“It is always literature that offers the best vision of landscapes,” writes Patrick Deville. Biographer in motion, smuggler of seditious people, discoverers of miracles, “great disruptors of History” and adventurers, the author of Pura Vida and of Plague & cholera (Seuil, 2004 and 2012, Femina prize) has no equal when it comes to drawing us into his whims.
This time we find him tracking down a little-known revolutionary, Pandurang Khankhoje (1883-1967), an agronomist and co-founder of the Ghadar Movement, an association of Indian expatriates fighting against British domination in their country.
But it’s also a new pretext for leaving your room, with your copy of the book under your arm. Mahabharatathe Sanskrit epic at the sources of Hinduism, and smuggle us away in its luggage.
From the snowy foothills of the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, passing through the streets of Calcutta, continuing his world tour on the back of his usual “flying carpet”, the French writer adds, with samsaraa new “novel without fiction”, the ninth, to his project “Abracadabra” – which must ultimately number twelve.
Landing first in Mumbai in 2020, thus putting an end to “a spell which for years” had barred him from India, Deville returns there in 2022 to set out in pursuit of some ghosts from the books.
“Among the billion and a half Indians I chose this one,” he tells us about Pandurang Khankhoje, whose name and “romantic life” remain largely unknown in today’s India — unlike Chandra Bose, another Indian nationalist revolutionary, who left his name at Calcutta airport.
Forced to flee the British Raj in 1906, before taking refuge in the United States where he became an agronomist, before settling in Mexico, a hero of agricultural science immortalized on murals by Diego Rivera, Khankhoje found himself fighting alongside the Germans (i.e. against the British) during the First World War.
Through reading sessions and active “clinophilia” in hotel rooms for smokers, fertile encounters or “river parenthesis” going up the Ganges (because it “is proven that life is always more exhilarating from that we are on the water”), Deville pulls out all the stops. The author of samsara keeps his eyes open to the vestiges of English colonization, always and everywhere trying to understand “a little something” about the contemporary history of India.
More than ever, the 66-year-old writer, who travels to write, mixes countries, dates, names and destinies, bringing together in his own way Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, William Walker, Pierre Loti, Tolstoy and Alexander Yersin.
With his adventurer’s reflexes, his well-stocked address book, his shady and friendly airs of an “honorable correspondent”, it is Patrick Deville, this time, who turns the big wheel of samsara. Master of a stunning gesture, sometimes bordering on name-dropping, it plunges us “into the great ocean of time”. Follow the leader.