New Delhi: France could have influenced the Indian freedomstruggle but didn't, and Parisalso ignored a warning from freedom fighter Maulana Abul Kalam Azad againstdividing the world on East-West lines, a new book contends. 

"What could have turned into a liaisons dangereuses didnot translate into a real challenge to British dominance over India,"French academician Samuel Berthet maintains in the just published CulturalDynamics and Strategies of the Indian Elite (1870-1947).

In spite of this, the India-France channels that were openedin the late 18th century "should certainly be explored once again,underestimating neither the weight of the socio-political motivations thatconditioned their making, nor the cultural richness of the exchanges that havetaken place", the book says.

The book has been published under the aegis of the Frenchforeign ministry's Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), which isprimarily oriented towards the study of issues concerning the contemporarydynamics of development in Indiaand South Asia.

"If France had been more tolerant toward the Indiannationalists, both in its metropolitan territory and in its settlements inIndia, the outcome of the resistance that the (British) Raj faced in the firsttwo decades of the 20th century could have been different," writesBerthet, who has taught at Santiniketan's Visva Bharati and New Delhi'sJawaharlal Nehru University.

"However, this did not happen because the major legacyof the last quarter of the 19th century is the division of the world accordingto the colonial line", the author says. 

"The making of a fearsome image of India, and more broadly of the Orient, through asupposedly common conspiracy of nationalist movements in India and Egypt, along with Muslimcommunities in the French colonies, is part of this conspiracy," he adds.

"The original perception of France regarding its interests inthe world tended to be conditioned by and substituted with a vision of a worlddivided into two blocks. This East-West and coloniser-colonised divide providedthe blueprint for further antagonistic perceptions such as democracies versuscommunist and other non-democratic countries, and Muslims versusnon-Muslims," the author argues.

Francealso ignored a clear warning from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a stalwart of theIndian freedom movement, of the dangers of such divides.

"We aspire for liberty and peace; we dream about aworld order where the East and the West, instead of being at loggerheads, wouldunite their forces and genius. However, who will accomplish this rapprochementand this union?" the book quotes Azad as asking in a communication to theFrench Government.

"The British have shown they are incapable of doing it.Not long ago, we still counted on France, on its liberal spirit, onits generosity. The years that have passed since the Great War have made theEast's great hopes crumble," Azad lamented in his letter to the Frenchministry of public instruction, which was responsible for the study of Islamicmovements. 

Thus, the dialogue between Indiaand France,both of which claimed to being great civilisations, did not proceedsmoothly", Berthet points out.

"The quest for universal humanism the starting pointfrom which a rapprochement and dialogue could have been established  was soon overtaken by political matters shapedby the forces of colonialism and nationalism," he said.

"India found itself at the confluence of France'srelationships with the rest of the world, whether it was the antagonism betweenthe East and the West, between the colonisers and the colonised, between Franceand Germany, or, still further, the antagonism between the communist world andthe 'free' world," the book says.