Satprem (30 October 1923 – 9 April 2007) was a French author and a disciple of Mirra Alfassa. Early life 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. India, The Mother, and Agenda 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 settled at 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. Enginger then sailed around the world, visiting the Congo, Brasília, Afghanistan, the Himalayas, and New Zealand, before once again returning to the ashram. On 3 March 1957, The Mother gave him the name Satprem ("the one who loves truly"). Satprem remained restless and dissatisfied for some years, torn between his devotion to The Mother along with Sri Aurobindo's teachings, and his wanderlust, and in 1959 he again left the ashram. He became the disciple of a Tantric lama, a priest of the temple at Rameswaram. Then as the disciple of another yogi he spent six months wandering around India as a mendicant sanyasi practicing Tantra, which formed the basis of his second novel, Par le Corps de la Terre, ou le Sanyassin (By the Body of the Earth or, The Sanyasi). After this he returned again (as he put it, "the bird flew back once more"