Danna Agmon's gripping microhistory is a vivid guide to the "Nayiniyappa Affair" in the French colony of Pondicherry, India. The surprising and shifting fates of Nayiniyappa and his family form the basis of this story of global mobilization, which is replete with merchants, missionaries, local brokers, government administrators, and even the French royal family. Agmon's compelling account draws readers into the social, economic, religious, and political interactions that defined the European colonial experience in India and elsewhere. Her portrayal of imperial sovereignty in France's colonies as it played out in the life of one beleaguered family allows readers to witness interactions between colonial officials and locals. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the subcontinent, Western-led ashrams and utopian communities remained in and around the former French territory of Pondicherry—most notably the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Auroville experimental township, which continue to thrive and draw tourists today. Unsettling Utopia presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Jessica Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires. Namakkal examines the colonial histories of the Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville, arguing that their continued success shows how decolonization paradoxically opened new spaces of settlement, perpetuating imperial power. Challenging conventional markers of the boundaries of the colonial era as well as nationalist narratives, Unsettling Utopia sheds new light on the legacies of colonialism and offers bold thinking on what decolonization might yet mean.

When, on February 22, 1790, a French barge by the name of ‘Bienvenue’ came ashore Pondichéry with the news of the events in Paris around the meeting of the Estates General, the storming of the Bastille and the abolition of feudal rights; it sent out a wave of topsy-turving repercussions amongst both the French and the English colonial administrations in India. Excited with the newly found principles that were inherent in the cries of the Revolution in France, yet, not knowing their precise socio-political extents and implications, each of the five French settlements on the Indian subcontinent came to create their own individual ‘revolutions’ – periods of mostly confusing and sometimes violent socio-political upheaval. Wellesley, on the other hand, fearing the influence of the principles of the French Revolution on the employees of the English East India Company, asked his superiors in London for the establishment of a college in Fort William in order to train men in the service of the Company against such ‘erroneous principles’. How do these revolutions in each of the French settlements in India – in some ways, mirror events of the 1789 Revolution in the metropolis – unfold? Where, exactly, did the universalist values of the Revolution find its boundaries when applied in contemporaneous colonial India? And how were the diametrically opposite values of imperial and republican France sought to be accommodated in such a context? Labernadie’s intricately detailed narrative from 1930 developed out of a privileged access to the French colonial administrative (yet unpublished) archives and correspondences based in Pondichéry, along with the contemporary interventions of Jacques Weber and Hari Shankar Vasudevan ensure a volume that is not only rich in material resources, but also intellectually nourishing; compelling its readers to reflect on questions of transcolonial experiences and mixed modernities in colonial India, as much as the very consequences of a revolution that fundamentally changed the manner in which politics came to be thought of thence.

French East India Companies is a comprehensive and readable historical narrative and economic statistical analysis of France's import trade with the Far East during the 17th and 18th centuries. Supplemented with an appendix that includes a detailed glossary of textile terms and 77 pages of statistical data from French archives not previously collected nor published, French East India Companies is an indispensable historical and economic resource.

This book focuses on the integration of the Coromandel textile industries with French colonies in India from the founding of the French East India Company in 1664 to its debilitating defeat by the British during the Seven Years War.

Patrick French brings one of the globe's most dynamic nations springing to life. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the country, sensitivity to its subtler nuances and a wealth of research.

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 is a study of the colonization of Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu and South India by the French during the eighteenth century, and their interactions with the Indian rulers and populations in the political, economic, social and religious spheres. French Governors based in Pondicherry since François Martin up to Dupleix never acquired any territory for France through outright conquest. They or their masters in France never had any grand plan to establish a French empire in India. Some Indian rulers were friendly with the French and the English as it served their interests. The study demonstrates that the French colonizers and missionaries would not have survived in India without the collaboration of the Indian dubashes, merchants, certain Indian rulers and military men. This collaboration was not on an equal footing, as the sepoys, merchants and dubashes were always subordinate and submissive to the Europeans. Even Ananda Ranga Poullé, the most famous of the Indian dubashes had to resort to the art of flattery to be in the good books of his ‘master’. European arrival and presence in India heralded the beginning of a cultural clash between the Europeans and Indians, in which the former had the upper hand. There was never any partnership or ‘master-bania’ relationship between the French and the Indians. Instead, the relationship had all the trappings of a ‘master-subordinate’ relationship, where the subordinate even though he might be a dubash was always at the mercy of the colonizers. The element of force, aggressivity and violence was omnipresent in European presence and expansion in India, in the political, economic and religious fields. Please note: This title is co-published with X. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.