The 19th-century novelist Honoré de Balzac was Catholic, French to the core and obsessed with the material details of French society. Yet there is something profoundly Hindu in the way he sought to understand the world.
Balzac was born in the final year of the 18th century. As he began his career, European literature was turning away from the abstraction of the previous century’s Enlightenment and towards realism. Realist writers, including the French novelist Stendhal, insisted that to understand the human condition, they first had to know local customs, political and economic pressures – and the inner lives of individuals.
