By no stretch of imagination can Jules Michelet (1798-1874), the famous French historian, can be called a racist. He was one year old when the French Revolution was slowly coming to an end. Later, he would go on to become one of the most influential historians of the event. He coined the term ‘Renaissance’ and as his Wikipedia page will tell you such was his influence that Vincent Van Gogh in his drawing ‘Sorrow’ (1882), inscribed the lines from Jules Michelet's book La Femme.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere in which Michelet grew up had internalised prejudices as fundamental truths which, when viewed from our century, would definitely be seen as racist.



He himself had them in him.



Yet, here, we are going to see how despite his unconsciously internalised prejudices, the reading of the Ramayana rejuvenated in him a sense of common humanity and even expanded the boundaries of his love to embrace all living beings. The book in question is Bible of Humanity (Bible de l'humanité, 1864), an ambitious attempt to provide a historical sketch of religions.

In his depiction of India, what we see are two forces at work: one, the vision of common humanity that is very much Hindu and in the second, the idea of races with their essences stereotyped. And through the Ramayana, the author arrives at a liberating vision. No wonder, this book was not much appreciated in the West.

Michelet begins with a romantic view of ancient India which was then very common among the European scholars and is critical of British attempts to reduce the antiquity of India. But what is more important in his approach is that while most European Indophiles tend to see India as an ancient ‘Aryan’ glory land now reduced to a sickening inferior mass of humanity, Michelet is critical of such a conception. To him the British ‘make it appear that the Indian Bible is more modern than the Jewish’. In truth, however, ‘primeval India was the original cradle, the matrix of the world, the principal and dominant source of races, of ideas, and of languages’.



He then points out that while the British wanted to limit India’s antiquity, they picturised India as being ‘buried forever in her Elephantina grottos, her Vedas and her Ramayana, like Egypt in her pyramids.’