaeological record affirms this: from Verinag to Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the ruins of major temples remain, some repurposed as graveyards, others with later superstructures erected upon their plinths.

History cannot be wished into conformity with contemporary preference. It must be read on its own terms, in its own languages. Anything less is not revision. It is reduction.  And to reduce the past in this manner is to fail both the dead and the living.

Should these historians be compelled to operate beyond their parochial remit, one may confidently anticipate further ingenuities. With the same methodological rigour, they would not scruple to advance the proposition that Mahmud of Ghazni did not, in fact, sack Somnath; that the devastation was wrought instead by a most obliging and localised earthquake, confining its attentions to precisely two square miles of temple precinct. Such is the poverty of scholarship that substitutes invention for evidence, and anecdote for archive.

( Avtar Mota )

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WHAT IF ALBERT CAMUS WOULD HAVE MET DR S RADHAKRISHNAN ?

                                                                        

      (AI-generated photo: Camus meets Dr Radhakrishnan)

ALBERT CAMUS WOULD HAVE MET DR S RADHAKRISHNAN HAD HE LIVED 

The two great men in the  above AI generated  picture never met. I don't think they even exchanged letters. Had Albert Camus lived beyond 1960, he would almost certainly have found Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan a fascinating figure to meet. Radhakrishnan was not merely India's President and a distinguished philosopher; he was one of the most important modern interpreters of Indian philosophy for the West. His writings on the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Hindu philosophy and the dialogue between Eastern and Western thought would have touched precisely those questions that increasingly occupied Camus: the meaning of action, responsibility, moral freedom, spiritual experience, human suffering and the possibility of ethical life without surrendering lucidity.

For the intellectual world of Camus, Radhakrishnan represented an extraordinary bridge between Greek humanism, European philosophy and Indian wisdom. Camus, who had already shown an interest in the Bhagavad Gita and other Eastern texts, might have recognised in Radhakrishnan a thinker capable of discussing the Gita without reducing it either to exotic mysticism or to an abstract religious doctrine. Radhakrishnan's interpretation of Indian thought as a living philosophy, concerned with the transformation of human consciousness, could have provided fertile ground for a profound conversation with the author of The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel.

One can therefore reasonably imagine that, had Camus survived, a meeting with Dr Radhakrishnan would have been one of the intellectual encounters he might have desired. It would have brought together two men who, despite belonging to different civilisations, were deeply concerned with the same fundamental question: how should a human being live in a world marked by suffering, uncertainty and the absence of easy answers? Camus might have approached Radhakrishnan from the standpoint of lucid revolt; Radhakrishnan might have responded from the standpoint of spiritual insight and the unity of existence.

Such a meeting would have been more than a meeting between a French novelist and an Indian philosopher. It might have become a remarkable conversation between the philosophy of the absurd and the philosophy of the Gita, between Camus's insistence on living without consolation and Radhakrishnan's belief in the stronger possibilities of human consciousness.

Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's attitude towards existentialism was neither one of simple rejection nor of unqualified acceptance. He recognised that existentialism had emerged from the profound spiritual and intellectual crisis of modern Europe and valued its insistence upon confronting existence in its concrete immediacy. Its preoccupation with anxiety, freedom, responsibility, suffering, death and the individual's struggle to create meaning represented, for Radhakrishnan, a serious philosophical response to the disintegration of inherited certainties.

Yet he also believed that existentialism, particularly in its atheistic forms, remained incomplete. Its great merit was its refusal to offer facile consolation; its limitation, from the standpoint of Indian philosophy, was that it often treated the experience of meaninglessness as the final horizon of human existence. Radhakrishnan's Vedantic perspective moved beyond this impasse. Human beings are not merely isolated individuals condemned to confront an indifferent universe; they are spiritual beings whose deepest nature may be disclosed through an experience of reality transcending the ego.

In this respect, Radhakrishnan could have found much to admire in Camus's lucidity, moral seriousness and resistance to nihilism, while questioning whether revolt and ethical responsibility exhausted the possibilities of human existence. Existentialism confronted the abyss with courage; Indian philosophy, Radhakrishnan maintained, asked whether the abyss itself might be transcended through spiritual realisation. The dialogue between Camus and Radhakrishnan would therefore have been one between two profound responses to the crisis of meaning: one grounded in lucid revolt, the other in the possibility of spiritual awakening.

Dr S. Radhakrishnan possessed a profound knowledge of Western philosophy and was familiar with the major intellectual currents of modern Europe. He knew French and engaged with the wider European philosophical tradition, including the debates surrounding existentialism. While it would be difficult to establish without specific documentary evidence that he had read the complete works of Jean-Paul Sartre, his philosophical range was certainly broad enough to have brought him into intellectual proximity with the major French thinkers of the twentieth century. It is precisely this breadth of intellectual sympathy that makes the imagined meeting between Radhakrishnan and Albert Camus so compelling. Camus, the writer of the Absurd, revolt and human solidarity, would have encountered in Radhakrishnan a philosopher who had deeply studied the crisis of Western thought while also drawing upon the profound resources of Indian metaphysics. Their meeting, had history permitted it, might have become a remarkable dialogue between two civilisations and two distinct responses to the human predicament: Camus's lucid defiance before a silent universe and Radhakrishnan's vision of a spiritual reality in which the human search for meaning could find a deeper ground.

The meeting, however, remained confined to the realm of historical possibility. Camus's premature death brought to an abrupt end a life of exceptional intellectual promise, while Radhakrishnan continued, for another fifteen years, to engage with the philosophical, cultural and moral questions of his age. The conversation that might have taken place between them was therefore never realised in history. Yet the absence of an actual encounter need not signify the absence of an intellectual dialogue. Indeed, the very distance between them makes such a dialogue all the more compelling. Camus confronted the human condition through the categories of absurdity, lucidity, revolt and ethical responsibility; Radhakrishnan approached the crisis of modern existence through the philosophical resources of Vedānta and the wider traditions of Indian thought. Their imagined meeting thus acquires significance not as a fanciful exercise in intellectual speculation, but as a symbolic encounter between two distinct philosophical responses to the predicament of modern humanity. What history denied them in person, comparative reflection may still recover in thought.

( Avtar Mota )

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WHY MENTAL COMPATIBILITY IS THE ONLY TRUE RELATION?

                                  

WHY MENTAL COMPATIBILITY IS THE ONLY TRUE RELATION? 

The social order imposes bonds derived from kinship and juridical obligation. Yet the rational faculty inclines toward associations predicated upon truth and psychological compatibility.*  

Thus we encounter the fundamental disjunction between institutional continuity and intellectual affinity.

We are born into a lattice of relationships we did not elect. Kinship is conferred by birth, collegiality by appointment, matrimony often by arrangement, and affiliation by shared interest. From childhood we are instructed in a single ethic: duty, adjustment, compromise, endurance. Yet endurance is not synonymous with living. And physical proximity is not synonymous with communion.The great traditions of both East and West converge upon an uncomfortable observation: *mental consonance constitutes the authentic basis of relation*. Neither social contract, nor familiarity, nor consanguinity, in itself, guarantees it. 

To maintain a measured distance from a relation marked by fundamental incompatibility is not arrogance. It is not egoism. It is, rather, an act of intellectual honesty and self-preservation — a refusal to acquiesce to a state of avoidable and corrosive dissonance.

What the Indian Scriptures Say

(1) The Dhammapada: Guard the Mind, Guard Your Company

The Buddha begins the Dhammapada with this:  

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become." (Dhammapada 1)  

If the mind is everything, then the company we keep is everything too. For the mind is not formed in isolation. It is shaped by the air it breathes, by the conversations, silences, judgements, and values around it. To stay in a relation that dulls, diminishes, or distorts your mind is to betray the very source of your life. That is why the Buddha also said:  

"Better it is to live alone. There is no fellowship with a fool." (Dhammapada 61)  

This is not misanthropy. It is hygiene. The mind, like the body, needs clean air.

(2) The Upanishads: The Self Is the Standard

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad gives an answer that undoes centuries of social piety:  

"Verily, a husband is not dear because he is a husband, but because the Self is dear. A wife is not dear because she is a wife, but because the Self is dear." (2.4.5)  

A role is not sacred in itself. What is sacred is whether the relation nourishes the Self. To maintain a bond that persistently violates clarity, peace, or growth out of mere duty is himsa, violence against oneself. Dharma is not blind endurance. It is alignment with Satya, truth. And truth begins with the mind.

(3) Yoga Vasishtha: Relation as the Air We Breathe*  

The Yoga Vasishtha is perhaps India’s most psychological scripture. Sage Vasishtha tells Sri Rama:  

"Association with the wise gives rise to wisdom. Association with fools gives rise to folly. Therefore, O Rama, choose your company as you would choose the air you breathe." (Vairagya Prakarana)

(4) Advaita 

Real relation cannot be thrust. It grows only in four conditions:  

1. The sunshine of empathy Karuna, the ability to feel another’s inner weather without fixing it.  

2. The oxygen of resonance without fusion: Anukampa asks for nothing in return. Whatever is due comes automatically by the inherent strength of Anukampa. It does not measure a relation in terms of a delivery expectation matrix.  

3. The food of understanding individuality: Prajna, seeing the other as a separate universe, not as your extension.  

4. The nurturing of individual space: Akasha, the freedom to become without surveillance.  

Where these are absent, no certificate, no blood tie, no social pressure can create a real bond. It becomes a cage. And the Yoga Vasishtha is clear: a gilded cage is still a cage.

(5) Bhagavad Gita 

"Sattve sthito buddhir yā pravṛttiṁ ca nivṛttiṁ ca" (18.30)  

"That intellect by which one knows action and inaction, what should be done and what should not be done" is Viveka. Choosing distance is Nivṛtti, knowing what not to engage in.  

"Uddhared ātmanātmānaṁ" (6.5)  

"Lift yourself by yourself." Protecting your own mind from incompatible company is self upliftment, not ego.

The Western Philosophers: From Solitude to Solidarity

(1) Arthur Schopenhauer was blunt:  

"A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free."  

"With people of limited capacity, the less one has to do with them, the happier one will be." 

For Schopenhauer, mental energy is capital. To spend it in friction and performance is slow impoverishment. Remaining at a distance is not cruelty. It is conservation.

(2) Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of Gesinnungsgenossen, comrades in disposition. In "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" :  

"One should not crave to be understood. One should only crave to be met by those who are capable of understanding."  

Depth is rare. To dilute yourself to fit a room is to betray your own potential.

(3) Soren Kierkegaard called this "choosing oneself". He writes:  

"The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you will never have."  

To stay in an incompatible bond is to mourn a future that will never arrive. Authenticity demands choice.

(4) Simone de Beauvoir made it ethical. In "The Ethics of Ambiguity" :  

"To will oneself free is also to will others free."  

A relation that requires one person to become smaller is not love. It is mutual imprisonment.

(5) Martin Buber gave us the language to see why so many bonds feel empty. In ,"I and Thou" :  

"All real living is meeting."  

An 'I and It' relation treats the other as a role: "my spouse", "my relative", "my boss". An "I and Thou" relation meets the other as a presence. Mental compatibility is the precondition for 

"I and Thou". Without it, we default to "I and It", and that is where resentment breeds.

(6) Hannah Arendt reminded us of "plurality". In ,"The Human Condition" :  

"Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived."  

Healthy relations do not demand sameness. They honour difference. So compatibility is not uniformity.

(7) Erich Fromm* in ,"The Art of Loving" drew the line:  

"Love is the union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self."  

Where separateness is lost, we get dependence. Where integrity is lost, we get bitterness. Neither is relation.

(8) Albert Camus: The Revolt Against Forced Intimacy:

Albert Camus called modern life "absurd", the human need for meaning meeting a silent universe. In ,"The Myth of Sisyphus", he names three responses: suicide, faith, or revolt.  

A forced relation is killing the truth of your inner experience daily for the sake of continuity. Camus says:  

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."  

By rebellion, Camus means to say: "I will not call this love when my mind starves in it." For Camus, this is not coldness. It is lucidity. Camus asks us to imagine Sisyphus happy, not because the task is pleasant, but because he owns it. He clearly says that we must own the company we keep.

The Test of Compatibility

Mental compatibility is not “we like the same food”. It is tested in four ways:

1. Tempo: Can we sit in silence without anxiety?  

2. Depth: Can we speak of death, failure, and meaning without judgement?  

3. Integrity: After we part, do I feel clearer or more muddled?  

4. Freedom: Do I feel larger, or smaller?  

To remain where you must diminish is to betray yourself and the other. For you are no longer present , only performing.

The lineage

The Dhammapada: guard your mind.  

The Upanishads: know the Self first.  

The Yoga Vasishtha: choose the air you breathe.  

Schopenhauer: guard your mental capital.  

Nietzsche: seek those who can meet you as equals.  

Kierkegaard: choose yourself.  

De Beauvoir: will freedom — yours and theirs.  

Buber: meet, do not use.  

Arendt: honour plurality.  

Fromm: keep your integrity.  

Camus: live honestly.

Conclusion

Ultimately, mental compatibility constitutes the only authentic basis for relation, for it is the sole condition under which one may remain without self betrayal. To remain at a distance from incompatible company is not an act of ego, but of discernment; it is a refusal to acquiesce to needless vexation. Solitude does not destroy us. It is prolonged association with that which is incongruent that diminishes us by degrees. In this, wisdom lies not in endurance, but in the quiet courage to choose alignment over accommodation.

(Avtar Mota)

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CAMUS AND MOULOUD FERAOUN

                                             

(Photo: May 1958, Algiers: Mouloud Feraoun and Albert Camus)

Albert Camus And Mouloud Feraoun

This is a  photo from May 1958 taken in Algiers. On the left is Mouloud Feraoun,  wearing glasses and a light suit. On the right is Albert Camus in a dark suit. By this time Camus had already received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, and both men were prominent writers living through the Algerian War.

Mouloud Feraoun was a Kabyle Algerian teacher and writer. He was born in 1913 in a village in Kabylia. He was Muslim, from a Berber family, and his books like ,"The Poor Man's Son" and "Journal" describe everyday village life, education, and the changes happening in Algeria. He wrote clearly and directly about people, not politics, and was respected as a voice of ordinary Algerians.

Camus and Feraoun had real respect for each other. Camus wrote the preface to Feraoun’s "The Poor Man's Son"  in 1954 and spoke of him with admiration. During the war they both believed in dialogue and in protecting civilians and schools. They met several times in Algiers, including in May 1958, which is when this photo was taken.

In his preface to "The Poor Man's Son,  Camus wrote :

"I love this land, and I am of this land. And because I love it, I do not want it to be torn apart.   Mouloud Feraoun tells us about this land with a truth that is rare. He speaks of the poor, of the village, of children and of work. He does not complain. He shows.There is in this book a dignity and a modesty that command respect. It is the book of a man who has known misery and who has not been embittered by it.  This is the voice of Algeria itself, the silent Algeria, the one that works and suffers and hopes."

Camus  put Feraoun on the map as without Camus’s name, a Kabyle teacher’s novel might never have been published in Paris in the 1950s.  Camus said Feraoun wasn’t writing politics, he was writing life. Daily life. Later in letters Camus called Feraoun “my brother.” Not because they agreed on everything, but because they both loved Algeria and hated seeing it bleed. Feraoun was deeply moved by the preface. He kept it with the book for the rest of his life.

Mouloud Feraoun was assassinated on March 15, 1962 for being moderate and pro talks. He and five other education inspectors were killed at a meeting in El Biar, Algiers, just days before the ceasefire that ended the war. His ,"Journal" , published after his death, remains one of the most important accounts of that period.

( Avtar Mota )

PS

Kabylia Berbers

The Kabyles are Berbers who live mainly in Kabylia, a mountainous region east of Algiers in Algeria. They call themselves Izwawen and speak Taqbaylit, a Tamazight dialect. For centuries they lived in village communities with strong traditions of democracy, agriculture, and olive cultivation. Kabylia is known for its resistance to outside rule , from Romans to Ottomans to French colonization. The region produced major writers like Mouloud Feraoun and Mouloud Mammeri who documented Kabyle life. Today Kabyles are central to the Berber cultural movement, fighting to preserve language, music, and identity. They are largely Muslim, known for hospitality, poetry, and strong community ties.

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HOW CAMUS SPENT NOBEL PRIZE MONEY

                                               

          

HOW CAMUS SPENT NOBEL PRIZE MONEY 

Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. It came with about 250,000 Swedish kronor at the time. In today's money that’s roughly:

- About $35,000 - $40,000 USD in 1957

- About $400,000+ USD today after inflation currently.

He didn’t blow it on himself. Here’s how he spent/used it, based on his letters and biographers:

Helping people directly

Camus gave money away quietly. Friends, struggling writers, and families in Algeria and France got help. He hated talking about it. His wife Francine has said he would just send cheques or cash when someone was in trouble.

 Supporting other writers and artists

A part of the prize money went to younger writers and theater people. He funded small theater projects and helped cover costs for people who couldn’t afford to publish or stage work. He never talked about this silent help with  any person. 

Family + Home

He bought a house in Lourmarin, Provence in 1958. It wasn’t fancy ,  a modest village house where he could write. Some of the prize money went toward that, so his family had stability.

Financial Security  for his Mother

He transferred  some  amount to his  mother's account to provide her adequate financial security.

 Paying debts and taxes and investment in his Theatre 

Like most writers he had normal bills. He cleared some debts and set aside some money for taxes. He used somec amount  to finance his own stage adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Demons. He directed it and it opened in Jan 1959 at the Antoine Theatre in Paris. It was a critical success.

Publishing

He financed the "Espoir" series for Éditions Gallimard, where he published Simone Weil’s works posthumously.In 1943, Simone Weil died of tuberculosis at age 34, a fate hastened by her refusal to eat more than the official ration in occupied France. A fiercely principled figure who lived her beliefs without compromise, Weil’s legacy endures through her writings, philosophies, and works like La Passion de Simone. By funding the publishing of the series, Camus ensured her ideas and essays were preserved and made available to the public.

What he didn’t do

No foundation, no charity in his name, no big investments. He told a friend the prize was “embarrassing” because he didn’t feel he deserved it more than others.

( Avtar Mota)

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WHY CAMUS COULDN'T TRAVEL TO INDIA

                                     

The Journey Not Taken: Why Albert Camus Never Travelled to India

Albert Camus died on 4 January 1960, aged 46, in a car crash on the road between Provence and Paris. With him died a series of plans that were only just becoming visible: to step back from journalism and politics, to write differently, and to travel far. Among the places he spoke of was India.  He never went. He did not reject India. He simply ran out of time. 

The reasons are straightforward, though often overlooked: he was overburdened, he was politically trapped, he was in poor health, and he died before the window opened. But the desire was there. It appears in letters, in conversations, and in the tone of his last notebooks. Had he lived, it is almost certain he would have gone.

A Life Without Margin: 1945–1960

To understand why Camus did not travel, one must first understand what filled his years.

Éditions Gallimard. From 1945 Camus worked as lecteur and later responsable de collection at Gallimard. This was not an honorary title. He read three to four manuscripts a week, wrote detailed reports, and managed authors. The post anchored him to Paris. A journey to India in the 1950s required a minimum of two to three months. The publishing house could not spare him for that long, and he could not absent himself without damaging the work he valued.

Algeria

 Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913. The War of Independence, 1954–1962, consumed his public life. He was attacked from both sides: by the French right for his calls for a “civil truce”, and by the left for not condemning France outright. Between 1955 and 1958 he wrote appeals, articles, and gave press conferences. He felt personally responsible. To leave for India during this period would have been read as desertion. He wrote in 1957: “I have people on both sides whom I love.” That is not a position from which one departs for several months.

Theatre and journalism.

From 1944 to 1947 he edited  Combat. From 1946 to 1953 he directed and adapted plays: Caligula, The Misunderstanding, The State of Siege. Even after leaving daily journalism, he wrote prefaces, gave lectures in Europe and the United States, and engaged in public debate. There was no sustained period of freedom. Travel to India was not a two-week holiday. It was an expedition. Camus did not have the months to give.

He Died Too Young

The most decisive reason is chronological. Camus died at 46. Compare this with his contemporaries. Romain Rolland travelled to India in his sixties. André Malraux made extensive trips in his fifties. Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre went in 1966 and 1967, also in their sixties. 

Camus was only just entering the age when such travel becomes feasible. The Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in December 1957, gave him financial security for the first time. His Carnets  from 1958–1959 show a clear shift. He writes of “silence”, “retreat”, “another rhythm”. He bought a house in Lourmarin. He told friends he wanted to stop writing for the press and return to fiction and essays.

India appears in this late period as a real possibility, not a vague idea. But he had only thirteen months between Stockholm and the crash. That is not enough time to plan, fund, and undertake a major journey, particularly with his health.

The Evidence of Desire: Letters to René Char

The most direct evidence comes from his correspondence with the poet René Char* They met in 1946 and remained close until Camus’ death. Their letters record Camus’ inner life with unusual candour. In 1958 Camus wrote of needing “to go far from Europe, to places where the sun teaches a different patience”. Char later recalled that Camus spoke specifically of Asia. Not as a tourist, but as a thinker seeking a different quality of light and silence. Char wrote after 1960 that they had discussed travel once the Algerian situation was “settled”. He believed Camus meant India, Greece, and other places “where stone and sea teach the same lesson”. 

This is important. Camus was not drawn to India as exoticism. He was drawn to it as a civilisation that had, for millennia, reflected on suffering, on limits, and on how to live without illusion. These were precisely the questions at the centre of 'The Myth of Sisyphus' and  The Rebel.

Health and Practical Obstacles

Camus contracted tuberculosis in 1930, aged 17. It recurred throughout his life. By the 1950s it was managed, but long-haul travel remained a risk. 

A flight to India in 1959 took 20–24 hours with several stops. A sea voyage took three to four weeks each way. For someone with fragile lungs, this was not trivial.

There were also institutional barriers. India in the 1950s was newly independent and intellectually vibrant, but Camus had no university post, no lecture tour, no publisher’s commission to go. He would have had to travel as a private individual, and that required the very thing he lacked: uninterrupted time.

He Travelled Through Reading

Because he could not go physically, Camus went textually.  He read widely in Eastern philosophy and history. In his notebooks from the early 1950s he notes passages on non-violence, on detachment, and on the ethics of action without hope of victory. These themes echo throughout ;The Rebel,  and The Plague. 

For Camus, reading was a legitimate form of travel. In Carnets_he writes: “To read is to go elsewhere without leaving.” India was present in his work as an intellectual horizon. The physical journey would have been the next step.

The Intellectual Climate of the Late 1950s

The late 1950s was a turning point for French thought. After Stalinism and during the Algerian War, Europe no longer appeared as the sole source of answers. Many writers and philosophers began to look eastward.

Camus’ turn was not towards mysticism. He was looking for an ethics that did not depend on God or on History. He was looking for a way to affirm limits, to act without illusion, and to maintain solidarity in a world without guarantees. 

India, in the public imagination of the time, represented precisely that: a long tradition of reflection on suffering and on how to act decently within it. It is not surprising that Camus, in his late notes, should have turned his attention there.

Had he gone in 1961, he would likely not have gone to ashrams. He would have gone to universities, to libraries, to speak with scholars. He had gone to Greece in 1955 for the same reason: to stand in the landscape that had produced a certain kind of thought.

He Would Have Gone Had He Lived

This is not speculation for its own sake. It is what those close to him stated. Francine  Camus, his wife, said after 1960 that he was planning “a long trip, perhaps to Asia”.  Michel Gallimard, who died with him in the car, was a publisher who organised author travel. They were discussing future projects on the day of the accident.  René Char wrote in 1962: “Albert would have gone. He needed the distance.”

The Nobel Prize gave him the means. The end of his editorial duties gave him the time. The conclusion of his most intense political engagement gave him the freedom. The only thing missing was time itself.

Had he lived to sixty, as Sartre and de Beauvoir did, it is very probable he would have made the journey.

What Was Lost: A Speculative Note

We cannot know what Camus would have written after India. But we can extrapolate from the direction of his last years. A Camus in India in 1961–62 would have encountered three things that spoke directly to his work. A practice of restraint and attention. Camus’ “lucidity” has affinities with disciplines of mindfulness and self-observation. He would have recognised a method. Gandhian non-violence  would have complicated his thinking in The Rebel_ about revolt and its limits. Camus was searching for a “no” that did not become a new tyranny. He would have found a living example. Indian philosophy’s long reflection on action and consequence would have spoken to Camus’ central problem: how to act in a world without final meaning.

He would not have become a convert. He was too committed to the body, to the Mediterranean, to the absurd. But he might have written a third major essay, something between 'The Myth of Sisyphus' and a travel journal, on what he called “solar thought”. That book does not exist because the journey did not happen.

Conclusion

Camus did not travel to India for four interlocking reasons: he was overworked, he was politically entangled, he was in poor health, and he died before the window opened.But the desire was real. It is in the letters to René Char. It is in the tone of his last notebooks. It is in the fact that, after the Nobel, he began to speak of withdrawal and distance.

To state that he did not go is factual. To state that he would have gone is to respect the trajectory of his last years.

 Camus’ work is ultimately about how to live with lucidity in a world that offers no final justification. India, for him in the late 1950s, represented a place where that question had been asked for a very long time.

His unwritten Indian journey is, in the end, very Camusian: a plan made in full awareness that time is short and that the world offers no guarantees. One must imagine Camus with his plans still in his hands. And one may reasonably conclude: he would have gone.

( Avtar Mota )

PS

(1)

Though Camus spoke to René Char of a future journey to India , a place of “light and silence” to which he hoped to withdraw once the Algerian crisis was over , Char himself never made that trip. The poet’s life remained rooted in Provence, Paris, and the landscapes of wartime France. Char absorbed the East through reading and correspondence, not through travel. The India that appears in their conversations was therefore a shared horizon rather than a shared itinerary: a desire voiced by Camus, remembered by Char, and left unfinished by both.

In posthumous interviews and memoirs, Char recalled that Camus had spoken of going to Asia “when the time came,” but Char’s own journeys remained within France and Europe. ( Source  René Char, La Parole en archipel (Paris: Gallimard, 1962); and Laurence Campa, René Char: Le poète et la guerre(Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 312–314.

(2)

André Malraux and Albert Camus looked east, but only one of them got there. Malraux travelled to India six times, beginning in 1929, and returned in the late 1950s as France’s Minister of Cultural Affairs. He met Nehru, wrote of Indian art and spirituality in ,' Les Voix du silence', and helped bring Indian exhibitions to Paris. Camus never made the journey. In conversations with René Char after 1957 he spoke of needing to “go far from Europe,” with India in mind as a place of light and silence once Algeria was settled. Malraux’s India was lived; Camus’ remained imagined. Both, however, were part of the same post-war French attempt to think beyond Europe. On Malraux’s visits see Laurence Campa, René Char: Le poète et la guerre(Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 313, and standard biographies of Malraux. On Camus’ desire to travel, see Char’s posthumous recollections in La Parole en archipel (Paris: Gallimard, 1962 )

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