Author: Romain Rolland
Kalidas Nag/
Translator(s)/ Editors(s): Chinmoy Guha
Publisher: Sahitya Akademi
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9788126029228
Description
The young historian Kalidas Nag (1891-1966) met the Nobel prize winning French thinker, novelist, dramatist, musiocologist and biographer Romain Rolland (1866-1944) in Paris in April 1922, and soon became his most trusted Indian friend and 'intellectual lieutenant'. Not a simple complement from a man who had friends and correspondents such as Tolstoy, Maxim Gorki, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, Hermann Hesse, Sigmund Freud, Einstein... In the most critical of times, in the 20s and 30s, the two became close confidants. This invaluable correspondence (1922-1938) – Warm, intimate, undissembling is probably the most important of Rolland’s Correspondences with the Indians. Rolland talks about Tagore and Gandhi, a dream project of a Weltbibiliothek, the Tagore-Mussolini controversy, the contradictions of the French intelligentsia, Rolland's passionate interest in Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, the rise of Hitler, the squabbles over The Golden Book of Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose's visits to Villeneuve and soon. The latter unlocks his heart and speaks about his own anguish and pain and reveals why he did not come to India. This book contains an intensely personal bio-data of Rolland. He also reveals for the first time why he was constituted in France.