An interview with Satprem, english subtitles

An interview wit Satprem with Georg Stefan Troller,
German journalist and writer, in april 1980. He left for India (in the Nilgiris, a mountainrange in Southern India) for an interview with Satprem.

Spoken in French/German with English subtitles.

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 thirty, 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.

Then travelled once more — Congo, Brasília, Afghanistan, Himalayas, New Zealand, sailed round the world, before once again returning.

On 3 March 1957, The Mother gave him the name Satprem (‘the one who loves truly’).

He was privileged to be the witness of the Mother's Work, which has been bundled in the volumes of Mother's Agenda.

In the second volume of his "Notebooks of an Apocalypse", Satprem noted, April 22, 1980: " I just spent three full days filming and interview with German TV - it's esquinant ... Finally, the film Troller will be what it will be, I do not know " (25/04/1980)