Madeleine Biardeau was a prominent Indologist

Indology

Indology is the academic study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent , and as such is a subset of Asian studies....

 from France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

.

Early life

Madeleine Biardeau was born into a middle-class family of small entrepreneurs. She was educated at the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure of Sèvres, in 1943, where she studied philosophy. Here, she was attracted to the Eastern

Eastern world

__FORCETOC__The term Eastern world refers very broadly to the various cultures or social structures and philosophical systems of Eastern Asia or geographically the Eastern Culture...

 spirituality and started learning Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

 in order to study the Hindu philosophy

Hindu philosophy

Hindu philosophy is divided into six schools of thought, or , which accept the Vedas as supreme revealed scriptures. Three other schools do not accept the Vedas as authoritative...

.

As an Indologist

Curious about India, Madeleine Biardeau joined the University of Travancore for two years in the 1950s, and studied Sanskrit texts with pandits. She visited India almost every year until the 1990s, and worked closely with pandits at the Deccan College (Pune)

Deccan College (Pune)

Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute is a post-graduate institute of Archeology and Linguistics in Pune, India.Established October 6, 1821, Deccan College is one of the oldest institutions of modern learning in India...

 and the French Institute of Pondicherry

French Institute of Pondicherry

The French Institute of Pondicherry UMIFRE 21 CNRS-MAEE, is a French financially autonomous institution in India, under the joint supervision of the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and the French National Centre for Scientific Research...

. She visited places of worship in towns and villages, surveying people from different castes and collecting information about the various cults and rituals. Meanwhile, she also taught at the École pratique des hautes études

École pratique des hautes études

The École pratique des hautes études is a Grand Établissement in Paris, France. It is counted among France's most prestigious research and higher education institutions....

.

She studied the Puranas

Puranas

The Puranas are a genre of important Hindu, Jain and Buddhist religious texts, notably consisting of narratives of the history of the universe from creation to destruction, genealogies of kings, heroes, sages, and demigods, and descriptions of Hindu cosmology, philosophy, and geography.Puranas...

 and the Advaita Vedanta

Advaita Vedanta

Advaita Vedanta is considered to be the most influential and most dominant sub-school of the Vedānta school of Hindu philosophy. Other major sub-schools of Vedānta are Dvaita and ; while the minor ones include Suddhadvaita, Dvaitadvaita and Achintya Bhedabheda...

 philosophy in detail. She translated the works of Mandana Misra

Maṇḍana Miśra

was a Hindu philosopher, who wrote on the Mīmāmsā and Advaita systems of thought, and was a student and follower of Ādi Śankara. Maṇḍana Miśra, also known as Suresvaracharya, was a follower of the Karma Mimamsa school of philosophy and a staunch defender of the holistic sphota doctrine of language...

, Vacaspati Misra

Vacaspati Misra

Vācaspati Miśra was an Indian philosopher who founded one of the main Advaita Vedanta schools, the Bhāmatī school , and whose work was an important forerunner of the Navya-Nyāya system of thought.Vācaspati was a Maithili Brahmin who lived near the frontier between India and Nepal Vācaspati Miśra...

, and Bhartṛhari (grammarian) into French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on The Theory of Knowledge and the Philosophy of Speech in Classical Brahmanism in 1964 (in French)

The Hindu epics constituted a main area of Madeleine Biardeau's scholarship. She translated the Ramayana

Ramayana

The Ramayana is an ancient Sanskrit epic. It is ascribed to the Hindu sage Valmiki and forms an important part of the Hindu canon , considered to be itihāsa. The Ramayana is one of the two great epics of India and Nepal, the other being the Mahabharata...

 of Valmiki

Valmiki

Valmiki is celebrated as the poet harbinger in Sanskrit literature. He is the author of the epic Ramayana, based on the attribution in the text of the epic itself. He is revered as the Adi Kavi, which means First Poet, for he discovered the first śloka i.e...

 into French (1991), in collaboration with two other scholars: Marie-Claude Porcher and Philippe Benoit. Her last major work comprised the two edited volumes of the Mahabharata

Mahabharata

The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India and Nepal, the other being the Ramayana. The epic is part of itihasa....

published in 2002.

Madeleine Biardeau withdrew to Cherveux in 2008, and died there in 2010.