François Gautier

François Gautier (born 1950) is a journalist and Hindutva activist based in India who served as the South Asian correspondent for multiple reputed French-language dailies.

He is also the founder of a private museum which seeks to portray Indian history in a nationalist manner. Gautier has written books on the history and Indology; he has established NGO namely Foundation for Advancement of Cultural Ties.

Life

Early life Francois Gautier was born in 1950 in Paris and received an upper-class Catholic education. He was subsequently sent to reputed boarding schools across Europe, from where he was expelled several times. Deeply impressed with Sri Aurobindo's writings, he chose to reside over Sri Aurobindo Ashram where his encounters with Mirra Alfassa influenced him to further prolong his stay. Gautier has also written columns for The New Indian Express, DNA India, and others. He is also the editor of La Revue de l'Inde.

Writing Gautier became interested in Indology when he began to travel outside Auroville. Sita Ram Goel contacted Gautier after reading some of his articles in a magazine called Blitz and asked for permission to reprint the articles in his book. Gautier instead wrote the book The Wonder That Is India. Later, the website Hinduism Today republished it online. Following this, Gautier wrote several other books. Gautier is also working on two books, one about Kalaripayattu, an Indian martial art from Kerala, and another on French influence in India, with the help of photographer Raghu Rai.

Photography and painting exhibitions Gautier has established the Foundation for Advancement of Cultural Ties (FACT), a NGO dedicated to portraying Indian history in a "correct" manner. He eventually planned to establish a museum similar to Holocaust museums. In 2013, during the visit of the 14th Dalai Lama, Gautier and his wife, organised an exhibition on the origin of Buddhism in India and its spread to Tibet with the help of materials from the Tibet Museum of Dharamsala, to educate the local people about Tibetan culture.

Views and opinions Gautier, who is critical of the partition of India, has advocated for Indian reunification, stating "as long as Pakistan and India are divided there will be other Kashmirs, other Ayodhyas, other wars with Pakistan—nuclear maybe—and India will never be at peace with its own Muslim community, which is a permanent danger to herself." In abidance with a Hinducentric scholarship, he has criticized the narrative of Indian historiography to be leftist,

A front-line Hindutva activist, Gautier also deems Hinduism to be under threat from Islam, Christian missionaries, Marxism and westernisation. He calls for use-of-force by the oppressed Hindus and opines of the Buddhist-Jain philosophies of Ahimsa to have actually enabled exploitation of India by foreign invaders. One of his most prominent views is about the Hindu Holocaust perpetrated by Islamic invaders which exceeded the extents of the Jew Holocaust and all other genocides. Gautier has also rejected the western-oriental scholarship of Max Müller, Arthur Llewellyn Basham as ill-portrayals of the history of the nation which birthed the theory of Hindu imperialism.

He has criticized the United Progressive Alliance government (2009-2014) and claimed that terrorism continued unabated whilst Muslim mullahs were allowed to preach freely and Hindu gurus were being targeted by the media and police. He has earlier criticized the usage of the term "Godman" by Indian media to describe self-proclaimed Hindu gurus proposing that Indian journalists often were not proud of their culture and had called for imparting a more fairer treatment.

Reception Manisha Basu, writing in The Rhetoric of Hindu India, deems him to be part of a suave derivative of Hindutva and notes of his consistent attacks upon left-liberal commentators—people who have supposedly leveraged their social privilege to dominate the socio-political consciousness of the "Anglophone national bourgeoisie" for long enough—in the process of becoming one of the few self-appointed interpreters of the Indian Right. Malini Parthasarathy too notes him to be a prominent voice of Hindutva, Basu remarks of his attacks against the constructs of Brahmanic privilege (and other intersectionalities) along with the radical perspectivising of proper historiography to be mere statistical extensions of first-hand-experiences have a high degree of similarity to Jay Dubashi's writings and his broader views about the journalistic model of history.

He was subject to severe criticism after having objected to the proposed induction of Aamir Khan, a Muslim Bollywood actor over a planned dramatization of Mahabharata, a Hindu epic. He had earlier asked for the boycott of PK, a Bollywood film starring the same actor, due to its depiction of a Hindu-Muslim love affair and accused Ashoka University of teaching an anti-Hindu anti-Brahmin book.

In 2017, Gautier claimed over a blog at The Times of India to have come across a hitherto-hidden manuscript of Nostradamus in a trunk, that (successfully) prophesied the statesmanship of Narendra Modi. The claims were reported across multiple news-outlets. but it was taken in earnest by some leftist commentators who accused him of having tampered with the original passages for fulfilling his political agenda.

Awards

2003 Panchjanya's Nachiketa Awards: The Bipin Chandra Pal Award, named after the historical figure Bipin Chandra Pal, was given to Gautier. He donated the money to FACT.