In 1899, the writer Julien Viaud, alias Pierre Loti, immersed himself ecstatically in the ‘India of palms’, meeting maharajahs, fakirs, devotees on the Ganges...and wrote one of his masterpieces India (without the English). Michaux, discovering India in 1931 (he could have crossed paths with Malraux that same year), devoted half of his Barbarian in Asia to it. If Malraux, who stayed in India several times, including in 1974, as a pilgrim before his death, never wrote a great book on India, he read Tagore and the great sacred texts and established a privileged relationship with Nehru and Indira Gandhi. As for Gide, translator of Tagore and Kabir, under whose invocation Michaux placed his Barbarian, he also knew Nehru and fervently supported the works of Malraux and Michaux. In this literary essay, a hymn to India and to these four very different writers who felt a common attraction to this country of ‘ancient civilization’, there are also many beautiful figures of passers-by, such as Ravi Shankar and George Harrison.