Satprem

Satprem (30 October 1923 – 9 April 2007) was a French author and a disciple of Mirra Alfassa.

Satprem was born Bernard Enginger in Paris and had a seafaring childhood and youth in Brittany.

During World War II he was a member of the French Resistance (in the "Turma-Vengeance" network). He was arrested by the Gestapo in late 1943 and spent one and a half years in German concentration camps. Scarred by the experience, after the war he became interested in the existentialism of André Gide and André Malraux.

He travelled to Egypt and then India, where he worked briefly as a civil servant in the French colonial administration of Pondicherry, on the Bay of Bengal. There he discovered Sri Aurobindo and The Mother and their "new evolution". He resigned from the civil service, and went in search of adventure in French Guiana, where he spent a year in the Amazon (the setting for his first novel L'Orpailleur (The Gold Washer), with his copy of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, then Brazil, and after that Africa.

In 1953, aged 30, he returned to India and Pondicherry to put himself at the service of The Mother and settle in the Ashram. He taught a little at the Ashram school, and was in charge of the French copy for the quarterly Bulletin of the Department of Physical Education which was The Mother's publication, and is still printed in English and French. During this time he met his companion Sujata Nahar.

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