Romain Rolland - Kalidas Nag correspondence : the tower and the sea / edited by Chinmoy Guha

As plasters crack and beams crumble in the last decade of the twentieth century, we open the magic casket of a lost correspondence of the 20s and 30s. 'disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves'.... It offers a scenario for humanity so different from the desacrilized one we have enacted in recent times!

This is a curious interface, on one level possibly more revealing than Rolland's more celebrated encounters with great Indians like Tagore and Gandhi. For once, there is no barrier of language, which Tagore and Rolland were so weary of ('We were like two deaf men who could not communicate," wrote the latter about his meetings with Tagore. 20 June 1930, Inde, Paris, 1960, p. 277). The letters are warm. reassuring, even intimate, and sometimes twitting, like all good letters should be, resonating with tenderness.

Romain Rolland (1866-1944), then 56, the 1915 Nobel laureate of France, who had overnight become a traitor to his countrymen for daring to transcend chauvinism during the First World War with his Au-dessus de la Mêlée, met his young admirer Kalidas Nag (1891-1966), 31, then a re searcher in Indology at the Sorbonne, 'at (his) sister's place' (Inde, p. 28) in Avenue de l'Observatoire, Paris (Nag's letter to Madeleine Rolland, 7 April 1922, Kalidas Nag Collection) on 4 April 1922- the year of the publication of The Waste Land. Ulysses and Siddhartha. It was one of those critical years', to quote Kalidas (Memoirs II. Calcutta, 1994. p.9). 'when Mahatma Gandhi took the lead in national politics and Tagore began sounding the clarion call of prophecy.