He escaped a roundup with his parents in 1942 in Paris. He was then transferred to the Nièvre, where he was lodged with a peasant family; he continued hisstudies at the Lycée de Nevers 2. At the Liberation, he joined his parents in Bourges. After his baccalaureate (1947), he completed a preparatory literary class at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. There he meets Pierre Vidal-Naquet 3 and Pierre Juquin (hyposekh of his class) and takes part in their communist cell. Slightly skeptical about Stalin, he was shocked by the trial of László Rajk (1949), which he analyzed with Pierre Vidal-Naquet. A linguist by training, Malamoud started his career by studying the Sanskrit language before tur- ning his attention to the Sanskrit classics and in particular to the patterns of thought underlying the oldest of these, the Veda. He served as a research director of Indian religions at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. His published works in- clude: Le Svadhyaya, recitation personnelle du Veda, Talttiriya-Aranyaka I (1977), Lien devie, noeud mortel, les representations dela dette en Chine, au Japon et dansle monde Indien (1988); Cuire el monde. Rite et pensée dans l'Inde ancienne (1989), Le jumeau solaire (2002), Feminité dela parole dans l'Indeancienne (2005), La danse des pierres. Etudes sur lascène sacrificielledansl'Inde ancienne (2005). Many of his books have been translated into several languages.