11 A school for noblemen, founded over a hundred years ago. I was admitted there because of some technical law, where even an ordinary Indian, even a Brahmin could be admitted. I was the only Hindu in the primary and high school classes.

4. When Malraux Meets Jawaharlal Nehru

1 ‘We Indians’.

2 See his Antimemoires (Gallimard, Paris, 1967).

3 Boulogne or Boulogne-sur-Seine, is just outside the official city of Paris.

4 Man’s destiny.

5 The Holy Grail: Saint Graal or the Holy Grail is supposed to be the vessel in which Joseph of Arimathea is believed to have gathered the blood of Christ after crucifixion. But there is another legend which says it was the begging bowl of the Buddha that went across Parthia to West Asia, and became so magical, it became known as the Holy Grail.

6 After the war when Jayaprakash Narayan, the socialist leader and disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, met Malraux in Paris, the very first question Malraux asked the Indian visitor was this: ‘What influence has Sankara on the Government of India today?’ Jayaprakash was so startled, he had no reply. He just smiled.

7 French Foreign Office.

8 Statecraft.

5. Mahatma Gandhi: Saint or Politician

1 See Note 5, p. 199.

2 ‘Moral light is the most wholesome and rectifying thing in the world.’ Woodrow Wilson.

3 The first ‘concentration camps’, as everyone knows, were founded in South Africa, during the Boer War.

4 Since I wrote this essay South Africa has become a republic where the Zulus, the Boers, the English-speaking citizens and Indians are all citizens.

5 Truth alone is victorious.

6 A Study of History, Vol. XII, p. 617.

6. The Silence of Mahatma Gandhi

1 This was in early 1942, when I had at his invitation, spent several months at Sevagram Ashram, near Wardha. I was then translating an excellent poem by Henri Frank, from French into English, for a New York magazine. Also the famous sixteenth-century poem, ‘The Story of the Good Cow’ of Kanakadasa from Kannada into English, and further help a friend to make a Hindi version of this great poem. Gandhiji, to whom I gave these two translations from the Kannada, said: ‘This represents me completely. Publish it.’ The ‘Story of the Good Cow’, abridged and translated into many, many languages (including Arabic, Spanish, French and Serbian), was distributed by the UNESCO, Paris, as Features all over the world.

7. Wisdom and Power: A Marriage of Necessity

1 See Note 7, p. 200.

2 Dark Night of the Soul, translated by E. Allison Peers.

3 City of God, XIX. 20, translated by Marcus Dods.

4 ‘Physics tells us however that—save at absolute zero, an inaccessible limit—no microscopic entity can fail to undergo quantum perturbations, whose accumulation within a microscopic system will slowly but surely alter its structure.’ Chance and Necessity, by Jacques Monod (Knopf).

5 The controversy over bussing black and coloured children to schools in white neighbourhoods.

6 As explained in the introduction, I am sorry to have inadvertently changed the story of Nala and Damayanti.