Hugo and India

'What a shadow this Germany! She is the India of the West', Victor Hugo writes in William Shakespeare (1864), while also describing Beethoven, 'the great German', as a deaf man who 'heard infinity.' While the notion of India being portrayed as repulsive in an essay on excess and exuberance may be surprising, it is nothing new: India evokes in Hugo a sense of intense aversion, but simultaneously also the guilt of a secret affinity. He imagines the country as an immense sepulchre: The poem Puits de l'Inde in Les Rayons et les Ombres (1840) indeed opens by associating the 'wells of India' with 'tombs'. He considers Indian literature, meanwhile, to be barbaric. When asked by his publisher Lacroix to add a few pages on Indian epics to William Shakespeare , the writer stated: 'The poems of India [...] have the ominous fulness of the possible, as imagined by insanity or related in the vision. These works seem to have been composed in common with beings to whom our world is no longer accustomed." Drawing on the medieval image of a teratological India, Hugo creates a dark, anonymous, superstitious, deformed or indeed shapeless India whose literary works are 'expanses of poetry rather than poems.'

Kept at arm's length, India thus features little in Hugo's oeuvre. But there are a few mentions of it in his novels, sourced from traveller texts (Jacquemont, Pavie) and popular-science texts (Eckstein, Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, Pauthier): the 'Maruts' or wind gods appear in The Toilers of the Sea , while the 'cheylas' or 'disciples' – chela – are conflated with child abductors in The Man Who Laughs.

Conversely, the 'New Series' of The Legend of the Ages (1877) includes a long poem penned in 1870, entitled Suprématie ('Supremacy'), which is effectively a literal rewrite of a narrative passage of the KenaUpanishad that Victor Hugo read in the form of Les Livres sacrés de l'Orient (1847) by G. Pauthier. The Upanishads are speculative texts written as extensions to the Vedas between the 6^th and 3^rd centuries BC: a source markedly distinct from the ancient mythologies the poet seeks to demystify in The Legend of the Ages. However, rather than acknowledging an apophatic conception of the absolute differing very little from his own, Hugo mythologises his source in this unique 'Indian' poem, turning the ontological unfathomability of the Brahmaninto a real clash of the gods, a battle for supremacy akin to those pitting giants against gods in Greek mythology. Moving away from the notion of approaching the absolute speculatively through the divine in the style of the Upanishad, where divinity is not a supreme principle, Hugo creates major tension by making Indra, the supreme god of the Vedas, the story's protagonist, who vies with the 'apparition' for certain divine attributes. Having become a stranger to both the poet and itself, the poem cements the contradictions of a writer haunted by the act of writing – or rewriting – a divine myth.

Published in january 2023