Somānanda Baba was not trained in a university department of Indology. Born in Brittany, he left formal schooling early and then spent seven years on the road — a long, unplanned journey across countries and ways of living that shaped him more than any classroom could have.
That journey led him to India, where he lived for a year as a sâdhu, immersed in a spiritual practice learned firsthand rather than read about. Back in France, he found his way into an association helping the unemployed return to work — one chapter among several in a life that took its time before settling into study.
It was his growing fascination with the Sapta Sindhu civilization that eventually led him, at the age of seventy, to teach himself Sanskrit, with no formal training, using the Assimil method — so that he could read the Rig Veda in its own language rather than through someone else’s translation. Over the six years it took to translate the entire text into French by hand, word by word — completed in 2023, only the second complete French translation ever produced — his research into the Sapta Sindhu civilization deepened alongside the translation itself, each hymn opening onto its archaeology, its geography, its meaning.
That parallel work is now gathered in The 7 Rivers Civilization and Understanding the Rig Veda. He writes under the name Somānanda Baba for his English-language work, a name earned through the path itself rather than assigned by any institution.