Suzanne Karpelès, the Frenchwoman who gave Cambodia back the keys to its own texts

Trained in the demanding disciplines of Pali, Sanskrit and Tibetan, Suzanne Karpelès (1890-1968) spent most of her life rescuing, cataloguing and reviving Khmer manuscripts. First curator of the Royal Library of Phnom Penh in 1925 and founder of the Buddhist Institute five years later, she trained two future Supreme Patriarchs of Cambodia and gave the country an intellectual tool that, without her ever intending it, would become one of the quiet cradles of national awakening.

Suzanne Karpelès in 1920, Autochrome by Auguste Léon (Archives de la Planète, Musée Albert-Kahn) — restored photo

A childhood between three worlds

Born in Paris in 1890 into a Jewish family of Hungarian origin, the daughter of an indigo merchant trading with India, Suzanne Karpelès grew up between the Lycée Molière in Paris and long stays in Calcutta and later Pondicherry, where she accompanied her parents from childhood. Her elder sister Andrée would become a recognised painter of Indian art; Suzanne turned instead to philology. At the École des langues orientales she studied Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan, becoming in 1917 the first woman to graduate from a school that was then almost entirely male — an achievement earned under scholars such as Sylvain Lévi, Alfred Foucher and Louis Finot.

Curator of royal knowledge

A member of the École française d'Extrême-Orient from 1922 — its first female full member — Karpelès was first posted to Hanoi before settling in Phnom Penh in 1925. The King of Cambodia had just founded a Royal Library there, and entrusted her with running it, making her the institution's first curator. Her task was immense: collecting, classifying, preserving and publicising a manuscript heritage scattered across the country's pagodas, often eaten away by damp and neglect. Access to this religious world did not come easily — by the customs of the time, a woman could not be left alone with a monk, and a lay intermediary had to pass letters and manuscripts on her behalf. Karpelès gradually won the pagodas' trust, until she was told at one of them: 'We no longer consider you a woman' — recognition, in its own way, of the singular standing she had carved out for herself in that monastic world.

Founder of the Buddhist Institute

This fieldwork bred a conviction: Cambodia needed an institution capable of carrying, beyond mere conservation, the study and dissemination of Khmer Buddhism. Karpelès proposed the idea as early as 1929; the Buddhist Institute of Cambodia was born on 25 January 1930, founded jointly with Laos — she would also open branches in Vientiane and Luang Prabang — and she served as its secretary-general for more than a decade, until her suspension in 1941. Under her direction, the Institute published the country's first Buddhist journal, ran a travelling library, printed and distributed sacred texts translated into vernacular Khmer through a publishing house she set up for the purpose, and broadcast programmes on Buddhism on state radio. It was also the Institute, under her leadership, that launched the commission tasked with compiling the great monolingual Khmer dictionary — a decades-long undertaking carried out by the reformist monks she had trained, whose name would become forever linked to that of Chuon Nath.

Teacher of two future patriarchs

Karpelès's most lasting legacy may lie less in the manuscripts than in the men she trained. At the École supérieure de Pali as at the Institute, she worked daily with a circle of young reformist monks — Chuon Nath, Huot Tath, Um Sur, Lvi Em — engaged in modernising Khmer Buddhism, between the critical translation of Pali texts and a campaign against practices deemed superstitious. According to the École française d'Extrême-Orient itself, Karpelès 'exerted a considerable influence on the intellectual formation' of two future Supreme Patriarchs of Cambodia: the Venerable Chuon Nath (in office 1948-1969) and the Venerable Huot Tath (1969-1975). These were precisely the figures, still honoured in the country's pagodas today, who would become touchstones of the Khmer nationalist movement in the 1940s.

An unlikely cradle of national awakening

The Buddhist Institute was more than a centre of scholarship: over the course of the 1930s it became a meeting place for a generation of Khmer writers, poets and intellectuals. By giving Cambodia back command of its own religious texts — until then largely read through a Siamese lens — Karpelès contributed, without ever intending to, to asserting a distinct Khmer cultural identity. Several figures who frequented the Institute in those years would go on to become actors in the national movement of the 1940s, making this house of religious learning one of the quiet cradles of the idea of a self-governing Cambodia.

A life of rupture and loyalty

Karpelès's story turned sharply in 1940-1941: as a Jew, she was among the fifteen Jewish officials in Cambodia dismissed from their posts by the colonial administration under the Vichy regime, officially forced into retirement; the French administration replaced her at the Institute with Pierre Dupont. She was not reinstated until 1946, at the end of the war. She went on to continue her missions for the École française d'Extrême-Orient and founded the Association des amis de l'Orient at the Musée Guimet in Paris, before retiring in 1955 to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram near Pondicherry, where she taught French language and literature until her death in 1968 — closing, in her own way, the circle between the worlds that had shaped her childhood.

Suzanne Karpelès dans les dernières années de sa vie — source : Angkor Database

Un héritage dispersé, mais bien vivant

En 1955, en quittant l'Asie, Karpelès confie une grande partie de sa bibliothèque personnelle à l'indianiste Paul Mus. Ce fonds — manuscrits khmers et pali, premiers imprimés bouddhiques cambodgiens des années 1920-1930, exemplaires dédicacés par les moines réformistes qu'elle a côtoyés — rejoindra après bien des détours la Bibliothèque du Congrès à Washington, où il est aujourd'hui conservé au sein de la Southeast Asian Rare Book Collection.

Des enregistrements de chants cambodgiens qu'elle avait rapportés sont, eux, conservés au musée de l'Homme à Paris. Un siècle plus tard, la Bibliothèque nationale du Cambodge et l'Institut bouddhique, toujours actifs à Phnom Penh, portent encore la marque de cette Française qui n'a jamais cherché à s'imposer comme héroïne nationale, mais qui a redonné aux Khmers les clés de leurs propres textes. C'est peut-être cela, le plus durable des héritages : avoir su s'effacer derrière l'outil qu'elle avait construit.