2023-10-05 01:56:00
Released from historiansdossierNinth stage of his “Abracadabra” project, the novelist’s new opus continues his quest into the intertwining of history.
On the occasion of the “Rendez-vous de l’histoire”, which is being held in Blois from October 4 to 8, 2023, Libération journalists invite around thirty historians to take another look at current events. Find this special issue on newsstands Thursday October 5 and all the articles from this edition in this file.
History, its unexpected events and their forgotten protagonists, often surpasses fiction, sometimes entangled in its routines and hackneyed recipes. The scholarly writing of history is not, however, foreign to the imagination: how can we understand the past other than by filling in the gaps in the archives and inventing new hypotheses? It is precisely in the intertwining of historical documentation and literary creation that Patrick Deville’s “novel without fiction” has been constructed for twenty-three years. Bringing the contemporary world from 1860 to the present day into a series of twelve works is his colossal “Abracadabra” project.
In his ninth opus, Deville takes us with him to South Asia to meet the icons of the Raj that the colonizers have the greatest difficulty in controlling: Lakshmi Bai, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, Subhas Chandra Bose, etc. However, to better get rid of the national romance of a country today in the hands of the BJP nationalists, the writer highlights the journey of a little-known character, Pandurang Khankhoje, which professional historians are slow to grasp.
Samsara thus tells the story of an expatriate patriot, like tens of thousands of other young people, in search of ideological, financial and military resources throughout the world, to free their country from British rule. According to the author, Pandurang embodies the chemically pure figure of the revolutionary adventurer, unlike the famous stooges cited above. In doing so, Deville sketches a global history of India that reveals, from Yokohama to Mexico City, via San Francisco, Durban, Constantinople and Saigon, the extraordinary ramifications of the diaspora, its transnational alliance strategies, and its crucial role in globalization. A traffic novel written by an author condemned to the immobility of a ghostly New Delhi hotel during the Covid-19 pandemic. And if sometimes the writing smells like a postcolonial adventure story, with its luxury hotels, its friendly expats, its benevolent diplomats and its Indian friends of France, it is to show the conditions of production of investigation – a real way of life for Deville –, usually erased by writers.
This reflexivity is found in his unique method. Multiscalar, its approach articulates the omniscient point of view of the satellite which, vertically, captures the smallest detail – a tiny crab on the foreshore –, multiple biographical itineraries meticulously recorded and the “great” story whose air it denaturalizes you’re welcome, certain major categories. Thus the “Sepoy Revolt” (1857) of our school textbooks, still adopting the English perspective today, turns out to be the “first war of independence” in the minds of Indian anti-colonialists. “Each of these lives deserved to be saved through storytelling,” writes Deville, thereby giving a beautiful definition of the work of a historian. Looking forward to the next stop on this world tour, in Arabia!
Patrick Deville, “Samsara”, Le Seuil, 192 pp., €19 (ebook: €13.99)
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