Jean-Claude Carrière has been a regular visitor to India for over twenty years. In this book, he takes us on a personal vagabondage, an inventory of his cultural and geographical curiosities, past and present. The ideal passport for all kinds of escapism. India is a challenge to the eye and to reason: so many peoples, so many languages, so many customs, so many beliefs, so many activities. So much of the past in so much of the present.
You'd think such a country didn't exist. And yet Indian democracy works, and all these peoples are one. By what miracle? This dictionary - in which love does not want to be blind - attempts to answer this question, through a constant, very Indian zigzag between places, gods, people and chance. We are constantly changing subjects, moving from concept to anecdote, guided by an invisible but all-powerful glue that is the great epic narrative known as the Mahâbharata.
India, an illusion that only finds its reality in a poem. The supreme challenge, accomplished here.
BOOK IN FRENCH
Author: Jean-Claude Carrière