Madeleine Biardeau [SEP] country of citizenship
Madeleine Biardeau
Madeleine Biardeau (16 May 1922 Niort - 1 February 2010 Cherveux) was an Indologist from France.
Early life.
Madeleine Biardeau was born into a middle-class family of small entrepreneurs. She was educated at the Ecole normale supérieure in Sèvres, where she studied philosophy. Here, she was attracted to the Eastern spirituality and started learning Sanskrit in order to study Hindu philosophy.
Indology.
Curious about India, Biardeau joined the University of Travancore for two years in the 1950s, and studied
In the "Mahabharata" and "Devi Bhagavata Purana", in the context of the birth of Bhishma, the cow Nandini is given the epithet Kamadhenu. In other instances, Nandini is described as the cow-daughter of Surabhi-Kamadhenu. The scholar Vettam Mani considers Nandini and Surabhi to be synonyms of Kamadhenu.
Iconography and symbolism.
According to Indologist Madeleine Biardeau, Kamadhenu or Kamaduh is the generic name of the sacred cow, who is regarded as the source of all prosperity in Hinduism. Kamadhenu is regarded