Nerval and India | Patrimoines Partagés

Claudine Le Blanc, professor of comparative literature at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Throughout the long history of Indian literature's introduction to France in the 19th century, Nerval, along with Joseph Méry, remains the translator of the first Indian play ever to have been performed on a French stage.

Le Chariot d’enfant (1850) is inspired by a prakaraṇa, a comedy of manners entitled Mṛcchakaṭikā, 'The Little Clay Cart', which introduced Alexandre Langlois' 1828 translation of Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus by Horace Hayman Wilson, published in Calcutta in 1827. Nerval paid tribute to this in his theatre periodical Le Monde dramatique in 1835, with three anonymous articles, dated 6 June, 10 June and 10 October, centred on Mrichchkati or Chariot d'enfant , the first of the Chefs-d'œuvre du théâtre indien.

There have been comments in the past highlighting the paradoxical nature of Nerval, a lover of the occult, focusing on a secular, political, satirical India, though it is difficult to ascertain the exact role played by Méry, who wrote a successful Indian fiction trilogy from 1843 to 1847. In both the play and the poet's work, India remains a vague orientalist reference and a succession of exotic names such as 'Varanasi', 'Patani' and 'Mahdewa' in the highly syncretic poem 'Erythréa'. Like Gautier, however, Nerval had been fascinated by the troop of bayaderes who had come to Paris in 1838, and he makes reference to 'Typoo', the sultan of Mysore who died in 1799, in 'À Madame Ida Dumas'; in his view, India could not be reduced to a meditation on origins.

'Translated' by Méry and Nerval, Le Chariot d'enfant, through five acts and using alexandrines, indeed transplants into the French drama system the ten-act love story between courtesan Vasantasenā and Cārudatta, the virtuous merchant ruined by his generosity – a story whose pathos emerges when the dharma or universal order, in the kingdom comes under threat. Reimagined as an 'old minister', a servant of the state wholeheartedly devoted to his nation, Tcharoudata (Charudatta) becomes a mouthpiece for criticising the royal excess, which, in act IV, ends in a veritable indictment of the royalty by Vasantazena: 'Boast about the luck that brought you your crown! / The glory! … it is the shining light that virtue gives us. / Wealth! … in the eyes of the noblest of spirits, / This dignity that scorns gold. / Strength! … it is fiery love / That draws souls to us without touching the body' (ll. 1148-1153). These republican allusions did not go unnoticed: the Odéon Theatre in Paris was closed down after the eighteenth performance of Chariot d'enfant, and its director, Pierre Bocage, dismissed.

Reworked by its authors based on the classic French theatre model, the final product presented to audiences in 1850 went against the initial public appetite for Sanskrit theatre and its original poetics, frequently likened to Shakespeare and Romanticist aesthetic since being discovered in the late 18th century. Incorporating elements of both a pastiche and chimera – a Nervalian term if ever there were one –, as though the ancient Indian play had made Nerval's dream of a modern tragedy come true, Le Chariot d'enfant is an oeuvre centred more on the notion of the bystander than the purveyor, its inspiration reflected in the character of the bystander invented by the adapters: 'I am nothing. Everywhere is my realm; / And India belongs only to me…' (l. 401)

Published in january 2023