In the course of the Nayiniyappa Affair, three different sets of fathers and sons filled crucial roles in advancing Nayiniyappa’s arrest, prosecution, and ultimate posthumous rehabilitation. These were Nayiniyappa and his sons, the French governor and his son, and the Jesuits’ catechist (religious interpreter) and his son. These fathers and sons, who together engaged in legal, political, and religious maneuvering, demonstrate the inextricable connections between the familial and the institutional, both in the evolution of the Nayiniyappa Affair and in the administration of colonial Pondichéry in general. They offer a microcosm of the forces grappling for control in the affair. While other types of familial ties—consanguinity, marriage, and godparentage—all characterized the bonds at work in Pondichéry, the coincidence of three father-son teams playing such a central part in the Nayiniyappa Affair reflects the working of family ties in the evolution of the colony. French and Tamil agents alike were eager to bring together the intimate and institutional facets of their lives. By examining these fathers and sons, we can see the familial workings of both the commercial and missionary projects in French India.
This chapter argues that the family was a nexus for the enunciation of various agendas in the governance of Pondichéry. It utilizes the prism of the Nayiniyappa Affair to reveal the interpenetration of family and colonial rule. Extended families, both French and Tamil, worked together to further their aims, taking advantage of the loyalty and commitment afforded by the ties of kinship. The benefit of an extended family network derived from the fact that long-standing familial ties enabled actors to extend relationships across time and space, securing support through successive generations and in different locales. For example, this meant enjoying the boomtown opportunities of Pondichéry while also drawing on the established trade of Madras. The ability to create relations across a diverse group of actors and the efficacy of couching such relations within a shared idiom of kinship were very much on display in Pondichéry early in the eighteenth century. Public performances of kinship, inscribed in colonial archives, served as a central tool for the negotiation and articulation of power in the colony.
The small body of work on the Nayiniyappa Affair has largely focused on the interreligious nature of the affair and the attendant power dynamics, with the Jesuits taking down a Hindu actor.1 But an analysis that makes room for the family in colonial politics can offer a different view. The Nayiniyappa Affair in fact occurred in part because of a rivalry between two local families—Tamil dynasties of commercial brokers who served the French for over a century, one of which happened to be Hindu, and one of which was Christian. The Nayiniyappa Affair was therefore partly the result of an ongoing local feud that both predated and followed French preoccupation with Nayiniyappa. Local agents took advantage of the way their own agendas dovetailed with those of the French and vice versa. The decades-long rivalry, and French involvement in it, reveals the connections between the structures of the family and those of the colonial project.
While histories of empire had long neglected the study of family life, it is now at the center of scholarly debates. More recent scholarship has shown that the structures of family underlay early modern European state building and highlighted the familial and gendered commitments of mercantile families that went into the making and governance of early modern states in the Netherlands, France, and England.2 In the imperial setting, “patrimonial power”—the exertion of power by rulers when this power is based on kin and personal relationships—has illuminated the making of sovereignty overseas.3 Scholars have shown how European colonizers used the bonds of kinship and other intimate ties as a technology of colonial rule, particularly in the Atlantic world.4 This work demonstrates that a history of a particular family can serve as a revealing account of global empire, in which the traces of kin, connection, and the quotidian both mirror and underlie the structures of imperial ambition.5 It also reflects anthropologists’ long-standing arguments that we should seek out kin relations and kinship practices not only in affinities undergirded by the ties of biology but in more constructed and contingent formulations of the family.6
In a colony as new and unstable as Pondichéry was at the beginning of the eighteenth century, families provided an especially crucial context and site for claims making. It is worth noting again that since Pondichéry had been little more than a sparsely populated fishing village before it was given to the French in 1673, nearly everyone in the town was a relative newcomer. This heightened the ability to forge new connections, and the idiom of kinship was rich ground for making such connections. The commitments of family, whether consanguineous or created, were crucial in the making of colonial authority, and Indian, Creole, and French families played a role in the French expansionist project in Pondichéry.7
Because French colonial authority in India was much more aspiration than reality in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth centuries, French administrators of the Compagnie des Indes and missionaries alike depended on access provided by their local brokers. In the context of this dependence, family—biological, fictive, and metaphorical—served as a shared and legible framework for local and French actors. Claims of relatedness could be made across ethnic, religious, and geographical difference, pointing to the existence of what has been termed “vernacular kinship.”8 That is, in the early encounter between French and indigenous actors in Pondichéry, as repeatedly demonstrated in the French archive, the family was a conceptual and practical resource in constant use.
The linkage between family and statecraft would have been familiar in France and India alike. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France the careful construction of familial commitments was key for political and professional success.9 Much as dynastic tradition in France brought together the institutions of the family and the state, in India state formation and family formation were also complementary projects.10 In both India and France, the family was a nexus for the definition of personhood and an anchor for communal history and commitment.
While the history of the family has been central to French historiography for several decades, the same cannot be said for the historiography of South Asia.11 In this historiography, caste has served as a central structuring analytic in discussions of both intimate and official power relations, a focus stemming in part from the much-commented-upon centrality ascribed to caste in and by the nineteenth-century British Raj. While the caste position of local Tamil actors held some importance for French employers, kinship offers an alternative prism in Pondichéry. It was the ties of family, more than caste, that emerged as a crucial shared component in the interactions between Frenchmen and local actors.12 The concept and practice of family, rather than of caste, were ripe for mutual exploitation in cross-cultural encounters in India, since this was a conceptual framework French and Tamil actors alike could use. Where the analytic focus on caste highlights the ways in which “colonizers” and “colonized” differed from one another, the emphasis on kinship makes visible the shared world that existed in Pondichéry at this early stage of European empire in the Indian Ocean.
The events of the Nayiniyappa Affair hinge on family. While Nayiniyappa would not live to see the lengths to which his sons went in order to clear his name and restore their family’s fortune and position, his posthumous good name at least benefited strongly from the special loyalty of fathers and sons. His three sons—Guruvappa, Moutiappa, and Vingatachelam—were responsible for two of the appeals submitted on his behalf, and after his death his eldest son traveled to France to plead with the Crown to restore Nayiniyappa’s fortune. In these efforts, the sons (and the Frenchman who assisted them in writing appeals and letters of support) highlighted the familial ties that motivated their efforts, referring throughout their texts to “our father” instead of the more impersonal “Nayiniyappa.”
The sons’ intense efforts involved their own interests, of course. Their father’s position provided tangible benefits, while his arrest carried with it dire consequences for them. Even before Nayiniyappa was appointed chief commercial broker in 1708, the benefits of his engagement with the company had trickled down to his family members. In 1706, the Superior Council of Pondichéry awarded to “Gourvapapullé” (almost certainly Nayiniyappa’s eldest son) a tax farming privilege.13 Conversely, when Nayiniyappa was first arrested, on February 13, 1716, his sons were arrested alongside him.14 According to Nayiniyappa, the French governor Hébert menaced him by saying, “If I had witnesses to this [wrongdoing], I would send you and your sons to the Mascarenes,” the French islands in the Indian Ocean where the French held slaves.15 The banishment imposed on Nayiniyappa and his family in 1716 affected his sons. After their father’s arrest, all three sons relocated to “the lands of the Moors”;16 the fact that they resettled in the French colony as soon as a new governor was appointed after Hébert’s removal in 1718 suggests that leaving Pondichéry imposed significant costs on them.
Collectively, the appeals on Nayiniyappa’s behalf pointed to the varying kinds of damage the sons had inherited as a result of their father’s conviction. For fiscal compensation, they requested monetary restitution of forty thousand pagodas, since this was the value of Nayiniyappa’s confiscated goods at the time of his arrest, and an additional one hundred thousand pagodas in damages.17 Reflecting the fact that the family’s good name had been damaged by their father’s conviction, they also asked that his good reputation be reestablished in the broad context of French India and the Tamil region, writing, “[We ask you to order] that his good name be restored, and that the decree doing so shall be read, published, and posted in the city of Pondichéry, and in the lands of the Company.”18 Clearing Nayiniyappa’s name rehabilitated the family as a whole. And reflecting the importance of family on both sides of the imperial divide, they asked the Crown to punish Governor Hébert’s son as well as the official himself.
The appeals sent following Nayiniyappa’s conviction reveal that the conflict pitted two local families against one another. In Pondichéry, for nearly a century only members of these two competing families had enjoyed the benefits of the post of chief commercial broker. The hereditary nature of the position was not unique to Pondichéry: in the French holding of Chandernagore, in Bengal, the family of one Indranarayan Chaudhuri held the post of broker for decades. The position was also hereditary in Ceylon, where Europeans employed local men in a similar position, and in the important commercial center of Surat on the west coast of India two rival dynasties also fought over the rights of brokerage.19
Tamil nomenclature does not assign family names as in the European tradition, but for convenience, I will refer to Nayiniyappa’s family as Pillai and their rivals as Mudali. French sources usually refer to the families with Europeanized versions of these names: Poullé and Modeliar. The term modeliar, derived from the Tamil word for “first,” was also a synonym for the position of chief broker in Pondichéry. Both terms are titles associated with the Vellala caste group, high-ranking agricultural landlords.20 The two families competing for the highest post available to Indians in the colony were of the same caste, though the Pillais were Hindu and the Mudalis Christian.21 In the Pillai family, Nayiniyappa was the first to be appointed courtier et chef des malabars, in 1708. At least three of his relatives would hold the position subsequently: his eldest son, Guruvappa (chief broker in 1722–1724); his nephew Ananda Ranga Pillai (1746–1761); and his likely great-nephew Tiruvangadan (1790s).
The Christian brokers employed by the French, the Pillais’ rivals, had a history of service that stretched back even earlier, to the very first days of the colony’s existence as a French holding. The founder of this dynasty was Tanappa Mudali (Modeliar), also known by his Christian name, André.22 He arrived in Pondichéry on January 17, 1674, at the express invitation of the town’s first governor, François Martin.23 His son, Lazare Moutiappa, followed him as courtier; Nayiniyappa replaced him in 1708. His grandson was Kanakarâya Pedro Mudali (Modeliar). Pedro then became chief broker when Nayiniyappa was arrested. The council ousted Pedro when Nayiniyappa was cleared of charges, establishing Guruvappa in the post. However, when Guruvappa died of dropsy two years later, in 1724, the council reappointed Pedro to the post, and he served until his death in 1746. Ananda Ranga Pillai ascended to the post at this time. It is possible that the French deliberately pitted one family against the other, with the position strategically made to oscillate between the two.
Just as the Jesuits had been agitating against Nayiniyappa for years prior to his arrest, the rivalry between the Pillai and Mudali families long predated Pedro’s assumption of the position of broker. The removal of Lazare and his replacement by Nayiniyappa in 1708 marks the beginning of the rivalry.24 At that time, Governor Hébert lambasted the Jesuits for their support of the Christian broker whom Nayiniyappa had replaced. A letter he wrote to the Jesuit superior, Father Tachard, read, “Ever since my arrival in Pondichéry, I have been astonished that we employ Lazare as modeliar, since he has so little ability, and so little credit in the town.”25 Hébert dismissed the claims of family in Lazare’s case, although he acknowledged that he had retained “André’s son,” emphasizing kinship over individuality, because he respected the choices made by his predecessor, Governor Martin. Had Lazare been at all capable of filling the post, continued Hébert, he would rather have employed him than anyone else in the town, seeing that he was “a Christian of good caste and high rank.”26
After Nayiniyappa’s son Guruvappa died unexpectedly while serving as chief broker, the Pillais sought to retain the post in their family. French correspondence devoted to the struggle between the two dynasties shows that colonial officials were uncomfortably aware of the power and influence that the post bestowed on local men. The contours of this struggle, as well as the very fact of its inscription in the French colonial archive, demonstrate that the French were well versed in the details of these families’ lives. Both French and Tamil actors made their claims with reference to kinship, suggesting there was a clear link between the institutions of the colonial state and the practice of local family life.
The French governor at the time of Guruvappa’s death, Beauvollier de Courchant, deemed Nayiniyappa’s brother-in-law Tiruvangadan, one of the candidates for the job of chief broker, too ambitious.27 Another candidate was Nayiniyappa’s second son, Moutiappa. Moutiappa had the support of his widowed sister-in-law as well as the support of missionaries of the Missions étrangères. But the French governor opposed Moutiappa as well, writing to Paris, “I feel obliged to alert you that he is the Black here who seems to me least suitable to being a modeliar [courtier].” He claimed that Moutiappa had stolen money and jewels from his brother. Also “he is a young man of very poor physiognomy, of ill regard, who is hated by everyone. . . . In short, we don’t see any talents in him. Furthermore, he is too young, and he would never want to become a Christian.”28 The governor’s remarks suggest an intimate acquaintance with squabbles within the Pillai family. While the charge of stealing from his brother may or may not have been accurate, Moutiappa could not be an effective courtier without the strong support of a family network of connections and commitments. Intrafamilial rivalry could be just as important as interfamilial rivalry in encounters with the French administration.
Correspondence between the company directors in Paris and the council in Pondichéry in 1725 reveals that the Parisian directors wanted to dismiss the Christian broker Pedro a year after his resumption of the post following Guruvappa’s death and replace him with another courtier as part of a number of personnel shake-ups. But the council resisted this directive, claiming that Pedro’s dismissal would significantly harm the company’s commercial interests. Council members lavished praise on Pedro as “an honest man, who is wise, loyal, experienced, one who is listened to and enjoys good credit, always providing signs of his zeal to serve, his docility, the care he takes of alerting us to all movements among the blacks.”29 The Pondichéry council described Pedro as “beloved by the blacks.” Added to this, his family connections made him eminently suitable for the post. “We also remembered his father, who was an excellent courtier, much loved by everyone; his uncle was also a modeliar and a very honest man.”30 While this memory belied Hébert’s assessment of Pedro’s father, it reflects the importance of kinship. The Pillai family would not take the post again until Pedro’s death in 1746, when the council selected Ananda Ranga Pillai over Pedro’s younger brother.
The rivalry between Pillais and Mudalis was long-standing, but the Nayiniyappa Affair was nevertheless a crucial juncture in the struggle over the profitable and powerful position of the colony’s chief broker. Nayiniyappa’s interrogation and subsequent appeals reveal that the tension between the two courtier clans directly influenced the investigation. An example is the testimony of a man who had been Nayiniyappa’s servant. A few years prior to his arrest, Nayiniyappa had accused this servant of stealing from him and complained of this theft to Governor Hébert. Hébert ordered that the man’s house and goods be sold and that the profits be given to Nayiniyappa in restitution. When Nayiniyappa stood accused of tyranny and sedition, the council called this servant as a witness against him, and he gave, as Nayiniyappa’s sons wrote in one of their appeals, “a horrible declaration against our father.” The sons accused Pedro and his brother-in-law of pressuring the witness into testifying.31 In fact, a number of witnesses against Nayiniyappa held grudges against him, for reasons that had little or nothing to do with the charges against him. As well as this servant, a group of shopkeepers who had been involved in a business dispute with Nayiniyappa testified against him.32 The sons accused Pedro of also influencing this group of witnesses.
Whether or not Nayiniyappa’s sons were right to accuse Pedro and his extended family of meddling with witness testimonies, the accusation reflects the importance of the broker clans and the tension between them. Nayiniyappa’s sons clearly understood the crusade against their father in a familial framework set against the world of local Tamil Christians, as well as the Jesuits. Their appeal alleged, “It was the Jesuits who crushed our father, they who instigated false testimony, the servant for this being Moutapen, their catechist, Pedro the modeliar, Raphael his brother-in-law, Darnacheraon his uncle, and other Christians known for their scandalous lives and their dishonesty.”33 In this account, the Jesuits were able to undertake their persecution of Nayiniyappa only with the assistance of a deeply familial network of accomplices—Pedro, his brother-in-law, his uncle, and their coreligionists, among them the catechist and his son the interpreter. In fact, a likely telling of the Nayiniyappa Affair would cast the Jesuits as the tools of the Mudali family, rather than the other way around.
Certainly the French fully understood the importance of local familial networks. A 1702 letter from Pondichéry’s Superior Council to the directors in Paris exposes further detail about the family ties that undergirded hiring decisions in the colony. The council conceded that the Jesuits had reproached French authorities for preferring to hire non-Christians (usually referred to in French sources as gentiles) over Christians for company positions. The council members halfheartedly denied the charge and justified their hiring decisions in terms that highlighted the familial. “The principal jobs suitable for local people . . . are held by an old Christian family, who began serving the king in St. Thomé under M. de La Haye in 1672, and have been employed by your company ever since,” wrote the council, referring to the Mudali family. The letter went on to name specific examples of Tamil Christians who held prominent positions in the company’s ranks, calling attention to the fact that brokers, interpreters, and laborers at the docks were all related: “The most important interpreter, the people who work on the waterfront assisting in the reception and departure of merchandise . . . are all of this family.”34
As this description reveals, working as a commercial broker had immediate benefits for members of one’s extended family, providing employment opportunities. The council’s premise that it was the family’s shared Christianity that ensured them all jobs should not be taken at face value. Rather, it seems just as likely that it was the familial association—regardless of confessional standing—that would have made the jobs travel across and between generations of a single family, with one relative securing a position for another. The fact that the Pillai family enjoyed similar benefits, despite its continued Hindu practice, indicates as much.35
The centrality of familial relations in the Nayiniyappa Affair is emblematic of the centrality of family to colonial governance in French India. The bonds between fathers and sons played a particularly visible role in the Nayiniyappa Affair. But one Tamil woman, Guruvappa’s widow, made a surprising impression in the French record of the affair. The archives of the French colony refer to her only as “the widow Guruvappa.” Her first name is never mentioned.36 Her experience reminds us that the bonds of kinship could enable all kinds of actors to advance their political, economic, and social agendas.
The correspondence of the widow Guruvappa with various colonial and metropolitan French institutions in the 1720s demonstrates how family members of Indian employees in Pondichéry were able to insert themselves into the sphere of influence of the French establishment and to successfully make claims on rights and rewards due to them by drawing on the language of kinship. The fact that such claims could be made by a woman, one who was illiterate in French and likely in Tamil as well and still repeatedly received favorable hearing, is an indication that the Compagnie des Indes was willing, and at times even eager, to draw extended familial networks into the complex calculus of its decision making in the colony.37
In the years following her husband’s death in 1724, the widow Guruvappa lobbied extensively to receive support from French institutions, writing to the company’s directors, to the directors of the MEP seminary in Paris, and, it seems safe to assume, also contacting the council in Pondichéry and the Missions étrangères missionaries living in the colony.38 In a letter to the seminary, she explicitly attempted to evoke the familial relationship she enjoyed with the missionaries in Pondichéry, writing that they had bestowed on her “the honor of receiving her and treating her as your child in your house.”39
In her communication with French interlocutors, the widow pursued two goals: she tried and succeeded to secure financial support for herself, and she advocated unsuccessfully for her husband’s brother Moutiappa to be appointed chief broker after Guruvappa’s death. Her letters offer a rare example in the archives of French India of a woman speaking in the first person.40 One of the letters in which the widow Guruvappa speaks in the first person concludes with the note “This is the mark [here an X appears] made by the widow of the Chevalier Guruvappa, who does not know how to write her name.”41 It is extremely unlikely that she spoke the French in which her letters were composed. She was also very young, only fourteen years old in 1723, when her name first appears in the records of Pondichéry’s état-civil. But although the letters were certainly coauthored by a Frenchman, there are indications the woman herself was intimately involved in the production of these first-person texts. One of the letters contains information about her childhood, which suggests her involvement. The fact that the widow found it necessary and expedient to make her claims in French, using the French terminology of kinship, reveals that effective claims making in French India necessitated navigating various affiliations and idioms.
Even though Guruvappa’s widow had powerful relatives who had long been in the habit of conferring with the colony’s highest-ranking French officials, she intimated in one of her letters that her act of writing to the directors of the company in Paris was a surprising one, perhaps even a transgressive one. “What will you say of the liberty I take in writing you,” she began a letter of August 12, 1724. “I admit that it is a great temerity on my part to thus abuse your patience and importune you, but as I think of the equity and justice which have made you so admired among all nations, I dare to flatter myself, messieurs, that you will have the goodwill to forgive me and cast compassionate eyes upon a poor, afflicted widow.”42 This letter was written shortly after her husband’s death of dropsy and implied that the widow had a right to expect assistance from the company, since her husband had served as courtier to the great satisfaction of the Superior Council. Her claim on the directors’ time and effort was also couched as depending on a long trajectory of family loyalty, mentioning the decades of her husband’s father, Nayiniyappa’s, involvement with the company. The widow Guruvappa had very specific ideas about the ways in which the company should assist her. “I am honored to prostrate myself at your feet and beg you to honor me with your protection, and to appoint my brother-in-law Moutiappa to the position held by his brother, my husband. I dare to hope that he [Moutiappa] will not prove himself unworthy of the grace that you will grant him.”43
The widow positioned herself as a stakeholder in the company’s hiring practices on more than one occasion. In a letter she wrote in 1726 to the Missions étrangères missionaries, she involved herself directly in the ongoing rivalry between the Pillai family and Pedro, the broker who had been appointed to replace Guruvappa. She proclaimed that Pedro should be “chased out of the office of modeliar,” since he did nothing except under the direction of the Jesuits.44
The widow Guruvappa’s attempts to create an alternative or supplementary kin network with the French might have been influenced by her precarious position within the Pillai family after her husband’s death. French records (as well as the widow’s letters to Paris) attest to the fact that after Guruvappa’s death, the family was involved in an inheritance battle, and a widowed woman would have been vulnerable. In a letter to Paris dated August 15, 1725, the council mentioned the internal squabbles in the Pillai family: “Ever since the death of the Chevalier Guruvappa, his widow is fighting with the deceased’s heirs, we have awarded her this revenue for her subsistence for the duration of her life.”45
The two requests in the letters—a job for her relative and a pension for herself—speak to different approaches to the benefits of kin networks. In the widow’s request that the post of broker be given to her husband’s brother, she was clearly attempting to bolster the position of her kinsmen in the colony, and by extension her own. That is, the protection she solicited from the company was configured and accessed through preexisting networks of family and marriage. But simultaneously, she worked to establish a fictive kin relationship with French institutions so as to enable herself to draw on their support and commitment by positioning herself as a child entitled to their protection. Her efforts were successful, as evidenced by the company decision to grant her a lifelong pension.46
The rhetoric of the widow’s letters appears, at first glance, to conform to the colonial fantasy of a submissive and childlike native requesting the protection of a paternal, colonial master. But a closer reading reveals that the widow Guruvappa drew on the currency of kinship strategically. Her engagement with French officialdom demonstrates how local inhabitants could participate in the administrative and political work of colonial governance through public and inscribed performances of kinship. The strategy of the widow Guruvappa, who both drew on the access afforded by her network of kin and attempted to forge new, kin-like relations with French newcomers, reveals how the local reality of kinship in India could intersect with the French idea and practice of family. She advanced her position and that of her relatives in Pondichéry through the idiom of kinship and mobilized support among Missions étrangères missionaries and company officials in both Pondichéry and France. By using affect-laden language, she demonstrated ingenuity, creativity, and strategic bonding in her interactions with colonial institutions. Her efforts relied on utilizing lines of communication long established between members of her family and the French authorities.
The ability of commercial brokers in South India to draw on their family ties to accrue profit and power, or what the historian Bhavani Raman has called the “lucrative tie of kin and cash,” has drawn some scholarly attention.47 But less remarked upon is the ability of European colonizers to similarly benefit from the bonds of kinship, and to this the next section turns.
The extent to which administrators of the Compagnie des Indes both sought to capitalize on local Indian family networks and accepted that their local employees brought with them both the advantages and the responsibilities of familial entanglements should not surprise. French imperial action—from the French Crown, itself a familial institution, on down—relied on the family as both a politicized concept and a daily practice. The same was true for the commercial sphere in France, in which reliance on credit extended through personal and familial relationships, making the family “of key importance in the commercial culture of the Old Regime.”48 The fact that the Compagnie des Indes was itself an institution in which advancement often relied on the associations of kinship is equally pertinent.49 Much as Tamil men could inherit the position of chief broker, French traders maintained and benefited from family connections within the institutional setting of the company. The company was, by some measures, a familial body: having a father who was a company employee virtually guaranteed a post for the son.50 This was true in the lower ranks of the company as well as in its highest reaches: when a director of the company in Paris died or withdrew, a relative would often fill his spot.51 In fact, beginning with Colbert’s creation of the Compagnie des Indes in 1664 to the days of the Nayiniyappa Affair, the ministers in Versailles charged with overseeing the company were composed of two sets of fathers and sons.52 Governor Dupleix, one of the colony’s most well-known governors in the mid-eighteenth century, was the son of one of the directors of the company.53 Employment in the company was a true Dupleix family business, since his brother also became one of the Parisian directors.54
Frenchmen treated the bonds of both godparenthood and marriage as means to expand and strengthen their family networks. By forging new kin relations, they could cross the borders of origin in order to affiliate with powerful people.55 The highest-ranking officials in the colony and their wives frequently appear in the Pondichéry notarial and religious record as godparents to French and Tamil Christian children born in the colony; it seems likely these designations offered a measure of economic benefit to the children and their parents.56 The état-civil record marking the birth of Jeanne Albert, a woman born to a Luso-Indian family who would become Governor Dupleix’s wife, exemplifies the uses of godparenthood. When Jeanne was born, her godparents offered the newborn support from both the ranks of the French company and local families in Pondichéry. The birth record written by a Capuchin missionary described the event: “Today, June second 1706, I baptized a girl named Jeanne. . . . The godfather was M. François Cuperly, a trader of the Royal French Company, and the Godmother Madame Jeanne de Castro.”57 While Jeanne’s godfather, Cuperly, solidified the Albert family’s position as members in good standing in the company’s town, the choice of her grandmother and namesake as the baby’s godmother—a local Christian woman who was the widow of a Portuguese man—suggests the family’s long-standing involvement in the regional landscape. Jeanne was a social force to be reckoned with in the colony when she became Dupleix’s wife and was herself a popular choice of godmother for Pondichéry’s newborns.
French parents’ choice of godparents created alliances with influential Tamil actors as well. The great-grandson of Governor François Martin’s wife, a child whose father was a powerful Pondichéry councillor, had in 1706 the “Armenian merchant, a resident of Madras,” Pedro Sacaria, as his godfather.58 Although the baby died in infancy in 1707, Sacaria provided the parents, the Hardencourts, and their circle a tangible connection to two worlds.59 First of these was the wealthy and well-connected Armenian diaspora, important players who provided French newcomers with entry into Indian Ocean trade. Second, he provided entry to the community of merchants in Madras, the prosperous English-ruled town where an Armenian might find an easier place for himself than a Frenchman.
Moving beyond the French sphere also allowed parents to create cosmopolitan horizons for their locally born children. Niccolaò Manouchi (Manucci), a well-known Venetian who had married a half-English woman from Madras and had spent years in the Mughal court, served as godfather to the children of several powerful families.60 With connections to multiple religious, linguistic, and political networks, he would have been a useful connection to his godchildren. Frenchmen in Pondichéry’s society may also have viewed being selected as a godparent as a symbol of arrival, an indication that one was a significant actor in the colony. Governor Hébert likely saw it that way when, upon his first arrival in India in July of 1708, he was almost immediately chosen to serve as the godfather to a son born in September to Claude Bruno, the port’s captain.61
Godparenthood also created horizontal links among the godparents, although that didn’t stop Governor Hébert and then councilor, later governor La Prévostière from becoming bitter adversaries in the course of the Nayiniyappa Affair. Governor Hébert and Marie Desprez, La Prévostière’s wife, had both served in 1709 as godparents to the same infant, six years before the explosion of the Nayiniyappa Affair.62 Nor was this the only such conflict or even the most recent one that Hébert experienced in relation to the affair, since in 1718 he became the godfather to the son of M. Delavigne, the general director of commerce in India for the Company of St. Malo, which intervened on Nayiniyappa’s behalf and called for Hébert’s removal. The baby’s godmother was the wife of Dulivier, Hébert’s archenemy and competitor for the role of governor.63 We can only conjecture about Delavigne’s motives in asking Hébert to serve in the role a year after his company had called for the governor’s removal. He may have been seeking to mend fences between the St. Malo Company and bickering Compagnie des Indes officials.
While godparental relations may have complicated Governor Hébert’s role in the affair, it was his paternal ties that were implicated in his turn against Nayiniyappa in 1715, when he returned to India for his second term with his adult son accompanying him. According to Nayiniyappa’s sons, both Héberts craved a return to India as a means to repair a dire financial situation: they were saddled by debts that they were unable to pay.64 Nayiniyappa’s sons claimed the official had promised to attack Nayiniyappa, long an object of the Jesuits’ animosity, in exchange for their support. Hébert the younger stood to inherit his elderly father’s debts and may have influenced the governor’s decision to reverse his former loyalties, supporting the Jesuits and attacking Nayiniyappa. Nayiniyappa himself thought so, and in one of his appeals he referred to Hébert’s “seditious son.”65 In this he leveled at his enemy the same accusation he had suffered.
In fact, Hébert fils took on an outsized role in the affair, even though he was only a junior employee of the company, a second du commerce.66 According to Nayiniyappa’s sons, the younger Hébert carried out queries that might have been embarrassing for the governor of the colony to undertake himself. They claimed that he had promised the Jesuit superior, Father Bouchet, that the governor would support a persecution of Nayiniyappa.67 Nayiniyappa’s sons were, of course, a partisan source, but there is no reason to doubt their claim that the son made the initial overtures, since this rendition of the affair is actually less damaging to Governor Hébert, removing some of his agency in Nayiniyappa’s persecution.
The sworn testimony of Manuel, the Tamil interpreter used to translate in most of Nayiniyappa’s interrogations, also suggests that Hébert fils played a crucial role in the Nayiniyappa Affair. The interpreter Manuel stated that Hébert the son, not the father, reviewed the testimonies of the witnesses against Nayiniyappa.68 Nayiniyappa’s sons referred to both Héberts, father and son, as the de facto governors of the colony, writing that their avarice had led them to conspire with the Jesuits, so that “they could retain the government of Pondichéry.”69 It appears the governor and his son made little effort to hide the fact that they were operating in concert, furthering a shared agenda in their pursuit of Nayiniyappa and his allies. The younger Hébert was present in some of Nayiniyappa’s interrogations by Governor Hébert, and according to Nayiniyappa’s appeal, Hébert fils intimated that he would accept a bribe to ameliorate the broker’s punishment.70
It was not only Nayiniyappa and his sons who claimed that both generations of Héberts conspired together. Nicolas de La Morandière, a company bookkeeper who was involved in drafting Nayiniyappa’s appeals, also viewed father and son as one operational unit. In a letter he wrote from India to the directors of the company in France in 1719, La Morandière said that when he looked into the books kept by the Héberts, an action he took in his capacity as company bookkeeper, he angered both father and son, and the two men together threatened to ensure he lost his job with the company.71 La Morandière also revealed that Hébert fils was in the room when the judges confronted Nayiniyappa before his sentencing. He described Hébert the younger (who was a junior employee and thus not technically qualified to serve as one of the judges) addressing the prisoner with authority: “You are a thief, we know you well.”72 La Morandière stressed the culpability of both Héberts: “I make no distinction at all, Messieurs, between father and son, and you must be entirely convinced that the crime of one is the crime of the other, with this difference: that the father is infinitely more culpable, because the authority of the government resides in his person.”73 The other judges also mentioned the younger Hébert’s’ presence in the room when they were interrogated in 1718 about their decision to convict Nayiniyappa.74
The third father-son pair in the Nayiniyappa Affair, apart from Hébert and his sons and Nayiniyappa and his sons, was composed of a father employed as a catechist and a son who was a company interpreter. The father was Moutiappa, the Jesuits’ head catechist (religious intermediary). His son, Manuel Geganis, served as the central interpreter in Nayiniyappa’s investigation—he was the interpreter for five out of a total of seven interrogations. He was also charged with arranging for the translation of witness testimonies from Tamil to French. Manuel was, like his father, a Christian and an intimate of the Jesuits. The first mention of him in the French archives dates to 1705, when he was arrested along with several other native Christian men.75 The Jesuits had long tried to bring about the closure of a large Hindu temple located right next to the Jesuit compound. An incident in connection with this had turned violent, when several of the Jesuits and their local Christian supporters stormed the temple and vandalized it.76 When Manuel was arrested, his father was already acting as the missionaries’ most trusted employee, and the arrest of the son suggests he was also closely affiliated with the Jesuits. On one occasion, Governor Dulivier explicitly referred to him as a catechist, the position also filled by Manuel’s father.77 Further, Manuel worked with the Jesuits prior to becoming an interpreter for the Compagnie des Indes, traveling to France with a Jesuit missionary. By 1715, the French company in Pondichéry employed Manuel as an interpreter, but Nayiniyappa’s supporters emphasized instead his father’s connection to the Jesuits, referring to him as “the catechist’s son” and not by his given name. Nayiniyappa’s sons wrote in their 1720 appeal, “The other interpreter is named Geganis, and is the son of the Jesuits’ catechist, which makes the matter even clearer,” as evidence that the proceedings were politically driven.78
Manuel’s role arranging for the translation of witness testimonies from Tamil to French allowed him to draw on his familial networks to advance the case against Nayiniyappa. Manuel provided Governor Hébert with easy access to a whole set of Christian actors involved in the production of evidence against Nayiniyappa, both Tamil and French: Moutiappa; the Christian Pedro, who was to replace Nayiniyappa as broker and was the central figure in Pondichéry’s Christian community; and the Jesuit fathers.
The council solicited testimonies from Tamil witnesses in Moutiappa’s house, and Manuel ferried the documented testimonies from place to place. As the catechist’s son, though not himself an employee of the Jesuits, Manuel was just close enough—but not too close—to serve as a perfect intermediary for interactions between Hébert and the Jesuits. His experience is yet another example of the imbrication of family in colonial governance.
Moutiappa and Manuel’s involvement with the Jesuits was of a piece with the missionaries’ broader strategy. Much like commercial brokers and French traders, Catholic missionaries and their native catechists, or religious intermediaries, relied on kin, family, and caste community to further the French missionary project of proselytization. Conversion to Christianity by French missionaries relied on the familial relations of their catechists. The importance of family relations was thus paramount for catechists, much as it was for commercial brokers. Conversion could move along family maps that the Jesuits had not charted but that instead followed lines of blood, caste, and familiarity.
The experiences of French Jesuits in the mission field away from Pondichéry thus demonstrate that much as the traders depended on the familial contacts of their commercial brokers, missionaries relied on the kin networks of their catechists. However, a crucial difference between traders and Jesuits was their response to this dependence on local family structures. The traders and administrators of the Compagnie des Indes were willing to accept this dependence, while the Jesuits were actively engaged in an effort to replace and supplant these kin relations with a membership in the family of Christ.
Many French Jesuits were themselves members of powerful and influential families, and the importance of family in professional advancement in French India would have been a familiar practice. But their training would have pre-disposed the missionaries of the Society of Jesus to shy away from too-heavy a reliance on the worldly ties of family connections. Upon entering the society, candidates were required to perform the Spiritual Exercises devised by the society’s founder, Ignatius of Loyola. The exercises were meant, suggests one scholar, to lessen the hold of ties outside the society, such that the community of the order would supplant the support and affective relationships of family.79 Although many individual Jesuits maintained close connections with their kin, the official position of the society discouraged this. Loyola was explicit about this in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus : “Everyone who enters the Society . . . should leave his father, mother, brothers, sisters, and whatever he had in the world.”80 Missionaries in India had chosen to replace the connections of natal responsibility and reciprocity with spiritual brotherhood. How galling, then, to find themselves utterly reliant on the ties of kin in India to spread the word of God. Even more upsetting would have been the position of Jesuits within these family networks. Not only did Jesuits depend on the familial relations of their native converts, but they were not even allowed to enter as equals, let alone superiors, into the networks on which they now relied. Jesuit missionaries thus found themselves denied membership in an association—that of the temporal family—toward which they were ambivalent at best.
Despite the Jesuits’ best efforts to insert themselves into such networks, albeit temporarily, their own stories demonstrate that most successful conversions in Pondichéry and beyond were achieved by the connections of catechists and other converts rather than by Jesuit persuasion. Father Pierre Martin told the story of a lady of the Indian court in Madurai named Minakchiamal, who was raised in the palace from a young age and given the task of administering to consecrated images of the deities that were worshipped there. After her marriage, she occasionally ventured out of the palace and made the acquaintance of several newly converted Christians. One of these, a woman with whom Minakchiamal had close relations, acquainted her with a “pious and wise catechist.”81 In this account the catechist told the new and highborn convert “about the grandeur of God whom we adore, and inspired in her, by his speeches, a high regard for our sainted religion.”82 Father Martin himself elsewhere admitted he lacked the ability to make such inspiring speeches in Tamil.83 Further, unlike the catechist, he could not produce the clincher: “It also came to pass during their many talks, that they discovered that they were quite closely related. The ties of blood intensified [her] esteem and confidence.”84 The catechist was thus able to offer the woman a conversion that did not entail a severing of all links to her community. The catechists’ ability to draw on ties of consanguinity was both a central offering they could make to the Jesuits and a durable source of their success in conversion.
The Jesuits drew on a long Christian tradition when they described their converts, and especially their catechists, as their spiritual children. In the preface to the ninth volume of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, the editor, J. B. du Halde, used an image that illustrated the intimate, corporeal relation the missionaries envisioned themselves to have with their employees the catechists. He wrote, “A missionary is multiplied in strength several times in distributing these catechists in various locations of the missions.”85 This image situated the catechists as emerging from Jesuit bodies, much like fathers creating sons. The catechists enabled the missionary to multiply himself, sending pieces of his body away, in a form of celibate generation. But this metaphorical kinship had its limits. The successes the Jesuits gained in the Nayiniyappa Affair depended more on paternal-filial ties built on consanguinity, such as that between Manuel and his catechist father, than on spirituality kinship.
Before Governor Hébert allied with the Jesuits, in a letter he penned on February 5, 1710, he pointed to the limits of relationships of fictive kinship. “One Christian Father leaves upon his death ten Christian children,” wrote Hébert, but he observed that the commitment Jesuits were able to inspire in their converted “children” in Pondichéry was of a more fleeting nature. “For at the end of ten years, you can scarcely find even one who still adheres to the true religion.”86 The benefit of an extended family network was that it enabled passing power and connections down through the generations. The spiritual family that Jesuits tried to construct in the subcontinent did not prove quite so enduring.
For catechists to succeed in their mission, they had to occupy positions of some authority among local communities, yet Christianity was a taint on one’s social standing in South Asia in this period. The problem created by their close association with the European missionaries was extreme for catechists. Missionaries paid catechists to devote themselves to being an example of faith to be followed, but their association with the missionaries could make them degraded and tainted men to be avoided. The difficulties surrounding the marriage of one of the missionaries’ catechists demonstrated this conundrum. This young man, who came from a family of “good caste,” had served the Jesuit missionaries from an early age in an unnamed coastal city—perhaps Pondichéry. Although the text does not explicitly refer to this man as a catechist, his close and intimate association with the missionaries as a member of their household makes it likely that he served them in this capacity. In the course of his life with the missionaries, he had on many occasions eaten with the Jesuits. When the missionaries decided it was time for him to be married to a young woman of his caste, “according to the custom,” it was quite difficult to find a bride of the right caste, because he had been tainted by sharing food with the missionaries, who, being Europeans, were of course not of his caste. “Nevertheless, after much effort,” recounts an eighteenth-century missionary account, “a family of gentiles [Hindus] that was much pressed by poverty agreed to give their daughter, and to have her instructed in [Christian] religion and baptized.”87 Alliance with the Jesuits was clearly quite costly in social terms.
Nor did the difficulties end once a bride was found. The missionaries went to considerable expense and hosted a large banquet to celebrate the marriage, inviting Christians of the young man’s caste and other guests. Yet even the Christians among the guests were loath to accept the invitation, being reluctant to eat with the missionaries and consume food prepared by European hands. They explained that the gentiles (referring to practitioners of local religion) would cast them out if they did so.88 These converts had remained active and respected members of their extended families and larger Tamil community, and their refusal to eat with Jesuit missionaries was emblematic of the Jesuits’ continual rebuff in their attempts to carve out a respectable foothold in the local landscape.
When the Jesuits tried to find a bride for their young protégé, they were attempting to use him as a stand-in for their own participation in these social and familial affiliations. The difficulties they faced speak to the limits of the use of intermediaries. Catechists could, on occasion, afford the Jesuits entry into local networks, but the missionaries inevitably came across barriers that could not be traversed. Because marriage meant the linkage of lineages, the Jesuits—with their murky and problematic social status and background—would have made for problematic and undesirable affines.
The missionary related the story of the Jesuits’ difficulty in arranging a marriage for their catechist in an aggrieved and accusatory tone. The Jesuits’ insistence on hosting a feast for their guests—disregarding the fact that sharing food with Europeans was at the root of the problems with securing a bride—suggests they hoped that their exclusion from local networks of celebration and conviviality would disappear if they simply refused to acknowledge it. The act of trying to arrange for the marriage suggests a usurpation of the familial role, and even the local Christian community—the very same people the Jesuits hoped would treat them as their spiritual fathers—refused to grant them this status. As Jesuits tried to supplant the networks provided by local families, the paths of conversion still flowed through families, thereby forcing Jesuit missionaries to participate in social settings in which they had little place.
This chapter has traced the efficacy of kinship in the Nayiniyappa Affair in order to demonstrate that a description of the politics, commerce, and conversion of colonial Pondichéry must account for the families of Pondichéry. The diary of the broker Ananda Ranga Pillai recounted an interaction he and an Indian friend had with the French colonial official Dumeslier in 1737. The entry highlights the centrality of kinship in the view of both French traders and their local intermediaries. Ananda Ranga Pillai wrote, “We both asked M. Dumeslier whether he meant to stay in India, or return to Europe. He replied that he did not see what advantage he could gain when he was separated and far away from his parents, brothers, sisters, and kindred. Alluding to his earnings in this country, he asked us whether we did not think that he could obtain the same on his own. He said that it was better to earn ten pagodas in one’s own land, than 100 in a foreign one, as in the former case a man need not give up friends and relatives.”89
Dumeslier’s plaintive summary of his position points to an important feature of colonial governance in Pondichéry: in the absence of local family networks, French newcomers depended on local employees like Nayiniyappa and Ananda Ranga Pillai. Ananda Ranga Pillai relayed this anecdote with a clear sense of his enviable position, given his secure access to a vast network of family and acquaintances and a close friend by his side.
French and local actors in Pondichéry drew on the shared idiom of kinship to strategically advance their political, commercial, and religious agendas. It is worth noting that both French and Tamil fathers and sons in the colony used kinship for political aims. Kinship was not cordoned off by European newcomers as a system that was primordial, immutable, or the domain of so-called natives. Rather, the efficacy of kinship cut across different systems of classifying relatedness, different religious affiliations, and different genders. Even though French and Tamil inhabitants of Pondichéry held different conceptual and practical understandings of familial relations, kinship was a shared idiom and the foundation of many of their most productive encounters. Scholarship on British India has shown how reliance on familial networks greatly strengthened the hierarchical authority of British company officials in South India while simultaneously providing subordinates with power over local inhabitants.90 The example of French India is markedly different in that working relations between French administrators and moneyed commercial brokers, and between Jesuits and their catechists, did not allow for such clear hierarchical distinctions. Affiliation with the French company or with missionaries did not necessarily entail subordination, and therefore French reliance on local family networks did not always position European newcomers as patrons. French trader-administrators, cognizant of their profound dependence on local markets and patterns of familial obligation and patronage, largely refrained from attempts to restructure or displace these patterns, as was common in later colonial projects.
In the Nayiniyappa Affair and beyond it, the action and theory of kinship were enmeshed within the practice of statecraft and bureaucracy, of commercial transactions, and of religious conversion. In the colony, French and Tamil families—both actual families and different conceptions of the family—collided and colluded. Familial relations sustained, enhanced, and shaped imperial projects in India.
A result of French reliance on local familial networks was that commercial and spiritual dealings with the French did not necessarily entail alienation from natal kin. On the contrary, the French desire to access such connections could even lead to the strengthening of these ties, as professional go-betweens and other local actors took advantage of these opportunities to bolster their standing in their family circles. Local, mostly Tamil agents who came into contact with the French at both the highest reaches of power and more humble spheres could leverage their employment by the French to strengthen their position in natal and affinal networks by using their authority in the colony to act as patrons and protectors. Such strengthening of kin ties was also a result of French strategies of trade, conversion, and employment. French officials, traders, and missionaries were all intensely aware of the importance of local associations of kin and caste. In their hiring of local employees, they attempted to insert themselves and their interests into such networks, albeit with only partial success.
The dependence on local familial networks was a site where trader-administrators and missionaries articulated the persistent conflict between projects of commerce and conversion. Religious and commercial agents took different approaches to dealing with this dependence. Trader-administrators were, by and large, comfortable with their reliance on the familial networks that their brokers made accessible, being accustomed to traveling along similar paths of advancement in French institutions. But Jesuits, while just as dependent as the traders on the local entanglements of their employees, were loath to accept this fact and instead attempted to provide an alternative kin network for their converts.