Archaka

Archaka (Invoker of Light) and Alexandre Kalda were the names of this remarkable author born on 27th December 1943. His first novel published at the age of 16 by Grasset, the prestigious French publisher and then a whole series accepted by the principal publishing houses of France (several by Albin Michel) and hailed by the critics. He arrived at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in India in 1975 where he was based and spent most of his life until he left his body at the age of 53 on 7th February 1996.

In the introduction to his "Le Dieu de Dieu" he gives us some glimpses into his life:

"I belong to the generation of genocides: the one which came to birth during the Second World War and awoke to the awareness of the world as a perpetual battlefield. On the bombardment in Europe there soon followed the explosion of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, while the liberated countries learned with at least as much of a sense of devastation about what happened in the concentration camps. In an instant, a whole town could be destroyed under the stupefied eyes of the nations. Within a few years a whole race almost disappeared without the other nations knowing about it.

To the genetic code inscribed in our cells was added in our subconscious the most formidable horror of all times. Too small to know what had thus entered into us, we reacted blindly and declared war in every possible way on the adult world.

I was twelve years old when I scribbled my first book. Having broken with his family the hero. hardly older than myself, went to live in slums. I was sixteen when I signed my first contract for a novel. without much literary value probably, but somehow I did write these words which were later at the heart of all my activities : 'I have killed death . I have not killed but destroyed, not death but the idea of death in me'

Fortunately I did not become famous..."

Fortunately because Archaka was a lifelong seeker. His search led him through Tangiers to India where he was brought by Sri Aurobindo's books. After meeting Nolini, the disciple who was closest to him and who gave him his name Archaka (he who invokes the light), he began gradually to become more and more a part of the Ashram where for 10 years he was appreciated as a very good teacher and the students loved his music lessons especially. In a letter of 1988 he writes to his great friend Christine de Rivoyre, the French writer:

"I work and enjoy myself and all is hope to me. Nothing weighs on me. Everything is essential. Oh, the Indian taste of things! How did I ever live in the West!... Here what dominates is the impression of light. At last I see the light of day."