French-Language Representations of India Globalised Research Across National Disciplinary Boundaries
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RESEARCH Perhaps the most significant side effect of the ongoing reconfiguration of the discipline of French studies in countries outside France has been the thoroughgoing internationalisation of that field of study. As a consequence, scholars of French in European countries with 18th and 20th century empires which competed with those of the French are researching colonialism and its afterlives in a comparative way. This approach is particularly promising in the study of the cultural contact between India and Europe. French-language representations of India Globalised research across national disciplinary boundaries. Ian Magedera tive analysis of the impact of the British whole subcontinent disappear between the debate to include, not only direct footfalls trading posts whose military defence was colonising other is nearly absent from Indo-China and the Indian Ocean sectors. on Indian soil, but also military activity in expressly forbidden in the two treaties of rompted by the award of a four-year academic research published in France, Despite French investment in Pondicherry Egypt, part of the British Indian empire’s Paris of 1763 and 1815, adds an inter-colo- PArts and Humanities Research Coun- French-language primary sources, fre- attested to by the École française d’extrême supply lines. Since Napoleon’s expedi- niser dimension to Mary Louise Pratt’s cil grant to a project on ‘Peripheral Voices quently contain both references to English orient, the Institut français, Alliance française tion of 1798, and in common with much understanding of the ‘copresence [and] in European Colonialism’ at the University (viz. the title of Marguerite Duras’s India and the popular Lycée français, and despite of ‘Franco-Indian‘ bilateral writing, ‘the interaction’ between coloniser and colo- of Liverpool, this essay surveys research Song) and to the ‘Britishers’ in India (such the Marxist-inflected proto-postcolonial French considered that they had not merely nised in ‘contact zones’.19 into French-language representations of as Phileas Fogg). writing of Bernard Mouralis in the 1970s, interests but an affinity with Egypt’.16 This India 1754-1954. That is from Dupleix’s Jean-Marc Moura’s 1999 work informed by is confirmed by the expedition’s publica- The ongoing, open-ended loss in what departure from India, to the cession to Evidence of this is provided in India Scripta, anglophone theory and studies exploring tion, the 21 volume Description de l’Egypte could be called France’s two-hundred- India of Pondicherry, the territory he once the Liverpool project’s bibliography, writ- the Indian dimensions of Mauritian and (1809-13), which rivalled the work of Brit- year-long decolonisation in India (1754 governed with the other French comptoirs ten by Corinne François-Denève.8 It will Réunionnaise writing, there has been lit- ish Orientalists in India such as William 1954), means that subaltern coloniser sta- of Yanam, Mahé, Karaikal and Chander- survey all the fiction and non-fiction books tle shift in the Francophone studies doxa.12 Jones. After his failure in Egypt, Napoleon tus can contribute to the study of France’s nagore.1 This essay will also place that on India published in French from 1754 Non-metropolitan francophone texts, and, planned a joint expedition to India with colonial policy. This builds on the work research in the context of the discipline of to the present day. Its scope goes further bizarrely, only non-metropolitan texts can Czar Paul under the leadership of Masséna, of Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and French studies which has shifted its focus but this was abandoned after Paul’s mur- Sandrine Lemaire in the Association Con- from the national literature of France, to École française der in 1801. naissance de l’histoire de l Afrique include the study of francophone cultures d’Extrême-Orient, contemporaine (ACHAC).20 From the start in their global contexts.2 The vitality of Eng- Pondicherry, India. The project’s book-length contributions to of the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, lish-language work on India from a postco- postcolonial theory elaborate one element and intensifying after 1880, the loss of the lonial studies perspective, means that the in the history of the French presence in Indian trading posts to the British and study of French-language representations India. The few French people in the Étab- the concomitant loss of national prestige of a non-francophone nation such as India, lissements français en Inde [the French pos- functions as an example to avoid.21 More must take account of anglophone work in sessions in India] between 1815 and 1947 generally, Jean-Marc Largeaud has pro- producing research which is historically were colonisers who were themselves vocatively equated this focus on loss after anchored and yet multilingual and com- under the hegemony of another European Waterloo with a French national culture of parative. power. France was thus a ‘colonisatrice colo- glorious defeat.22 It must be said, however, nisée’ (a colonised coloniser], or, better, a that these comparisons with India were A French corrective to ‘India as ‘subaltern coloniser’.17 intended to spur on French colonialists an anglophone space’ ? rather than to inhibit them. Early in the investigation, however, two The status of the French as subaltern colo- anomalies appear. First, although there nisers in India brings an understanding Globalised research practice are studies in English which address the of simultaneity to French-language repre- While attuned to national contexts such French presence in India, they tend to sentations of India. French writers can be as those above, a practice of globalised examine it in isolation.3 Far more serious, seen doing several partially contradictory research should exhibit two qualities at however, is the way that the vast majority of things at once. They criticise British colo- the same time. The first is to be linguis- research on colonial India in English treats nialism, from a supposedly disinterested tically inclusive. Ideally, this manifests it as an anglophone space. Indian lan- viewpoint, while frequently sympathising itself concretely, such as in the bi-lingual guages surface, but the comparative study with French colonialism. Their criticism co- annotations of India Scripta. Alternatively, of two or more European colonisers (the existed both with a selective solidarity with it can be a cumulative phenomenon, such British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Danes the European colonial brother (a perspec- as conferences and volumes of collected and the Swedes) is a comparatively recent than existing publications because it will be be ‘francophone’ in the official sense, are tive that is so often masculinist) in the face essays which admit more than one lan- phenomenon (even taking into account the annotated in both English and French and still reduced to serving in a reductive exoti- of threatening Indians, and with an imagi- guage, authors who publish in more than massive differences in scale between the be available via open access.9 cist mode as ‘an elsewhere for the French native occupation of the Indian space for one language, or, at the very least, use colonial enterprises of the other countries In France, the institutional embedding of a language’.13 nostalgic, fantasist and utopian ends. Their source texts in French and English.23 and that of the British).4 The anglophone comparative research practice is hampered writing is free to explore other Indias, and bias also applies to Indian historians of by both scepticism about the place of inter- France as subaltern coloniser it is particularly interesting to study French The second quality is integrated multiple India writing in English in the Subaltern disciplinarity and the academic pedigree in India representations at times of change in the foci. One of the main domains in which Studies school, although they aim to renew and state support accorded to the neigh- These restrictions imposed by national colonial status quo, such as in 1857-59. these can function is in a suspicion of their discipline by what they consider as an bouring disciplines of Indology and Fran- disciplines encourage the project team to nation states, while at the same time anti-bourgeois and anti-nationalist analysis cophone studies. establish a new practice of comparative It is also possible to apply the notion of acknowledging their importance in the of Indian history. colonial studies. Using a strategy of trian- the subaltern coloniser to other contexts period from 1754-1954. Cross-national com- French Indology was consecrated in 1814 gulation between France, India and Britain where a double stratification of power pre- parativism of this sort is standard practice As Harish Trivedi has suggested, post-colo- at the Collège de France with the founding in the context of competing colonialisms, vailed, such as in the relationship, after in studies on the pre-history of colonialism nial studies has ‘ears only for English’.5 of the first chair of Sanskrit in Europe for this research both applies and simultane- 1763, between the French and both indig- in the 17th century and earlier.24 It is also Thus, despite the major theoretical contri- Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (1773 1832).10 ously modifies postcolonial criticism in enous peoples in Quebec, and colonised found in studies of mercantilist colonial- butions in studies published from 1983 to This was the precise time at which France English, helping to correct its anglocentric groups in the Caribbean. Indeed, more ism.25 This is because the shareholders in 1997, it is striking that none of them men- was being reduced to a second order power and Anglo-Indian-centric bias and joins generally, the notion helps to theorise the a company were not necessarily nationals tion the French presence.6 In both anglo- in India. From that time onwards, Indology other projects which seek to bring in a role of proxy agents in colonial power rela- of the country where it was based.