Nayiniyappa was already dead when his eldest son, Guruvappa, made his way from India to Paris in an attempt to reclaim his father’s reputation and riches. Guruvappa was tremendously successful in the metropolitan capital: he was baptized as a Christian in the chapel of the royal family, powerful royals served as his godparents (or so at least ran the family lore), he became a knight of a French noble order, and his family’s fortune was restored. When he returned to India, he took his father’s place as Pondichéry’s chief commercial broker and chef des malabars, displacing his father’s rival, Kanakarâya Pedro Mudali. But Guruvappa’s triumphant trip to Paris is but one example of an intermediary on the move among many in Pondichéry at the time of the Nayiniyappa Affair.
In Pondichéry, Tamil men employed by French traders and missionaries as professional go-betweens traveled in India, across the Indian Ocean, and between India and France. This chapter examines both the mobility of local intermediaries and French reliance on this mobility. It advances two related arguments, the first concerning go-betweens’ mobility and the second concerning French responses to this mobility. First, the concomitant presence of mobility and stability in the lives of colonial intermediaries helps explain the extensive role these men filled in Pondichéry’s development in the first decades of the eighteenth century. The journeys undertaken by several of Pondichéry’s commercial and religious intermediaries reveal that these Indian employees had the contacts, experience, and ability to act as avatars for their French employers in far-flung locations. They used their portable connections and skills while also deploying travel to improve their own social position. That is, somewhat paradoxically, their stability and relative enmeshment in long-standing social structures enabled them to move with relative freedom between ports, markets, and associations. In the lives of intermediaries, mobility and stability were mutually constitutive. Being known—as a neighbor, relative, creditor, coreligionist—opened up pathways of travel, making go-betweens accepted visitors. At the same time, the benefits accrued from traveling on behalf of French employers bolstered the position of go-betweens in their communities of origin. Movement not only was a physical practice in space but could also contribute to movement of a different kind, up the social scale.
The Nayiniyappa Affair again supplies a prism, here shedding light on the mobility of intermediaries in the context of empire. This is demonstrated by the travels of two intermediaries, both intimately connected with the affair, from Pondichéry to Paris. The first is Guruvappa, who became a professional intermediary as a result of his travels; the second is Manuel Geganis, son of the Jesuits’ catechist (religious intermediary) and the central interpreter in Nayiniyappa’s investigation. Their travels illuminate the broad geographical breadth of the Nayiniappa Affair as a local scandal with global dimensions. Long-established roots in the Tamil region made both men’s travels possible. While Nayiniyappa had been stripped of his riches and died in prison, the family’s position within a broad network of well-off merchants most likely enabled and funded Guruvappa’s travel, and connections with the MEP missionaries in Pondichéry secured him an introduction in Paris. He returned to India with a French name, clothes, and confession but still with the habits of a local (more on that below) and was quickly reincorporated into the local landscape. Much the same holds true for Manuel, who traveled to Paris because he was part of a local clan that was well connected with the Jesuits, and his ties of kinship served as the basis for his travels. Once he was back in India, his journey to the metropole enabled him to serve a crucial role in the Nayiniyappa Affair as its chief interpreter.
The second argument advanced here stems from an examination of French approaches and reactions to intermediaries’ capacity for mobility. The tense divisions between French commercial and missionary projects played out in yet another field. French traders traveled from port to port across the Indian Ocean, buying and selling as they went, and ventured inland to fill their ships’ holds with goods before returning to France to sell them. As Europeans, they lacked reputation, credit, and history in the trading associations of the Indian Ocean. Without local commercial brokers they could not act effectively in new markets. Missionaries also needed to travel from the moderately Christianized coast to the “pagan” hinterland, where souls were not quite waiting to be harvested. They viewed this as a spiritual journey as well as a physical one, traversing an arduous physical path just as they asked that their converts undertake an epistemological shift from one set of practices and beliefs to another. They relied on catechists, or religious interpreters, to negotiate this unknown physical and spiritual terrain.
Traders and missionaries both employed Indian intermediaries to act on their behalf, going where they were not known or welcome, and so moved their agendas while staying in place. But traders and Jesuit missionaries reacted very differently to the constraints and dependence they both faced. French traders and officials of the Compagnie des Indes showed considerably less resentment over this dependence than did the Jesuits. French traders were, by and large, willing to accept their dependence on intermediaries, which aligned with their general preference for sustaining the trading networks along which merchandise profitably flowed. French Jesuits, on the other hand, while they were reliant on their catechists to act on their behalf in towns and villages where European missionaries were not welcome, were often resentful of this dependence. The forcefulness with which the Jesuits interfered with company business when they encouraged Governor Hébert to arrest Nayiniyappa suggests this resentment; they also had ongoing conflicts with their own catechists.
Journeys and itineraries by intermediaries cemented and complicated the connections and relationships between the various outposts of empire, rendering meaningful the initial voyage that created a colony. Mobility and stability, coming together in the personal histories of Pondichéry’s intermediaries, allowed go-betweens to participate in the creation of a relationship between India and France. In the course of such voyages they wove together the French empire, creating a world where Paris and Pondichéry productively jostled one against the other.
A colony begins with a journey, made by settlers. Colonial histories have often focused on the mobility of colonial settlers while paying less attention to the travels of other agents in the colony.1 In this, historians have followed the lead of European colonial actors, who presented themselves to their supporters at home as emphatically mobile, although their position in the colonies as suspicious strangers severely circumscribed this mobility. Traders and missionaries in French India shared the predicament of this duality, and they consequently looked to local intermediaries for aid. Go-betweens addressed this problem without entirely resolving it.
Over the past several decades, scholars of both premodern India and Old Regime France have overturned perceptions of these societies as static realms, with a peasantry strictly bonded to a geographically restricted existence. The opportunities of early modern Europeans and South Asians alike to travel outside their natal communities have garnered increasing attention.2 One study has suggested that the category of “circulation” might adequately capture the vibrant exchange of goods, people, and ideas in the Indian Ocean.3 The crucial link between mobility and imperial settings and horizons has been trenchantly highlighted, yet with an emphasis on the “high” imperialism of the nineteenth century.4
At the same time that men and women in France were enjoying increasing opportunities for a mobile existence, the French actors who might have seemed to embody the epitome of mobility—those who traveled across the seas in pursuit of commercial and religious agendas—were in fact coming to terms with the limits of and strictures on their own mobility. As the next section will demonstrate, colonial administrators and missionaries had a well-articulated vision of French projects as cosmopolitan and of transregional and global reach. But this vision was undermined by Frenchmen’s limited ability to make room for themselves in these locales.
As Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out, the cultural mobility of ideas, practices, and metaphors relies on the literal, physical aspect of mobility—bodies moving in space.5 The contradiction between French ambition and limited French physical mobility led colonists pursuing both commercial and religious agendas to rely heavily on the physical transportability of the go-betweens who could travel on their behalf. But ultimately the contradiction that French employers faced, between mobile ambition and hampered movement, made the mobility of their intermediaries a fraught issue.
Connections across the region and the Indian Ocean more broadly were central for Pondichéry’s development. The colony was the administrative, commercial, and judicial center not only of the French holdings in India but also of the French Indian Ocean. A key component of French imperial strategy in the Indian Ocean was the founding of French colonies in Île Bourbon (present-day Réunion, first claimed by the French in 1642) and Île de France (present-day Mauritius, a French colony beginning in 1715).6 An unidentified French writer noted early in the eighteenth century, “Commerce in the Indies, by its nature as well as the current state of affairs, is connected to the operations of government, and the administration of our colonies and our factories in the eastern seas is connected to the commerce of the Indies. In order to guarantee this commerce we must have a fulcrum in this region.” The writer argued that French administrators must consider Île de France in the context of the Indian Ocean. “As long as we possess this important island, the door of the Indies will be open to us; if we lose this island, the door of the Indies will close forever.”7 Pondichéry’s success or failure was irrevocably tied up with the state of other French interests in this maritime region.
The French desire for continuous presence and influence across the Indian Ocean region was often thwarted. Where French officials imagined a spectrum of similarity, made coherent and cohesive by virtue of French governance, the reality of Indian Ocean dissimilarities provided an unwelcome reminder of the fragility of this imperial imaginary. Displaying their ignorance of the complexities of local affiliations, the Parisian directors requested in 1719 that “a dozen young Christian Malabar girls, capable of spinning cotton” be sent to the company’s colony in Île Bourbon. The Pondichéry council had to explain that complying with the company’s request would undoubtedly lead to violence and dire consequences.8
Opportunities for French expansion, commercial or religious, were not limited to locales where Frenchmen had already achieved some semblance of sovereignty, such as the Indian Ocean island colonies or the French comptoirs in India. French officials viewed the British-ruled city of Madras, Pondichéry’s largest neighbor, as an important hunting ground for such opportunities. Linguistic and historiographical specialization has led scholars to divide the study of Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French projects in India into separate realms of analysis and in turn to keep those separate from Indian regional history. In the case of Pondichéry and Madras, most scholars have studied the cities separately or imagined them as pawns in the global struggle between France and England. A regional context reveals that the history of Madras and Pondichéry’s relationship depended as much on the two cities’ proximity as on their strategic value in a global tussle. Pondichéry and Madras were woven together in ways that circumvented the divisions imposed by European rivalries, a fact both European and Indian agents recognized and made use of early in the eighteenth century.
Parisian directors and trader-officials in Pondichéry alike sought to recruit Madras’s wealthy and well-credited merchant class. The Pondichéry council declared that “there is only one solution” to the problem of supplying merchandise to French ships, “which is to employ every possible means to convince the merchants of Madras, powerful and accredited, to come and settle in Pondichéry.”9 Local employees had familial and commercial connections in both cities, and Nayiniyappa and his extended family allowed the council to tap into this resource. Nayiniyappa himself had relocated from Madras to Pondichéry as a young man, and once established there, at the urging of Governor Hébert, convinced his brother-in-law Tiruvangadan, a wealthy merchant in the city, to join him in Pondichéry.10 Tiruvangadan and Nayiniyappa then lured a network of their associates to the French colony.
A memoir written by Tiruvangandan’s descendant late in the eighteenth century recounted how these new arrivals from Madras used their connections to populate the French colony with their acquaintances. “[Tiruvangadan and Nayiniyappa] wrote to their correspondents in the towns and villages of this province, who sent merchants, weavers, cloth painters and workers of all kinds of métiers and professions, and thus the colony took on a certain luster,” recounted the memoir. “They began to produce and paint fabrics here, and commerce opened up, by both sea and land.” Prior to these efforts, the writer claimed, Pondichéry was little more than a village, peopled only by petty shopkeepers and farmers, lacking a proper commercial class.11 The connections of men like Nayiniyappa across the region, rather than conditions created by the French, were most crucial for the creation of such a class.
Tiruvangadan’s network of associates in Madras was precisely what made him an attractive recruit for the French. Prior to the explosion of the Nayiniyappa Affair, colonial officials explicitly asked him to arrange for the shipment of merchandise from various ports by deploying his friends to do so. Tiruvangadan mentioned that brokers relied on the ties of friendship more than once in a document he submitted in the course of the Nayiniyappa Affair when he recounted his connections with the French company. As he noted, “In order to succeed [in the job given to him by the company] I invested my capital and that of my friends.”12 French newcomers had much more difficulty forging such friendships.
In 1716, Governor Hébert claimed that Tiruvangadan was in possession of funds embezzled by Nayiniyappa and arrested him. Tiruvangadan wrote an appeal that began by laying claim to his well-established position in Madras as the anchor of his respectability: “I, being a merchant of this town of Madraspatan, land of the English, where I lived with my business dealings, my reputation and the credit of my person.”13 Later, when he was banished from Pondichéry, he returned to Madras and there composed an appeal to the French Crown, using a French-speaking notary in Madras. He returned to Pondichéry after Nayiniyappa’s exoneration, and according to the family memoir written by his grandson, the five richest merchants in Madras and their families accompanied him. These merchants brought with them something more important than capital: sought-after Indian Ocean connections, crucial to Pondichéry’s ambitions of becoming an important trading center. As soon as these merchants were settled in the colony, they began fitting out ships and sending them all around the Indian Ocean—to Manila, Aden, and Mocha. Thus, Tiruvangandan’s grandson wrote, “Due to the intervention of my grandfather and the merchants he brought with him, commerce opened up and was linked to all ports.”14
Tiruvangandan’s actions proved immediately beneficial to the company’s global commercial interests. In April of 1720, when the Christian Pedro was still chief broker, the Pondichéry Sovereign Council recorded that “Tirouvengadam, a malabar merchant and resident of this town” (not certainly but very likely Nayiniyappa’s brother-in-law), had brokered a relationship with Portuguese merchants in Macao, who were interested in regularly sending ships to Pondichéry—a very desirable proposition for the French, who were constantly trying to lure credited and established Indian Ocean merchants to their port. The Macao merchants demanded lower taxes as their privilege, and the council readily acquiesced.15
The ties between Madras and Pondichéry could also be cemented back in Europe in unexpected configurations. The diary of Nayiniyappa’s nephew Ananda Ranga Pillai mentions that on one occasion when the French and English governors of the neighboring Indian colonies found themselves in Europe at the same time, they became housemates. He heard from the captain of a ship recently arrived from Europe that “Mr. Pitt [the governor of Madras] was living in France in the same house with M. Lenoir [the governor of Pondichéry], and that they were inseparable companions.”16 Thus it was that being neighbors in India made unlikely bedfellows in France of the governors of rival colonies.
When Ananda Ranga Pillai was chief broker to the French, he received daily reports from the corps des marchands des malabars and the caste chiefs on what had occurred in each of their districts the previous day. The reports and their frequency indicate the importance of connections outside Pondichéry.17 By serving as a clearinghouse for regional information, Ananda Ranga Pillai could create commercial opportunities, drawing on wider resources than those available in the French colony. Even before he was promoted to chief broker, when the French wanted to begin producing blue cotton in Pondichéry rather than importing it from the important trading port of Porto Novo (Parangipettai) sixty kilometers away, Pillai made this possible. He orchestrated a series of complex political negotiations and some strategic gift giving that resulted in the relocation of skilled weavers from Porto Novo to Pondichéry.18 In compensation for his efforts, the Superior Council of Pondichéry rewarded him the privilege of supplying blue cloth for ships headed for Europe, Île de France, and other places.19 Beyond the financial reward, this mark of distinction further strengthened the broker’s importance and influence in the region. It likely was a crucial step in securing him the position of chief broker in 1746.
The story of Nayiniyappa’s sons’ banishment from the colony after their father’s death and subsequent return to Pondichéry also illustrates how intermediaries’ acceptance in the local landscape could have more than mere commercial benefits. Nayiniyappa was well into his sixties at the time of his arrest. Nevertheless, the sons claimed that his death less than a year into his three-year sentence occurred under suspicious circumstances. Nayiniyappa, wrote his sons, “suffered incredible pain and misery” after his whipping and during the months of his imprisonment.20 On the night of August 6 he suffered a loss of blood, and the following night he died. “It was made known to us,” the sons claimed, “that on the Thursday night before his death, Hébert fils and some soldiers came to our father’s prison cell, and one of them hit our father several times with the hilt of his sword. But we have no certain proof of this. One of the surgeons of the company visited our father that Friday, and filed a report that he found him seriously ill, but not at all in danger of death, nevertheless he lost the ability to speak, and died.”21 Nayiniyappa’s sons were not the only ones who claimed that the broker’s death was suspicious. An anonymous history of the Compagnie des Indes, one critical of Hébert, described Nayiniyappa’s death in these terms: “[Nayiniyappa] died in prison after some time, a death that surprised everyone.”22
Three days after their father’s death, Nayiniyappa’s sons relocated to a village away from Pondichéry and French rule. But merely leaving Pondichéry, they complained in one of their appeals, was not enough to protect them from Hébert’s wrath: “Three pions were sent from Pondichéry to assassinate us,” they claimed.23 Sensible of their position in the region, the Indian ruler of the province to which the sons had relocated commanded the village chiefs to guard them day and night and assure their safety.24 One day, when a servant from Pondichéry arrived in the village, he was immediately identified as a stranger and therefore as a threat. Under interrogation, the man could supply no satisfactory explanation for his presence in the village. In fact, the networks of regional knowledge exposed him as a fraud: he claimed to be on his way to visit friends at a neighboring village but was not able to supply their names. Finally, the man admitted he had come to see Nayiniyappa’s sons. But when the sons arrived, they did not recognize him. The sons claimed that at this point the man admitted that Pedro, the new head broker, had recruited him and others to kill them in return for cash, jewelry, and lifetime employment in the service of the French company.25
There is no way of knowing whether this alleged assassination attempt actually occurred. But its telling suggests the special benefits of being known and the drawbacks of being unknown. Nayiniyappa’s sons expected their story to be considered plausible when they claimed local leaders had protected them because of their family’s stature in the area. They likewise knew that the claim that a stranger coming after them took a risk in doing so would have the ring of truth. The Frenchmen who heard their story would know better than anybody the risks of being a stranger and that some people would be recognized, protected, and accepted where they were not.
It was one of Nayiniyappa’s French supporters who first suggested that a representative from the family travel to France to present in person the case for the restitution of Nayiniyappa’s fortune. The Pondichéry governor had reversed the verdict against the broker in 1719, but the earliest mention of the plan to travel to Paris appeared even earlier than that. Denyon, a former engineer who was responsible for the building of Pondichéry’s fort, proposed this course of action. Back in Paris, Denyon, along with a man named de Sault (a relative of Hébert’s rival, Governor Dulivier), served as the Paris liaison for the appeals filed by the Indians before the French king. In a letter he wrote in 1718 to Tiruvangadan, Denyon argued that any effort he himself could undertake in Paris would have only limited success: “I believe that affairs that are important and of delicate consequences could not be decided in your favor and others before the departure of the ships for India; you would do well to engage Rama [Ramanada] to go to England to come here [France] and throw himself at the feet of the king.”26
It was Guruvappa who soon acted on Denyon’s advice. In a notarial document filed in Pondichéry in 1719, he anticipated that this journey and his stay in France would prove expensive. He petitioned the council to order Governor Hébert and his son to pay his expenses, claiming that it was their evil machinations that had necessitated his trip.27 Leaving Pondichéry for Madras, Guruvappa embarked on a British ship that set sail for London, and from there made his way to Paris.28 He arrived there not as a stranger, for his French allies in Pondichéry had set the stage for him. Father Tessier, the MEP missionary in Pondichéry, had written to the directors of the MEP seminary in February of 1719, exhorting them to warmly welcome Guruvappa in their expansive rue de Bac headquarters. “I beg you, messieurs, to give this Malabar all the help you can offer him, in acknowledgment of the great services his deceased father provided to our missions here,” wrote Tessier, and he explained the reasons for Guruvappa’s travel to France.29 It appears that the MEP directors granted Tessier’s request: when Guruvappa’s widow herself wrote to the directors in Paris after her husband’s death, she reminded them of the warm welcome they had given him.30
Tessier required two things from his Parisian brethren: first, that they help Guruvappa in putting forward his claim for financial restitution before French officialdom, and second, that they make every effort to convert Guruvappa to Christianity. “The greatest service you could give to Nainiapa’s son would be to try to make him into a good Christian, and instruct him in his duties. I pray the Lord he will grant you this grace,” he wrote.31 Presumably Tessier had attempted to bring about this conversion himself in India. He clearly hoped that a period of immersion in a Christian land might complete the work. This, indeed, proved to be the case.
A search of the registers of the St. Eustache parish in Paris, where Guru-vappa became a Christian, did not yield a copy of his baptismal record. Nevertheless, there are numerous reports, both from Guruvappa’s own family and from French observers, that this conversion took place on Sunday October 8, 1720. The directors of the MEP seminary baptized Guruvappa in the chapel of the Palais Royal. A nineteenth-century account claimed that the regent, Philippe d’Orléans, served as the godfather, and the godmother was the regent’s sister, Elisabeth Charlotte.32 Guruvappa was given a new name, one that traveled with him back to India: a 1724 registrar record from Pondichéry refers to him as “sieur Charles Philippe Louis Gourouapa.”33
In Paris, a royal decree made in favor of Guruvappa restored his father’s fortune and officially cleared Nayiniyappa’s name of any implication of wrongdoing. The declaration, signed by the king in September 1720, decreed that Hébert’s judgments against Nayiniyappa, Tiruvangadan, and Ramanada were overturned, the sums seized from them were to be returned, and the men’s reputations would be rehabilitated. Hébert was ordered to pay them damages.34 The fact that Guruvappa was present in Paris when this decision was made proved crucial, since he was able to press forward his efforts to actually collect the damages from Hébert and to be paid in gold or silver instead of with bank notes.35
Guruvappa stayed in Paris for a little while longer after the decision was made. His conversion was but the first of his Parisian transformations. The second, performed by lettres patentes of February 28, 1721, made him a chevalier, a knight of the French order of Saint Michel. The order, founded in 1469, was initially a most prestigious honor, but its status had changed by the eighteenth century. Bankers, artists, members of the bourgeoisie who had performed some important service, and most pertinently, visiting foreigners regularly received this honor. Guruvappa would have cut a striking and unfamiliar figure—a young Indian knight—and a nineteenth-century French account refers to him as a man well known in regency Paris.36
Back in Pondichéry, Guruvappa must have regaled his family with stories of his adventures in Paris, and the Pillai family memoir, written late in the eighteenth century, fondly recalled how Guruvappa was “covered in honor” during his stay in France.37 When Ananda Ranga Pillai received a report of France provided by a Frenchman, he noted that this man’s “descriptions tallied with what we had heard before from other European gentlemen, and from Chevalier Guruva Pillai.”38 Guruvappa’s travels, and the stories he told upon his return home, clearly remained a family benchmark of authority for all things French.
There are other indications that Guruvappa’s travels to France made a lasting impression on his relatives. In 1757, when Ananda Ranga Pillai was involved in a dispute with a senior official of the company in India, Georges Duval de Leyreit, he wrote to complain to the current générale de la nation, the official’s superior. After detailing a litany of complaints, Ananda Ranga Pillai concluded by saying that if the matter could not be resolved promptly in India, he wanted permission to travel to France as soon as possible and plead his case there.39 He mentioned Nayiniyappa’s arrest, saying, “His son, Gourouvapapoullé, went to France to throw himself at the feet of Monseigneur the Duc d’Orléans, Regent of the Kingdom.” The exoneration of Nayiniyappa and the honor bestowed on the knighted Guruvappa, continued Ananda Ranga Pillai, were matters of global renown: “All of France and all of India are familiar with this example of justice rendered unto an Indian.”40
Crossing the ocean back to India, successful in his mission of restoring his father’s fortune, the Chevalier Charles Louis Philippe Guruvappa was appointed Pondichéry’s chief broker. Yet Guruvappa’s status now posed a categorical conundrum: Indian or French? Pagan or Christian? Intermediary or noble? The archive reflects that these questions confounded Frenchmen in the colony for the remaining two years of Guruvappa’s brief life (he died of dropsy in 1724). The fact of his ennoblement would have been a delicate matter, since it is likely that the only other knight in the colony was the governor—now Guruvappa’s employer.41
Guruvappa’s confessional status was also confusing to French observers. According to the agreement made between the Jesuits and the Capuchins in Pondichéry, the Jesuits ministered to the Malabar Christian population, while the Capuchins were in charge of the parish for Europeans. Guruvappa was, without a doubt, a Malabar convert. Yet he was also a knight of the order of St. Michel and as such was designated a member of the Capuchin parish.42 Further, Nayiniyappa’s persecution by the Jesuits presumably would have made his son loath to submit to their religious authority, and his new liminal status as a French knight made this possible. Guruvappa no longer fit neatly into preexisting categories that attempted to draw clear distinctions between colonists and Indians.
How enduring was Guruvappa’s conversion to Christianity? His widow described herself as a practicing Christian in 1726; an observer described his descendants in the nineteenth century as faithful Christians.43 Guruvappa was buried as a Christian, according to the record of the Pondichéry état-civil, tended by the Capuchin missionaries, which reads, “Today, August 13 1724, I buried in . . . our cemetery of Saint-Lazare . . . the chevalier Gourapa, who died between midnight and eight in the morning,” having celebrated the rites of Easter.44 The Capuchin Père Esprit de Tours signed his certificate of death.45
But some signs indicate that Guruvappa may have emulated his Hindu father’s adoption of the Catholic rosaries as a suitable gift for the poor while maintaining his local religious practice. His comportment discomfited French missionaries. “Upon his return to Pondichéry, Gourouappa persisted in the exterior profession of Christianity,” wrote a later missionary historian, “but in his conduct, he unfortunately gave unequivocal signs of insincere faith.”46 An MEP missionary stated that Guruvappa “hardly exercised his [Christian] religion,” yet nevertheless he “lived in the European manner” (il vivait à l’européenne).47 Guruvappa’s trip to Paris perhaps did not bring about any radical change in his religious practice, but it did clearly make a lasting impression on his habitus.
Guruvappa posed a semiotic problem after his trip to France: he projected a confusing series of signs. With his Christian name, European clothes, and stories of his triumphant trip to the center of French power, he should have been a shining example of the benefits of Christian conversion. Yet the message he gave potential converts was mixed at best. Much like Nayiniyappa’s distribution of rosaries, Guruvappa’s postconversion behavior is an example of the shaky dichotomy the missionaries tried to enforce between real and fake conversion. Instead of serving as a model Christian, Guruvappa added Christianity to his arsenal of religious practices, comfortably accommodating both the old and the new.
Guruvappa’s journey to Paris, his success there, and his subsequent elevation to the post of Pondichéry’s chief broker illustrate both the opportunities of intermediaries to travel among the outposts of empire and the benefits that could be accrued by such travel. With the support of French and British accomplices, Guruvappa managed to make his way to France, while his rival Governor Hébert was trapped in Pondichéry, his letters trailing Guruvappa in both speed and efficacy. Once in France, Guruvappa maintained his “exotic” appeal while simultaneously embracing norms that would have made him better accepted there. Returning to the colony, he kept the habits—in both senses of the word—that suited him and shed those that did not. He returned to Pondichéry a force to be reckoned with, displacing the current chief broker, Pedro.
Significantly, in 1724 when the Catholic Pedro himself was reappointed to the post of chief broker after Guruvappa’s unexpected death, the council referenced his mobility. They highlighted Pedro’s maritime experience: “S. Gourouapa having died last September of dropsy, we named as courtier in his place Pedro, who already was [courtier in the past],” reported the Pondichéry council. “He is wise and we were pleased with his conduct in the voyage he made to Manila on the Soucourama in the capacity of captain and supercargo.”48 Pedro’s sea voyage would have endowed him with desired commercial skills, but it also would have enabled him to forge personal connections in the important port of Manila.49 Thus even Pedro, whose claim to authority largely rested on the support of the Jesuits in Pondichéry, still needed to demonstrate that he was able to reach beyond the confines of the colony.
The highest-ranking brokers—such as Nayiniyappa, Guruvappa, Pedro, and Ananda Ranga Pillai—all traveled in the region and beyond, thereby acquiring the connections and experience that rendered them effective brokers. But go-betweens at more humble stations were similarly mobile. A man named Arlanden, who served in Pondichéry as the valet and broker of a French trader called Judde, serves as a telling example of how brokers were both able and required to move about as part of their duties. Judde and Arlanden were both implicated in a slave-trafficking case, which was brought before the Pondichéry council in 1743.50 In the course of investigations, which resulted in the release of most of the captives, it was revealed that Arlanden had traveled extensively throughout the Tamil region, abducting and ensnaring potential slaves through a network of local associates. The place origins of the enslaved men and women held by Judde revealed Arlanden’s itinerary, for he captured slaves for his French employer in Tranquebar, Karikal, and especially Arcot.
Commercial brokers had to establish both local and regional lines of credit and reputation so as to draw on a wide array of commodities and ports. But travel—and its mutually constitutive counterpart, situatedness—was also a central practice for the other kind of go-between examined here, the catechists.
Guruvappa’s travels to France were unusual but not unique.51 Like Guru-vappa, the interpreter Manuel was a professional go-between whose father was also a go-between. Before he served as the chief interpreter in the investigations against Nayiniyappa, Manuel traveled to France with one of the Jesuits. While the archives never refer to him as a catechist, his father, Moutiappa, was the head catechist to the Jesuits in Pondichéry, and this was often a hereditary position, in Pondichéry and elsewhere in South Asia. Second, a Jesuit manuscript that relates the founding of a mission in the Tamil region mentions that two catechists were sent to pave the way for the Jesuits’ arrival; in an unusual departure from most Jesuit writings, the catechists are mentioned by name, and one of them is referred to as Gigane—possibly Manuel Geganis.52
Two documents related to the Nayiniyappa Affair reference Manuel’s travel to France. One of the appeals put forward by Nayiniyappa’s sons mentions that “the interpreter was a servant of the Jesuits, son of their catechist, and was once a valet to one of the Fathers in France, returned to India with Hébert in 1715.”53 Another appeal, presented by Ramanada, Nayiniyappa’s business associate, contains a note in the margins that offers more intriguing detail: “The son of the catechist is a Christian Malabar, whom Father Petit took to France as his valet in 1705, and whom he presented in that kingdom as a man of quality in the Indies; he returned with M. Hébert in 1715. Since he spent almost ten years among the French, it is not surprising that this valet, who has aptitude and who is entirely devoted to the Society [of Jesus], speaks French as well as he does, having been taught [by the Jesuits].”54
Why did Father Petit take Manuel with him to France and keep him by his side for a decade? Surely, servants could be found in France, but were there services that only Manuel could provide, or a special connection between the two men?55 Ramanada’s reference to Manuel’s being presented as a “man of quality in the Indies” offers a possible explanation: a converted Indian, one of supposed high social rank and fluent in French to boot, would have been an important fund-raising tool for Jesuits. Such a man could have served as a living, breathing indication of their success in India. By presenting Manuel as a man of quality, the Jesuits might have been attempting to disguise the reality of the intersection of class and confession in India, a reality in which Christian converts were much more likely to be poor and of the lower castes.
Having spent a decade in France bestowed special status on Manuel, who was one of the few residents in the colony who could speak both French and Tamil fluently. Being intimately familiar with the daily details of life in France would have been another uncommon attribute and one that would explain how Manuel came to fill a position of prominence in what were at times rival institutions: the French trading company and the Jesuit mission. His unusual position as an intimate of the Jesuits and an employee of the company allowed vicarious entry into the interrogation room to both the Jesuits and the local Christian community of which he was a member.
While Manuel was unusual in having spent so much time in France, all catechists traveled in the course of their duties.56 Since only a handful of missionaries were responsible for a vast expanse of land surrounding Pondichéry, reliance on catechists was complete. According to Father Martin, the Jesuit missionaries each employed “eight, ten and sometimes a dozen Catechists, all wise men and perfectly instructed in the mysteries of our sainted religion. These Catechists precede the Fathers by several days, and predispose the people to accept the sacraments. This greatly facilitates the ministrations of the missionaries.”57 He described the Jesuit superior Jean-Venant Bouchet departing each destination after a few days, while the catechists would linger for a good deal longer.
The missionaries who attempted to lure Indians into the fold of Christianity faced a problem: they had no spiritual reputation. They were nothing more than foreigners, and the salvation they promised was as questionable as the credit of their commercial counterparts. Jesuits were endlessly concerned with their low status in India, bestowed on them as Europeans, or Paranguis. The difficulties that the Jesuits encountered as Paranguis would have been familiar. The global Jesuit project was in fact premised on overcoming the hardships of being a foreigner, with the ultimate mark of success and God’s favor being martyrdom at the hands of those who refused to accept Jesuits into their world. The fact that Jesuits did not limit themselves to missions protected by European colonial powers (for example, their ambitious mission in China) made violent attacks or indifferent dismissal all the more likely.
Although the Jesuits often paid tribute to the benefits their mission reaped from the catechists’ position in their communities of origin, the letters they wrote suggest they resented their dependence on catechists more than their commercial counterparts resented their local brokers like Nayiniyappa.58 Discussing the difficulties newly converted Christians faced, the Jesuit father Martin wrote that the catechists were sometimes those who provided the worst examples: “The catechists are often the first to scandalize the people with the bad example they provide, or obstruct the missionaries in the exercise of their ministry, due to their stubbornness and opinionated nature; and yet the missionaries dare not punish the catechists, for fear of bringing a cruel persecution on the whole mission.”59 This passage described a power struggle without a clear winner. Martin found the catechists headstrong and independent but had no way to control them. Their regional connections made them potentially dangerous foes.
In a letter of December 10, 1718, the Jesuit father Le Gac created a revealing juxtaposition between two stories concerning catechists. The first story presented a commendable catechist and the other, an errant one. The first described a catechist who came to a village in order to instruct a group that expressed interest in Christianity. Upon his arrival in the village, where he was unknown, he was arrested as a spy.60 He was then presented before the village head, and the catechist told him that the Sanyassi (meaning the missionaries, described here with the Hindu term for ascetic) for whom he worked enjoyed the protection of the governor. The catechist was nevertheless put in prison, but throughout the night he fearlessly read aloud Christian texts.61 Two important Indian men from a neighboring village, who knew the catechist, came and vouched for his innocence and virtue and obtained his release.62 Le Gac approved of this catechist’s piety and fortitude.
The second story, presented a few pages later in the letter, concerned a catechist who was summoned by a Hindu man with an interest in Christianity to instruct him in his village. But the catechist made various excuses and delayed his arrival for a long period. Once he made the journey, he remained in place a mere three days before returning to the mission. The catechist was worried for his own safety, for it was known that in this village strangers were often subject to severe punishments.63 Le Gac denounced the catechist who refused to travel, blaming him for his timidity.64
Taken together, the two stories demonstrate that the Jesuits demanded fearlessness from the catechists and a disregard for their safety. A catechist who brought persecution on himself was presented in heroic terms, while one who demonstrated warranted caution, for cruel treatment was often the lot of imprisoned catechists, was denigrated as a coward. The first story also reflected the missionaries’ powerlessness to protect the catechists; an intimate network in which they were unable to participate, connections forged of neighborhood and family ties, achieved their man’s release. The refusal of the second catechist to travel to the village also illustrated the difficulty the missionaries encountered in their relations with the catechists and in the mission field in general. The catechist did not want to put himself in a situation where he would be penalized for being a stranger in an unknown village. But for the Jesuits, the experience and danger of being a stranger were inescapable anywhere in India. The missionary’s anger at the timid catechist might have been sharpened by his realization that he had given up the privilege of belonging by coming to India.
Father Tachard admitted that his knowledge of Indian religious practice originated with reports given to him by the missionary Father Bouchet (the future Jesuit superior and adversary of Nayiniyappa). Father Bouchet, in turn, relied heavily on local catechists, employing as many as a dozen at on time. Father Tachard conceded that residence in India and even travel throughout India had done little to improve his knowledge of the place: “Even though I lived for several years in Pondichéry on the Coromandel coast, in Balassor in Orissa and Ougouli [Hugli] in the kingdom of Bengal and in Surat, where religion and mores are almost the same, and I had several discussions with infidels about their religion,” he admitted that he did not consider himself an expert on the topic. “I can honestly declare that I have gained very little solid and certain enlightenment. Because the gentiles [Hindus] who live along the coasts, where Europeans live, hide from us and disavow as much as they can their fables and superstitions.”65
Jesuit attitudes toward the travels of catechists oscillated between two poles: reliance and resentment. Scarcity of missionaries, the vastness of the mission field, and the unlikelihood that Jesuits would be welcome and respected visitors all made it a mission imperative that catechists travel on behalf of missionaries. Yet the ability of catechists to insinuate themselves into communities of potential converts meant that they took an outsized role in the life and direction of the mission, becoming stand-ins for the missionaries and thereby rendering the missionaries dispensable. For catechists, the opportunity to travel away from Pondichéry, an enclave of tenuous European authority, offered a chance to exercise these powers. In Pondichéry, it must have been clearer that the Jesuits were in charge and the catechists were their employees. But what of a place like a new mission in the hinterland, where the Jesuits admitted they had to hide in order to further their own cause? There the distribution of authority between Jesuits and catechists was even less clear-cut than in the colony.
The creation of new Jesuit missions proved to be more successful if catechists rather than missionaries established them. A manuscript account by Father Bouchet recounted the history of the founding of the Tarcolam mission, showing how such projects could simultaneously depend on the mobility of catechists and be a local, community-led effort.66 The mission was the initiative of a young Indian man, Ajarapen, who converted to Christianity and then convinced the French Jesuit Father Mauduit to start a mission in his hometown of Tarcolam. Ajarapen’s story itself revolves around the oscillating forces of mobility and stability, as Father Bouchet wrote: “Eight or nine years ago a young boy born in the town of Tarcolam left his parents and traveled to several places in these parts. . . . During his voyages to the coasts he was baptized and resolved himself to return to his land to see if his relatives, who were all idolaters, were still alive.”67 The coast here figured as a transformative and liminal space: a young boy goes to the water’s edge, immerses himself in the new practices borne over the seas, and then carries droplets of the coast back with him to his place of birth. Yet this watery transformation adhered more easily to the bodies of converts and, later, catechists—not missionaries, who were not effective carriers for this immersive change.
Although Ajarapen was not explicitly labeled a catechist in the text, he was described as working as an assistant to Father Mauduit, presumably in Pondichéry, where Mauduit was stationed. When Father Bouchet, the Jesuit superior, arrived in the village, it was only after Ajarapen had prepared the ground for a visit by Father Mauduit and several catechists had already been sent to the village.68 Ajarapen’s work was especially successful: when he told his family stories about his guru, a relative offered to donate a plot of land on which the Jesuit mission could be built. When village opinion coalesced against the decision to build a mission, the village elders emphasized the fact that the missionaries were strangers (gens inconnus) rather than raising any religious objections.69 Father Bouchet believed the potential donor was reconsidering his gift because it had been revealed the missionaries were Paranguis, and this was their undoing: “Experience has already taught me several times that our missionaries were always well received before there was any suspicion that they were Europeans, but as soon as they were recognized [as Europeans], they were shamefully chased away, or they were treated with scorn,” lamented the Jesuit. Bouchet believed it was Indian traders who had themselves spent time on the coast who recognized the missionaries as Europeans.70 Knowledge acquired at the coast again proved pivotal. The Jesuits here remind us that contact was not merely an occurrence of so-called colonial contact zones; it also seeped deep inland.
Word traveled quickly, not only from the coast inland but also between neighboring villages. This was what most concerned Jesuits about their possible failure in Tarcolam: it would severely compromise their chances in the entire region and sully their reputation beyond repair. Ajarpen’s support had given them a chance at Tarcolam, but word of mouth would also be their downfall if everyone knew they were Europeans. As Bouchet admitted, “If we left here with infamy [attached to us], we would not easily find an occasion to return; word would spread to the surrounding tribes.”71 Ultimately the Jesuits were given the land for their mission at Tarcolam as a result of Ajarapen’s efforts.72
French actors encountered significant difficulties when they tried to move through the Indian landscape and relied on the mobility available to intermediaries. Go-betweens deployed their mobility to enhance their status as professional go-betweens in the French colony, such that mobility both depended on and enhanced their stability in the region. Traders and missionaries alike experienced this dependence on mobile local employees. But as in the realms of kinship and language, mobility was another arena in which French agents of commerce and religion approached similar issues differently. Traders, such as the Frenchman Georges Roques in Surat, might have grumbled about their reliance on commercial brokers: “Whatever reputation or credit you might possess, nobody will deal with you unless you have a private broker. This is the custom of the country. You have to follow it. . . . Hence, let us choose one and then close our eyes!”73 But like Roques, traders generally accepted this as the cost of doing business. Missionaries on the other hand, and specifically the ambitious Jesuits, attempted to shift the social reality that made catechists crucial to their efforts and were therefore much more ambivalent about their dependence on catechists to move in their stead.
The prism of the Nayiniyappa Affair spotlights the issue of colonial mobility. Nayiniyappa’s position as a node for information that traveled through the town and across the region made him both a valuable asset to the company and a threat to traders and missionaries alike. After Nayiniyappa’s death, the unfolding of the affair occurred over space as well as time. His eldest son traveled from India to Europe, successfully reversing the more common itinerary that originated in the metropole and concluded in the colony. Once in France, Guruvappa made ample use of a French and global network of supporters that facilitated his movement up the social ladder, capping his trip with a French knighthood. But as his actions upon his return to India demonstrate, this is no simple story of assimilation. Guruvappa adopted some of the habits he picked up in France and discarded others, with no harm to his position in the colony.
From the other side of the Nayiniyappa Affair, Manuel’s travels to France exhibit the special nimbleness intermediaries like Manuel and Guruvappa could exhibit, drawing on linguistic and cultural expertise to traverse the internal French boundaries that separated the missionary and commercial projects. Taken together, the movements of these two men between India and France, alongside the travels of other commercial and religious intermediaries across the Indian Ocean region and within India, demonstrate that the travels performed by intermediaries enabled them to acquire and sustain the special skills and abilities French colons and missionaries valued so highly.
French traders and missionaries in India both undertook projects that required them to be mobile if commerce and conversion were to succeed. But there was a significant gap between this articulated vision of imperial mobility and the realities of their limited ability to move through colonial space. Lacking reputation, credit, local ties, or moral authority, they often found it difficult to venture beyond Pondichéry or to transform Pondichéry into the busy and Christian hub they envisioned. Professional intermediaries filled this gap between ambition and reality, traveling on behalf of their employers, inserting Pondichéry into preexisting Indian Ocean networks, and using the connections and skills accrued in the course of travel to bolster their position as stable figures of authority in the colonial landscape. Pondichéry’s intermediaries enjoyed uncommon opportunities to journey between outposts of empire, and in the course of this crisscrossing they constituted the empire as a connected entity, a well-traversed map of overlaid European and Indian itineraries.