Examines metropolitan French-language representations of India from the period between the recall of Dupleix to France to the Second Treaty of Paris. This book explores what a European power, territorially peripheral in India, thought of both India and the administrative rule there of its rival, Britain.

Examines metropolitan French-language representations of India from the period between the recall of Dupleix to France to the Second Treaty of Paris. This book explores what a European power, territorially peripheral in India, thought of both India and the administrative rule there of its rival, Britain.

The French Colonial Imagination examines France's critical response to the Indian uprisings of 1857-58 and their brutal suppression by the British. Drawing from texts produced during the Second Empire and the early Third Republic, Nicola Frith foregrounds the extent to which B...

The Indian uprisings (1857–58) against British rule in India represent an iconic period within the history of anti-colonial resistance. Numerous works have considered these historical events from British and Indian perspectives, but none have yet questioned how they were viewed by Britain’s foremost colonial rival in India, the French. The French Colonial Imagination examines how the potential for Britain to lose its most lucrative colony at the hands its own colonial “subjects” allowed French writers to envisage a world freed from British dominance. The uprisings offered the attractive possibility that France could undergo a colonial revival in the wake of British defeat, thereby reversing the devastating losses inflicted upon France’s former empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Notable among these losses was Britain’s decision (in the Treaty of 1814) to permanently reduce France’s presence in India to five small trading posts scattered around the periphery of British territory. The extent to which to the French colonial imagination of the nineteenth century was shaped by the memories of such defeats forms a primary concern of this monograph. This investigation into French responses to the Indian uprisings reveals that French colonial discourse was determined as much by its visions of the colonized “other,” as by the dominance of their British rivals. Drawing from journalistic, historical, political, and fictional texts written during Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire (1852–70) and in the early years of the Third Republic (1870–1944), The French Colonial Imagination shows how the uprisings gave French writers the opportunity to speak out against the rapacity of British colonialism and its treatment of colonized Indians, while simultaneously constructing a competing colonial discourse that would justify further expansion in North Africa and South East Asia. Standing at a crossroads between the “loss” of Ancien Régime’s empireand the Third Republic’s ideological investment in overseas expansion, this understudied period of colonial history reveals the centrality of loss, fracture, and political emasculation as core preoccupations haunting the French colonial discourse in its quest to regain cultural and ideological ascendancy over its greatest political enemy.

Another Reason is a bold and innovative study of the intimate relationship between science, colonialism, and the modern nation. Gyan Prakash, one of the most influential historians of India writing today, explores in fresh and unexpected ways the complexities, contradictions, and profound importance of this relationship in the history of the subcontinent. He reveals how science served simultaneously as an instrument of empire and as a symbol of liberty, progress, and universal reason--and how, in playing these dramatically different roles, it was crucial to the emergence of the modern nation. Prakash ranges over two hundred years of Indian history, from the early days of British rule to the dawn of the postcolonial era. He begins by taking us into colonial museums and exhibitions, where Indian arts, crafts, plants, animals, and even people were categorized, labeled, and displayed in the name of science. He shows how science gave the British the means to build railways, canals, and bridges, to transform agriculture and the treatment of disease, to reconstruct India's economy, and to transfigure India's intellectual life--all to create a stable, rationalized, and profitable colony under British domination. But Prakash points out that science also represented freedom of thought and that for the British to use it to practice despotism was a deeply contradictory enterprise. Seizing on this contradiction, many of the colonized elite began to seek parallels and precedents for scientific thought in India's own intellectual history, creating a hybrid form of knowledge that combined western ideas with local cultural and religious understanding. Their work disrupted accepted notions of colonizer versus colonized, civilized versus savage, modern versus traditional, and created a form of modernity that was at once western and indigenous. Throughout, Prakash draws on major and minor figures on both sides of the colonial divide, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nationalist historian and novelist Romesh Chunder Dutt, Prafulla Chandra Ray (author of A History of Hindu Chemistry), Rudyard Kipling, Lord Dalhousie, and John Stuart Mill. With its deft combination of rich historical detail and vigorous new arguments and interpretations, Another Reason will recast how we understand the contradictory and colonial genealogy of the modern nation.

At the pinnacle of French power in India, Pondicherry sparked the imagination of those back home. Pondicherry was the French window on Indian culture, proudly seen as the Gallic Gateway of India. For over three centuries this gateway witnessed the busy trade of spices, beautiful textiles, woven cloth and later peanuts in return for a steady flow of gold, silver, weapons, merchants, priests, soldiers and adventurers. Later, as the English tightened their noose around Pondicherry, the beleaguered French were caught up in their own fateful and impossible attempt to combine colonial and republican principles. History was played out street by street in old Pondicherry and the wealth of these experiences have left an indelible mark on the unique cosmopolitan city that is Pondicherry today. The purpose of this book is to present a brief, illustrated history of these places that once were French.

This book investigates how French Romanticism was shaped by and contributed to colonial discourses of race. It studies the ways in which metropolitan Romantic novels—that is, novels by French authors such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, François René de Chateaubriand, Claire de Duras, and Prosper Mérimée—comprehend and construct colonized peoples, fashion French identity in the context of colonialism, and record the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans. While the primary texts that come under investigation in the book are novels, close attention is paid to Romantic fiction’s interdependence with naturalist treatises, travel writing, abolitionist texts, and ethnographies. Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination is one of the first books to carry out a sustained and comprehensive analysis of the French Romantic novel’s racial imagination that encompasses several sites of colonial contact: the Indian Ocean, North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and France. Its archival research and interdisciplinary approach shed new light on canonical texts and expose the reader to non-canonical ones. The book will be useful to students and academics involved with Romanticism, colonial historians, students and scholars of transatlantic studies and postcolonial studies, as well as those interested in questions of race and colonialism.

This book examines the French theatricalization of India from 1770 to 1865 and how a range of plays not only represented India to the French viewing public but also staged issues within French culture including colonialism, imperialism, race, gender, and national politics. Through examining these texts and available performance history, and incorporating historical texts and cultural theory, David Hammerback analyses these works to illustrate a complex of cultural representations: some contested Orientalism, some participated in Western colonialist discourses, while some can be placed somewhere between these two markers of ideology in Western culture and the arts. He also assesses the works which participated in shaping the theatrical face of Western hegemony, ones directly participating in Orientalism as delineated by Edward Said and others. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, French literature, history and cultural studies.

From the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the imagination came to be recognized in South Indian culture as the defining feature of human beings. Shulman elucidates the distinctiveness of South Indian theories of the imagination and shows how they differ radically from Western notions of reality and models of the mind.

The Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganges flowing south to the Bay of Bengal, is now little known outside of India. Yet for centuries it was a river of truly global significance, attracting merchants, missionaries, mercenaries, statesmen, laborers and others from Europe, Asia and beyond. Hooghly seeks to restore the waterway to the heart of global history. Focusing in turn on the role of and competition between those who struggled to control the river--the Portuguese, the Mughals, the Dutch, the French and finally the British, who built their imperial capital, Calcutta, on its banks--the author considers how the Hooghly was integrated into global networks of encounter and exchange, and the dramatic consequences that ensued. Traveling up and down the river, Robert Ivermee explores themes of enduring concern, among them the dynamics of modern capitalism and the power of large corporations; migration and human trafficking; the role of new technologies in revolutionizing social relations; and the human impact on the natural world. The Hooghly's global history, he concludes, may offer lessons for India as it emerges as a world superpower.