François Gautier Quotes

I believe that the ancient knowledge that stands behind Hinduism is a truth the world needs: why life ? What happens after death? What is karma, what is dharma ? How the divine manifests himself or herself, at different times under different names, with different scriptures…. That knowledge which once roamed the world, from Mesopotamia to Greece, only survives today in India.

Thus, even today, one can hardly find a single reference to Indian philosophy in modern text books. “For instance, writes Roger-Pol Droit, one cannot come across a single mention, in the Dictionary of Philosophers, of the Buddhist philosopher Asanga, whose works are probably as important as those of Aristotle, nor his books can be found in libraries...

When I first went there I discovered an entirely new approach of looking at life. It was as if I had sudden awakened from deep slumber.

SRINAGAR, May 30, Election Day. It's a small Hindu temple on the banks of the river Jhelum, lost amongst the hundred and one mosques of Srinagar. Its entrance is heavily guarded by BSF forces and it is protected by sandbags on all sides, as it has been hit recently by a rocket fired by militants. Inside, a handful of Kashmiri Pandits are still trying to preserve this sacred place, where a natural lingam is said to have emerged 3000 years ago and where their forefathers have worshipped for 20 generations. "We were once 30,000 in this district of Srinagar," remembers Shyam, a Hindu priest, "but today we are only two hundred. All our brothers and sisters had to flee. Our houses were burnt, our women raped, our sons killed". Shyam and his friends offer us a cup of tea and some biscuits and we leave this temple which seems to be doomed, wondering why nobody ever reports about it.

This was indeed a masterly stroke on the part of the British : thanks to the Aryan theory, they showed on the one hand that Indian civilisation was not that ancient and that it was posterior to the cultures which influenced the western world – Mesopotamia, Sumeria, or Babylon – and on the other hand, that whatever good things India had developed – Sanskrit, literature, or even its architecture, had been influenced by the West.

Nevertheless, they did their fair share of harm to India, which has not yet really recovered from two centuries of Raj. Their brutality, whether the hangings of Indian nationalists, or the incredible ferocity which followed the great Indian Mutiny, or the massacre of Jallianwala Bagh, are today part of history. They ruled for two centuries with the unshakeable conviction of their own racial superiority which made Fitzjames Stephen, the philosopher of the Indian Civil Service, say: “Ours is essentially an absolute government, which has for base not the consent of the Indians, but their conquest. It does not want to represent the concept of the indigenous population of life and government and can never do, because then it would represent idolatry and barbarism. It represents a belligerent civilisation and nothing could be more dangerous than to have in one’s administration, at the head of a government founded on conquest—implying in all points the superiority of the conquering race, its institution, its principles, that men who hesitate to impose themselves openly.”

At some point, after years or even centuries of submitting like sheep to slaughter, Hindus—whom the Mahatma once gently called cowards—erupt in uncontrolled fury. And it hurts badly. It happened in Gujarat. It happened in Jammu, then in Kandhamal, Mangalore, and Malegaon. It may happen again elsewhere.

At the end of the interview, I was won over and I understood that this man, who never puts himself forward and seemed most humble, had cultivated kindness and compassion since his early childhood, tirelessly drawing from the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism.

Finally, Westernisation through television and advertisements, is sweeping across India, and this may be the greatest danger, as westernisation has killed the souls of many Asian countries.

Then, one of the devotees quietly started humming a bhajan, maybe as ancient as the city of Kashi itself:"Om namah Shivaya, Om namah Shivaya "; and soon all of us joined him softly, so as not to break the magic spell of the silent silver night. After a moment, Sri Sri closed his eyes and seeing him totally absorbed, perhaps in some mystical realm, touched our soul as nothing else could. There was an atmosphere of stillness and serenity. In a corner, a girl started shedding quiet tears of ecstasy an elderly man joined his hands in a silent prayer, a wordless gesture of deeply felt gratitude; everyone shone with intense inner joy, bliss and wonder. As for me, to my surprise, the constant chattering in my mind had become quiet; my soul soared high in the air. Only this perfect moment WAS.

I often faced a lot of hostility from the sub-editors who would censor my articles.

François Gautier - Les mots du dernier Dalaï-lama (2018, Flammarion), Prologue

In Tripura, for instance, there were no Christians at independence, the maharaja of the state was a Hindu and there were innumerable temples all over the State. But from 1950, Christian missionaries (with Nehru’s blessings) went into the deep forests of Tripura and started converting the Kukis. Today, according to official figures, there are 120.000 Christians in Tripura, a 90% increase since 1991. The figures are even more striking in Arunachal Pradesh, where there were only 1710 Christians in 1961, but 115000 today, as well as 700 churches! What to say of Mizoram and Nagaland, where the entire local population is Christian! The amount of money being by poured by Christians into the North-East is staggering: The Saint Paul’s school of Tripura, for instance, gets an 80 lakhs endowment per semester. Which Hindu school can match this ? No country in the world would allow this. France, for instance, has a full-blown Minister who is in charge of hunting down "sects". And by sects, it is meant anything which does not belong to the great Christian family, particularly if it has Hindu "pagan" overtones…

Gautier, in his book A History of India as it Happened—not as it has been written, tears into the questionable narratives of Marxist historians and quotes many examples of negationism. He says: “We will never be able to assess the immense physical harm done to India by the Muslim invasions. Even more difficult is to estimate the moral and the spiritual damage done to Hindu India”. Finally, Gautier explains why negationism must be challenged. He says “it is not about vengeance, or of reawakening old ghosts, but of not repeating the same mistakes”. This is indeed central to the argument of Elst, Frawley, Gautier, and Bhyrappa. Secular, democratic India must know the truth and make peace with it.

American archaeologist Mark Kenoyer was able to prove in 1991 that the majority of archaeological sites of the so-called Harappan (or Dravidian) civilisation were not situated on the ancient bed of the Indus river, as first thought, but on the Saraswati. Another archaeologist , Paul-Henri Francfort, Chief of a franco-american mission (Weiss, Courty, Weterstromm, Guichard, Senior, Meadow, Curnow), which studied the Saraswati region at the beginning of the nineties, found out why the Saraswati had ‘disappeared’ : « around 2200 B.C., he writes, an immense drought reduced the whole region to aridity and famine » (Evidence for Harappan irrigation system in Haryana and Rajasthan -Eastern Anthropologist 1992). Thus around this date, most inhabitants moved away from the Saraswati to settle on the banks of the Indus and Sutlej rivers.