How Hanoi became a hub for French scholars studying India

The French first arrived in India in the 17th century, but for another 100 years or so, they had no interest in its civilisation. India was just another source of trade for them – until Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron came along.

Anquetil-Duperron, the son of a spice importer, had dedicated himself to classical studies and philology. He travelled to India in 1754 and ended up spending eight years in the country, learning Persian, Sanskrit and other Indian languages as well as Zoroastrian theology. He published the first European translation of the Avesta and became the first professional French Indologist. It was he who conceived the institutional framework for the profession.

“It is true that a few missionaries have already produced some work on Asia that is important and even essential in its genre,” Anquetil-Duperron wrote. “European scholars have also extended the field of our knowledge in the same area. However, their work suffers from certain drawbacks. On the one hand, these relate to the duties attached to the state of being a missionary. On the other, there are drawbacks such as being deprived of the company of Orientals, and the advantages of being able to do all things they do, and seeing things with their eyes.”

Anquetil-Duperron insisted that another way had to be tried or else these disadvantages would prevent France from having a “satisfactory understanding” of Asian countries. “This gulf will never be bridged by simple travellers’ tales from soldiers, sailors or traders,” he warned.

His solution was straightforward: “It is professional scholars who are needed, scholars who travel.” “But how will they be able to do this? We know that communication helps to increase understanding, and that distant countries sometimes have needs that require informed and prompt help. A way that might be advantageous to both sides could be to set up what I might call travelling academies.”

Anquetil-Duperron died in 1805, with his wish to establish such academies unfulfilled. But his work became popular in France. The Collège de France in Paris introduced Sanskrit as a subject in 1814, followed by others such as the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which was established in 1868, and the École des Langues Orientales.

At these schools, the emphasis “was on the study of classical languages and texts or written documents taken out of their original context,” write Catherine Clémentin-Ojha and Pierre-Yves Manguin in their book A Century in Asia: The History of the École Française D’extrême-Orient (2007).

It was Anquetil-Duperron’s ideas that provided the framework for the École Française D’extrême-Orient (or the French School of the Far East, abbreviated as EFEO). This institute played a priceless role in enabling Indologists and Sanskrit scholars from France to engage in research and conservation in what was called “Further India”.

The EFEO was established in Hanoi in 1900 while it was under French colonial occupation. Its first researchers were either Indologists or Sinologists, many of whom knew Sanskrit. Although it opened in French-occupied Indochina, the EFEO had a pan-Asian outlook from the start. “The goal was to deepen knowledge about the civilisations of India and China and their influence in Southeast Asia,” Clémentin-Ojha and Manguin say.

The school followed Anquetil-Duperron’s vision. “In a university setting where Asia was studied through texts and from Europe, the EFEO saw itself as playing an original role,” Clémentin-Ojha and Manguin say. “From the time of its foundation, it allowed its members to conduct their prolonged research in situ and facilitated their direct contact with Asians on the very site where their traditions had evolved.”

New generation

One of the co-founders of the EFEO was Sylvain Lévi. A “brilliant Indologist” who was “prodigiously erudite”, Lévi became “a professor at the Collège de France at the age of 31,” say Clémentin-Ojha and Manguin.

Lévi was a master of Sanskrit as well as Japanese and classical Chinese. He taught and inspired a whole generation of Indologists such as George Coedès, who was the director of the EFEO from 1929 to 1947 and whose book The Indianized states of Southeast Asia is a definitive text on the subject.

About his mentor Lévi, Coedès said, “His intellectual brilliance was supported by an unfailing memory, a rare ability to assimilate knowledge and an uncommon power to work without flagging.” “As competent as a pandit in Sanskrit, he still found time to learn Chinese in spite of his workload, as he considered a knowledge of that language indispensable in his studies of Buddhism,” Coedès added. “For the same reason later on, he felt he had to learn Japanese. He was always ready to make the effort needed to acquire a new tool for his work.”

In 1911, Lévi took a critical look at how the “Orient” was seen in France. “In principle this is simply a geographical term,” Lévi explained. “In fact, it is a brutal conception that sweepingly divides up humanity into two halves, in the vein of the old hellenistic idea of barbarians. Its crude symbolism conveys a sense of the smug pride of the West that scorns the whole world outside its borders.”

Even in the early 20th-century France, there was little understanding of the great civilisations of Asia, such as India and China. Knowledge of these countries was “not ranked highly in institutions of higher learning,” Clémentin-Ojha and Manguin write. “Certainly, a discipline focussing on the Orient had existed from the second half of the 17th century but Oriental studies and orientalism had a marginal place in comparison with the Classical studies which were considered an integral part of the education of any cultivated man.”

Nehru’s request

While a large number of French scholars focused on the Indian influence in Indochina, one of Lévi’s best students, Jules Bloch, was determined to follow in Anquetil-Duperron’s footsteps and live in India. Bloch, who graduated from the École des Langues Orientales, majoring in Hindi and Tamil, became a member of the EFEO in 1905 and lived in Hanoi for three years before moving to India.

Bloch’s first stop in India was the French colony of Pondicherry, where he put his knowledge of Tamil to good use. “His first port of call in India was Tamil Nadu but eventually he settled in Maratha country at Poona with R.G. [Ramakrishna Gopal] Bhandarkar, and a group of philologists gathered around him,” Clémentin-Ojha and Manguin write.

His book titled Caste et dialectes en tamoul (Caste and Tamil Dialects) was published after he returned to Paris. The book illustrates “how sociological and linguistic research could happily go hand in hand,” says the EFEO on its website. In 1914, he published his thesis titled La formation de la langue marathe (The Formation of the Marathi Language), which the EFEO calls “the greatest fruit of his stay in India”. This was turned into a book in 1919 and translated into Marathi in 1941 and English in 1970.

“In his second major work published in 1934, L’indo-aryen, du Veda aux temps modernes (The Indo-Aryan, from the Vedas to Modern Times), he describes the languages ​​of India in direct relation to Sanskrit, and Sanskrit itself, in all its forms and with its Iranian connections,” the EFEO says.

Bloch moved back to Paris in 1937, where he was appointed professor of Sanskrit language and literature at the Collège de France. This was the same position Bloch’s mentor Lévi had held until his death two years earlier.

The outbreak of the Second World War and the subsequent German occupation of Paris forced Bloch out of the institution. He returned to the Collège de France and his professorship once the city was liberated in 1944 and stayed on for the next seven years. His most notable work in the post-war years was Structure grammaticale des langues dravidiennes (Grammatical Structure of Dravidian Languages). Published in 1946, the book was translated into English by Ramakrishna Harshe in 1954.

The EFEO, encouraged by Jawaharlal Nehru, finally set up its first centre in India in Pondicherry in 1955. By this time, thanks to the efforts of Indologists like Lévi, Coedès and Bloch, India studies had become well established in France.

“The aspiration was simply to set up a great French research centre in India that would be comparable to that of the Mecca of Orientalism, the Asiatic Society of Calcutta,” Clémentin-Ojha and Manguin write. “Unlike the British, for lack of any dedicated base in India, French Indologists had great difficulty carrying out long-term studies in their chosen country. They had to work principally outside the frontier of the subcontinent. Some studied the effects of the expansion of Buddhism or Brahminisim in Southeast Asia or ‘Further India’ as the regions which had undergone Indian influence were then known.”

Although India, after attaining independence in 1947 from Britain, pushed France to leave its colonies in the country, the French scholarship in further establishing the ancient links between India and South East Asia was appreciated. Indian diplomat and historian KM Panikkar, for instance, praised the work of the EFEO while serving as India’s first ambassador to China: “Whatever its lack of success in other domains, France in the Orient stands out for its sympathetic understanding in the cultural domain.” Panikkar added that the EFEO had earned the “gratitude of the peoples of Asia for the magnificent work of its scholars in the restoration and conservation of monuments, the collection, publication and interpretation of inscriptions and other related activities”.

The opening of the centre in Pondicherry led to an increase in French scholarship of India, cementing France’s place as one of the leaders in Indology.

Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His Twitter handle is @ajaykamalakaran.