Name Pierre Fallon | ||
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Pierre Fallon (24 September 1912, Namur, Belgium - 20 September 1985, Calcutta, India) was a Belgian Jesuit priest, missionary in India, Professor of French literature at the University of Calcutta. In 1950 he founded the dialogue centre Shanti Bhavan (with Robert Antoine) in Calcutta; in 1960 the similar Shanti Sadan in North Calcutta; and later took charge of Shanti Nir.
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Education
Fallon entered the Society of Jesus in 1930, and came to Calcutta, India in 1935. He obtained Indian citizenship in 1950. He held a licentiate in Indology from the University of Louvain, a licentiate in philosophy, a licentiate in theology, and was the first Jesuit to obtain an MA in Bengali philology from Calcutta University.
Work
He founded Shanti Bhavan with Robert Antoine in 1950, and contributed much to make it a living centre of intercultural and interfaith dialogue.
Ten years later he founded a similar Shanti Sadan in a much poorer and crowded area of North Calcutta, and later, after the sudden death of Louis Winckelmans took charge of Shanti Nir (1978), in the southern suburbs of the city. He was an educationist of renown, but also took charge of charitable work for the famine-stricken and refugees.
For 25 years he was a much appreciated professor of French literature at the University of Calcutta, where he also became a member of the senate and the academic council. He also taught at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta. He was much in demand as a public orator in Bengali, French and English. But his heart was in translations from the Bible and other texts for Christian worship in Bengali. His "Glossary of Bengali Religious Terms" (1945) had prepared him for the task of translating biblical and liturgical texts. He was deeply involved also in interfaith dialogue. The last words he typed before his fatal heart attack summed up his entire life-work: “Dialogue with Persons of Other Faiths...” That was in September 1985: Pierre Fallon was in fact preparing a text for the forthcoming visit of John-Paul II in Calcutta (February 1986).