Désirée Levi's intelligent and passionate description of her 1921-1922 journeys, DANS L'INDE: DE CEYLAN AU NEPAL, was first published in Paris a century ago and appears here for the first time in English translation. Madame Levi's honest, unvarnished prose paints a vivid, detailed picture of India's cultural, political, and social life at a crucial moment in the struggle for independence and recognition. She had a front-row seat to Gandhi's anti-colonial efforts, visited Hindus, Jains, Parsees and Sikhs in their homes and temples, and socialized with the common men and women too often ignored by Europeans of the period. Thanks to her husband, Sylvain Levi, a renowned Sanskrit scholar and author of a monumental history of Nepal, she gains access to aspects of life in India and Nepal that otherwise would have cluded her. Their four months as humble visiting professors at Santiniketan, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore's sprawling campus at the epicenter of the Bengali Renaissance, gave her access to India's intellectual, cultural, and political elites. A completely different experience awaited them in Nepal, where, after a harrowing trek over the Himalayas, they enjoyed four months of luxury and scholarly work in Kathmandu as guests of the royal family. Short visits to Sri Lanka and intrepid journeys across India and Nepal in every conveyance known to man completed their year-long odyssey she faithfully recorded in this book. Illustrated with period photos by E.O. Hoppé, and enhanced by Pratapaditya Pal's valuable observations, Désirée's great-great-grandson, Pascal Fuchshuber's family insights, and extensive notes by the translator, IN INDIA: FROM SRI LANKA TO NEPAL is an important contribution to the scholarship and understanding of India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka of a century ago.
Désirée Lévi (1867-1943) did not set out to be an adventurer, anthropologist, sociologist, political scientist, or author, but she became all of those. Born Désirée Bloch to a Jewish family in Paris in 1867, she married M. Sylvain Lévi, a renowned Sanskrit scholar and historian of Nepal. Her narrative of their adventures in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka in 1921-1922 was published in 1925 as DANS L'INDE DE CEYLAN AU NEPAL. It was her only book, and stands as a monument to her intelligence, humanity, and the beauty of her writing.
I have always lived vicariously through literary characters, particularly those living in the waning days of colonialism. Naively, Conrad's Lord Jim. Malraux's Claude Vannec, and any number of characters in short stories by Maugham and Saki were my earliest heroes. The closest I ever came to leading an anti-colonial revolt in the Congo or Indochina was licensing the distribution rights to American films internationally for a series of independent film companies. At least I got to visit many of these places, and still travel often to Africa and Asia for the United Nations as an educator on film and TV copyright for local producers. The most exciting part of my adventures is the taxi ride on LA's notorious 405 Freeway to the airport. Adventure has become a relative concept in the world of cell phones, the internet, and paved roads.
As I got older, I discovered that many adventurers were real people. Alexandra David-Néel, Heinrich Harrar, and Harrison Forman had ventured into ""For-bidden Tibet, and were welcomed by the locals. I also discovered that my early heroes often represented the worst aspects of European and American arrogance. Simply treating people with respect and warmth seemed to work wonders - it had always worked for me on my many sales trips overseas.
I immersed myself in the study of the most amazing period in human history, the first half of the 20th century. It was a time of heroes and villains, artists and philosophers, and, above all, social transformation on a scale the world had never seen. My interest in Indochina eventually led to chair the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Southern Asian Art Council for four years. I was also on the board of the Ethnic Arts Council, gaining privileged access to real experts and the fabulous collections of South Asian and Himalayan art at LACMA and the Norton Simon Museum.
At the risk of boring you with my life story, I thought it might be helpful to the reader to understand how I came to translate a book by an obscure French woman whose name is unfamiliar even to scholars, though her husband remains a towering figure in the field more than eighty years after his death. I have visited sixty-some countries and spent more than 3 years of my life in France. I have traveled to Asia more than 30 times including my own trips to Sri Lanka and Nepal, but have only visited India in books and films, an embarrassing oversight that I hope to correct soon. I am familiar with that vast country's art, history, geography, and even the current political situation, and I know that I will be overwhelmed when I finally get there. I'm already overwhelmed by the Indian art and culture at my doorstep in Los Angeles.
Since acquiring the famed Heeramaneck collection in 1969, LACMA has care-fully built a renowned collection of South Asian and Himalayan art. That is thanks in large part to the efforts of Dr. Pratapaditya Pal, curator of the collection for 25 years, after which he took a similar role at the nascent Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. That was just before I was associated with LACMA, and I did not meet him until 2015. We found that we were neighbors (in Los Angeles terms), and initiated weekly lunches, both of us having a taste for the cheap, spicy, ethnic restaurants that populate LA's strip malls. Knowing my appetite for true-life adventure stories, Dr. Pal, introduced me to Dans l'Inde: de Ceylan au Népal, by a French woman, Désirée Lévi (1867-1943), who traveled in Sri Lanka, India and Nepal in the 1920s with her husband, Sylvain Lévi (1863-1935), the Chair of San-skrit Language and History at the Collège de France. I managed to purchase a used copy on the internet, and by our next meeting had read the book through twice. Dr. Pal often reminds me now that I would not shut up about Mme. Lévi and her adventures. She was modern, an internationalist, unusual for Europeans writing about India at the time, but perfectly attuned to my sensibilities and my favorite authors from the period. Mme. Lévi's sense of humor, keen observational skills, and passionate writing instantly connected me to her. At that point in time, Dr. Pal did not of an English translation, so I set myself to the task. In subsequent discus-sions with colleagues, he was told that one might have been prepared for Maharaja Chandra Shumshere (1863-1929), but we have not been able to locate a copy.
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