The passing away of the French scholar Madeleine
Biardeau, translator of the Ramayana and an outstanding specialist of the
Puranas, is a loss to understanding Hindu
Madeleine Biardeau, the widely respected French
Indologist, passed away on 1 February 2010 in
Rigorous
thought
Her works can be broadly divided into three parts.
First, she focused on Advaita Vedanta and translated the works of Mandana
Misra, Vacaspati Misra and the grammarian Bhartrhari, which she commented in
her doctoral dissertation on The Theory
of Knowledge and the Philosophy of Speech in Classical Brahmanism (1964, in
French). Elaborating on the notion of orthodoxy, Madeleine Biardeau sketched
out the religious and intellectual principles that framed the Brahmanical
mind-set of the tenants of Advaita Vedanta. These authors, who stressed the
strict observance of sacrificial practices inherited from the Vedas, were
concerned with the quest for salvation, moksha, considered as a way of escaping
from the cycle of death and rebirth. Thus at the heart of Hinduism is set a
structural tension between the man-out-of-the-world, the renouncer whose
samnyasi is the typical example, and the ordinary man-in-the-world who bears
the burden of his destiny, his karma. Furthermore, Madeleine Biardeau showed
that this tension should be located within a wider cosmological representation
of the word embedded within the main goals (puruşārtha) that structure the
idealised life of the orthodox Hindu man. Brahmanism can be considered as
expressing an anthropological understanding of the Hindu civilisation, as she
put it a later book Hinduism: The
Anthropology of a Civilisation (1994 for English translation). The second
part of the work that Madeleine Biardeau conducted deals with the study of the
Puranas, to which she devoted erudite books edited by the French School for the
far East (Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient). Yet, her interest for the Puranas
was part of a larger concern with Hindu literature, mainly the Epics, which
constitute the third main area of Madeleine Biardeau's scholarship. In
collaboration with two French Sanskrit scholars, Marie-Claude Porcher and
Philippe Benoit, she translated into French the Ramayana of Valmiki (1999). Yet
her last and major achievements remain the two edited volumes of the
Mahabharata that she published in 2002. In this impressive work, which took her
four decades to complete, she presented a detailed resumé of the whole Epic
that she completed by her own interpretation. Briefly, Madeleine Biardeau
considered the Mahabharata as an intellectual and religious reaction against
Buddhism whose appeal to the layman was upsetting Brahmanical values by
dislodging the Brahmans from their privileged position in the mundane world.
More generally, she used to say that the Epics, as well as the Puranas, should
be read as a particular theological and philosophical genre which is
eschatology, as both deal with the ultimate endings of cycle of events whether
at the individual level or that of the cosmos.
Madeleine Biardeau not only worked in close association
with Pandits either at the Deccan College at Pune or at the French Institute at
Pondicherry (which was founded by the French Indologist Jean Filliozat in
1956), she relentlessly visited temples and places of worship in towns and
small villages, questioning people from all castes, and enquired about their
contemporary cults and rituals. Her book Stories
about Posts: Vedic variations about the Hindu Goddess (2002 for the English
translation) combines varied studies on the Sanskrit Epics, the Hindu Goddess,
Vedic sacrifice and the interpretation of Hinduism.
The main argument that Madeleine Biardeau constantly
belaboured in her work deals with the unity of Hinduism (see her contribution
to TN Madan's edited volume The Hinduism
Omnibus, 2003). As she recollected it in a rare published autobiographical
statement: “From the beginning of my Indological studies I have been quite
convinced that Hindu society was much less divided ideologically, that the top
and the bottom were not so utterly alien to each other than was usually
contended.”
Associates
Her own interpretation of Hinduism is close to the view
expressed by Louis Dumont in his Homo
Hierachicus (1966 for the French edition), which remains the most
impressive understanding ever published on the caste system. This intellectual
association of a Sanskrit scholar and of an anthropologist who both did
fieldwork (mainly in South India), was long considered as typical of the French
scholarship on India, although this blending of skills was not at all uncommon
among Indian scholars since the very beginning of the 20th century. Yet the
intellectual framework which underlines both Madeleine Biardeau's and Louis
Dumont's understanding of Hinduism has been, and still is, debated among
scholars of India who questioned the unilateral Brahmanical grounding of their
scholarly approaches. Madeleine Biardeau was Directeur d'études at the fifth
section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at Paris, the stronghold of
Indologists since the end of the 19th century, and in 1969 she succeeded Louis
Dumont as head of the Centre for Indian and South Asian Studies at the Ecole
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her death marks almost the complete
disappearance of a whole generation of French scholars who profoundly redefined
the intellectual understanding of (classical Hindu)
Roland Lardinois is a Sociologist at the
http://beta.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article114491.ece?homepage=true