Introduction
When three French merchant ships arrived in 1714 in the port of Pondichéry, on the Coromandel coast of India, the disembarking sailors found themselves in the midst of a massive celebration.1 The town was marking the marriage of the son of Pondichéry’s chief commercial broker, a Tamil man named Nayiniappa.2 Ten thousand guests, Tamil and French, took part in the event. The party went on for days, with elephants, fireworks, lavish feasts, religious rites, and dance performances—including one that took place in the house of the commander of the French fort. The scribe of the French merchant fleet devoted several pages of the ship’s journal to the description of the event, clearly dazzled by the wealth, influence, and authority on display.
The host of the wedding celebration, Nayiniyappa, was the most important Indian employee of the Compagnie des Indes orientales, the French trading company governing Pondichéry.3 The town-wide celebration reflected his place and power in the colony. Yet only two years later this same man was alone in a prison cell; for days he was held without even knowing the charges against him. On June 6, 1716, the French colonial court convicted Nayiniyappa of the crimes of tyranny and sedition after finding him guilty of abusing his power and organizing an employee uprising that had taken place the previous year. He was taken to the town’s main bazaar and received fifty lashes of the whip in front of a watching crowd. All of his vast wealth, accumulated over decades of doing business with French traders—the land, houses, jewels, elephants, cash, and goods—was stripped from him, and his three sons were banished from Pondichéry in perpetuity. He was sentenced to serve three years in prison, but just a few months later he died in his cell under somewhat mysterious circumstances.
Three years after this solitary death, in 1720, a young Tamil man would kneel to embrace Christianity in the ornate chapel of the royal family in the Palais Royal in Paris. No less a personage than Philippe d’Orléans, the regent of France, would serve as his godfather. French missionaries hosted the young foreigner in their Paris headquarters. A few months after that he knelt again, this time to receive a French order of knighthood. The pendulum had swung back for Nayiniyappa’s family, for the kneeling man was his eldest son, Guruvappa.4 It was likely Guruvappa’s own wedding that the ship’s scribe had depicted in his journal six years earlier. Nayiniyappa’s son returned to India ennobled, the banishment rescinded, with a new name honoring his royal godfather and the young King Louis XV: he was now the Chevalier Charles Philippe Louis Guruvappa.5 He assumed the position that had been his father’s: chief commercial broker to the Compagnie des Indes in Pondichéry. The event known in both France and India as l’affaire Naniapa—the broker’s rise, fall, and posthumous rehabilitation over the course of a decade—had come full circle as Nayiniyappa’s son returned triumphant to the colony.
These radical reversals of fate were an essential feature of the Nayiniyappa Affair, the event at the center of this book. And as the Nayiniyappa Affair was litigated, investigated, and contested, the involved actors all articulated their vision of French empire in the East and debated the role of local intermediaries like Nayiniyappa in Pondichéry. An investigation of the affair and the fault lines it revealed shows that conflicts between and within the projects of trade and religion were a defining characteristic of French empire in South Asia.
The French Crown and its agents were engaged in two central efforts in India in the first decades of the eighteenth century: building the town of Pondichéry into a prosperous trading hub and converting local men and women to Catholicism, the religion of the French state. The two efforts at the heart of the French presence in South Asia—making money and making Christians—shared important characteristics. French colonial trade and Catholic religious mission were both concerned with creating and propagating a colonial vision of order, authority, and morality. However, they differed in the specifics of this vision, and the intersection of the two efforts entailed significant instability and friction. Although the French state chartered, funded, and to a large measure directed both of these projects, merchant-administrators and missionaries could not agree on what kind of colony—and colonie was the term consistently used by contemporaneous sources to describe the settlement of Pondichéry—they were creating.
Traders and officials of the Compagnie des Indes sought to sustain the very profitable status quo and to insert themselves into long-standing Indian Ocean trading networks. French missionaries, on the other hand, espoused an ideology of disruption and radical change in an effort to reconfigure the local spiritual and social hierarchies. The book’s central argument is that commerce and conversion in French India were simultaneously symbiotic and fundamentally in tension with one another. Would the traders’ vision of a profitable status quo prevail, with the French newcomers seamlessly inserted into the established networks and markets of the Indian Ocean world? Or would the missionaries’ transformative agenda emerge triumphant, with a Catholic order replacing the multiple religious practices in the region?
The complexities of internal colonial rivalries and the imbrication of local networks within these rival efforts shaped the French experience in South Asia. The creation of sovereignty in French India, I argue, required distributed authority. Local intermediaries shared in the mechanism of distributed authority, effectively sidestepping the binary of collaboration or resistance that has informed so much of the scholarship on colonial encounters. The first decades of French rule in Pondichéry, and especially during the course of the Nayiniyappa Affair, revealed with particular clarity the stakes of such distributed authority.6 The actors most intimately involved in the Nayiniyappa Affair understood the case as hinging on precisely the intersection of mediation and sovereignty.
What, then, was the Nayiniyappa Affair, and why should it matter for the histories of colonialism, France, and South Asia? The remainder of this book is devoted to teasing out the affair’s multivalent and layered meanings, but its twists and turns were the stuff of high drama and can be briefly summarized. Nayiniyappa came to Pondichéry as a young man, and over several decades of involvement with the Compagnie des Indes he became one of the richest and most influential men in the French colony. In 1708 the French governor, Guillaume André Hébert, appointed him to the highest position a local man could hold: courtier to the company and “head of all Malabars.” Nayiniyappa and Hébert worked closely together for several years, trying to build the colony’s trade and reputation. Five years into Nayiniyappa’s tenure as chief broker, Hébert was removed from office because the directors of the company in Paris were unhappy with his management of the colony, and he was sent back to France.
But Hébert wanted to return to India, where a man could make a lot of money quickly. Hébert’s rivals told an unflattering story about the governor’s agenda and methods; according to Nayiniyappa and his allies, Hébert cultivated the powerful Jesuits, who had the ear of some of the most important actors in the French court. In return for the Jesuits’ support—so goes the story according to Nayiniyappa’s supporters—Hébert agreed to help the Jesuits in Pondichéry bring about Nayiniyappa’s downfall. The Jesuits strongly objected to Nayiniyappa as chief broker because he refused to abandon his local religion, which we would today term Hinduism, in favor of Christianity.7 The Jesuits wanted a Catholic Indian as chief broker.
We cannot know whether Hébert and the Jesuits struck a deal. But in 1715 Hébert was sent back to Pondichéry, and a few months later he ordered Nayiniyappa’s arrest. Two of Nayiniyappa’s close associates, his brother-in-law Tiruvangadan and a man named Ramanada, were arrested as well. Nayiniyappa’s trial attempted to answer the question, how central a role in the colony’s rule was it possible, permissible, or desirable for a local intermediary to fill? His conviction was an effort to curtail the influence of local actors. But after Nayiniyappa’s conviction, a global mobilization effort on his behalf ensued—by missionaries who were rivals of the Jesuits, traders who were rivals of Hébert, and an association of merchants from St. Malo with trading interests in India, who relied on Nayiniyappa to keep their ships full and their journeys profitable. Nayiniyappa died before he could benefit from these efforts on his behalf, but he was exonerated posthumously. Hébert was removed from office, sent back to France in disgrace, and ordered to pay damages to Nayiniyappa’s heirs.
This bare-bones account of the affair does little, however, to reveal its multiple and contradictory meanings and implications for the history of French India. An inquiry into Nayiniyappa’s life, downfall, and rehabilitation starkly reveals the fissures between the commercial and spiritual branches in Pondichéry, especially between the Compagnie des Indes and the Jesuit missionaries. We see here conflicts at multiple scales and intersections, with institutions fracturing against each other and internally: traders against missionaries, traders against traders, missionaries against missionaries. The Nayiniyappa Affair pitted government officials and traders on the one side against Jesuit missionaries on the other, but it was also the site of even more internal face-offs: current administrators of the Compagnie des Indes battling their current and former colleagues; traders in France against traders in India; Jesuits against rival Catholic religious orders, the Capuchins and Missions étrangères de Paris (MEP) missionaries, a society created in 1658 expressly for conversions in Asia.8 It is worth reiterating that all these actors purportedly shared a single cause—the prosperity of Pondichéry in the name of God and king. The Nayiniyappa Affair thus reveals the fractured nature of the colonial effort.
Historiographies of both France and South Asia have largely neglected the history of French India, albeit for different reasons. In colonial South Asia, the shadow of the British Raj has loomed so large as to obscure the neighboring French as well as Dutch and Danish colonies in both the Tamil region and Bengal, site of the French holding in Chandernagore. Even as the historiography of India in the eighteenth century has been growing, it is still, to a large extent, devoted to unraveling the origins, processes, and consequences of British rule.9 The study of the Indian Ocean more broadly has grown enormously in recent years, but the French experience within it has similarly garnered surprisingly little attention. French historians, on the other hand, have only relatively recently begun to study empire, owing to what has been described as a “fit of collective imperial amnesia” following the French loss of colonies in Asia and Africa in the twentieth century.10 Late twentieth-century efforts to reckon with the war in Algeria and its ongoing impact on France in the modern era have been central in the turn toward colonial history, meaning that the bulk of the work on French colonialism has been devoted to France’s Second Empire, of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.11 Work on France’s First Empire, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the other hand, has by and large focused on the Atlantic. Historians have marginalized the French colonies in India and the Indian Ocean and dismissed them as failures and thus insignificant.12 Yet French experiences in the early modern Indian Ocean—precisely because they do not follow the trajectory of more familiar, later imperial histories—enhance our understanding of the conflicts, challenges, and contradictions inherent in colonialism.
This book integrates ongoing debates about colonial mediation on the one hand and the making of imperial sovereignty on the other by situating the Nayiniyappa Affair at the heart of an account of French colonialism in India. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, across the empire, French actors and populations newly under French rule negotiated mutual working orders. This period saw debates over practices of enslavement, cultural blending and miscegenation, trade and smuggling, and the relationship between metropolitan vision and colonial enactment.13 At the heart of most of these debates was an attempt to determine the contours of French sovereignty in colonial locales.14 The Nayiniyappa Affair illuminates this phenomenon with particular clarity, since in the course of the affair debates about mediation and its limits morphed into explicit claims and counterclaims about both the desired ambition and the possible reality of French sovereignty.
Cultural mediation, and more specifically the work of native intermediaries in colonial settings, has been shown to be pivotal in the making of emerging empires.15 Scholars have demonstrated how colonized subjects, especially elites, could come to have crucial roles in the creation of political and administrative ties between the intermediaries’ communities of origins and the sometimes far-flung colonial cities where official power was concentrated.16 These investigations, however, have focused almost exclusively on the bridge these go-betweens provided between European newcomers and indigenous populations. Historians have only recently turned their attention to the role local intermediaries filled within European political and institutional settings, to examine how they provided an opportunity for colonial actors to grapple over their different approaches to governance, trade, and religion.17 In Pondichéry, native colonial intermediaries acted within the European imperial structures, mediating, highlighting, or benefiting from conflicts among European groups as much as from the differences between new arrivals and local populations. The focus on intermediaries in Pondichéry reveals both that intra-European conflict was a defining feature of colonialism and that intra-Tamil conflict, particularly between rival families of local brokers, similarly informed colonial decision making.
Scholars have also attempted to uncover the mechanisms by which imperial sovereignty comes into being.18 Yet this work, Mary Lewis has suggested, focuses on the unitary, categorical whole of empire, to the neglect of the local specificity of colonial politics.19 Much attention has been paid to resistance on the ground to colonial sovereign rule, but sovereignty itself is often described as stemming from political and intellectual trajectories that are conceptually separate from the actual experience of colonialism.20 By theorizing sovereignty in early modern empires as a construct imported from Europe, this literature obscures the role of local agents, including the significant role of the intermediaries on which colonial rule relied.21 The spatial and temporal categorizations that posit that concepts of sovereignty arrived with colonists aboard European ships or were developed in later, more hegemonic imperial settings do not do justice to the historical record. Agents of the French state in Pondichéry neither wholly conceived sovereignty in advance nor fully held it in undivided fashion. French sovereignty had to be constructed in Pondichéry and thus incorporated local actors, conflicts, and practices.
Puducherry to Pondichéry
The French were the last to arrive of all the Europeans who established trading posts and colonies in India, following the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and even the Danes. The Compagnie des Indes orientales, created in 1664, was the first durable vehicle for French commerce in India. Unlike the merchant-led Dutch and English companies, the French endeavor was an explicitly royal project, imagined and executed by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister of finance.22 The creation of the company was of a piece with Colbert’s broader mercantilist vision, according to which control of foreign trade was crucial for the state’s well-being.23 Earlier scholarship has tended to consider the early efforts of European charter companies in the East as “mere” merchant capitalism; more recently, scholars have demonstrated how these mercantile efforts acted in state-like ways, with territorial and cultural ambitions informing their decisions, such that the distinction between “purely” or “merely” commercial projects and political, state-like, imperial, or colonial ones holds little water.24 After all, every European trading company depended on its relationship with the state that provided its charter.25 If it is true that the early British East India Company presence in India was in many ways that of a state, as Philip Stern has cogently argued, this was much more the case in the French experience, since the French company, as scholars have recently argued, was a “state concern . . . rather than a truly merchant-run trading organization.”26 The French case is distinctive, not least because the involvement of various missionary orders, explicitly charted by the French king and sent to support commercial efforts, demonstrates that the French in Pondichéry were engaged in an effort to transform the spiritual, cultural, and political landscape, alongside their attempts to insert themselves into established commercial exchanges.
The company’s structure bore witness to its royal origins: a Paris-based chambre générale of directors appointed by the Crown managed it, under an official who reported directly to the king.27 Most of the capital that established the company was raised from the royal family, government ministers and other members of the court at Versailles, and financiers. Both Louis XIV and the powerful minister Colbert were major shareholders in the company, with the king providing more than three million livres of the original capital subscription to the company, roughly half the initial capitalization.28 Once established in India, the Compagnie des Indes, like other European charter companies, administered towns, made laws and dispensed justice, minted money, commanded troops, built fortifications, and supported conversion efforts.29 But in this case the French state was the explicit planner and director of its actions, making the imperial dimension of this commercial project central to the company’s development.
The French first tried to establish themselves in Surat, a bustling and well-established port in Gujarat on the west coast of India, where the French founded a trading post in 1668, but they quickly encountered difficulties.30 Too many rivals, too little room for newcomers. It was in the town of Pondichéry, almost a decade after the Compagnie des Indes orientales was first formed, that the French would gain a measure of political sovereignty, but it was a somewhat haphazard affair at the outset. In the 1670s the company’s traders turned south from their failed effort in Surat to the Coromandel coast of India. In an unexpected turn of events, Sher Khan Lodi, a local Indian governor appointed by the sultan of Bijapur, suggested the French might like their own establishment in the region, and he gave the French representative Pondichéry as a gift.31 The village was not far from English and Dutch holdings, and its Tamil name—Puducherry—meant “new town.”32 The newness of Pondichéry also meant that almost all its residents—French and South Asian–born alike—were effectively newcomers and that French rule in the town was not displacing an earlier form of Tamil sovereignty. The French company also made a concerted effort to cast a broad geographic web in India, founding satellite trading posts (comptoirs) in Karikal, Yanaon, Mahé, and Chandernagore, and it maintained its lodges in Surat and Masulipatam. Beginning in 1701, Pondichéry served as the administrative, political, and military center of the French presence in the subcontinent (figure 1).
Pondichéry’s survival and prosperity depended on trade. Trade in India radiated across a wide-flung web of ports, out from the coastal cities of the subcontinent to Asia and the Indian Ocean. From Pondichéry, trade routes fanned out both east—to Aceh, Mergui, Pegu, Batavia, Manila, and China—and west—to Mocha, the Maldives, and the islands of Île Bourbon and Île de France in the Indian Ocean. In all these ports, French traders competed not only with the Dutch, English, and Portuguese but with the commercial communities of Gujratis, Jews, Muslims, Armenians, and others that had preceded them.33 Cross-cultural trade, in the Indian Ocean as elsewhere, depended on trust, familiarity, and reputation, as merchants tried to establish a stronghold far from home and relied on credit to carry out transactions.34 French traders would have been intimately acquainted with the absolute centrality of credit for doing business, since credit structured economic and social life in early modern Europe.35 For Europeans who arrived in the Indian Ocean, the solution for their lack of credit and entry was dependence on local actors. The French were by no means unique in their reliance on intermediaries, since the practice was widespread across early modern imperial settings.36 But those empires that managed to transform themselves into more hegemonic powers—and the British Raj is the most pertinent example—obscured this reliance.37
It is surely no coincidence that the span of the Nayiniyappa Affair corresponded to a difficult period for French officials on two fronts: first, the instability of the French state, and second, the shaky finances of the Compagnie des Indes. The instability at the level of the French state was the result of ongoing war—the War of Spanish Succession in 1701–1714, with its resulting financial crises—and the Regency period during Louis XIV’s minority, dating 1715–1723.38 The war and its repercussions continued to reverberate throughout the French colonial world, in both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, long after the end of fighting. In the resulting debt crisis, showy trials against individuals deemed culpable for France’s unstable financial system were a common feature both in the colonies and in the metropolis, where a special tribunal, the chambre de justice of 1716, was charged with assigning blame for financial disorder within the monarchy’s finances.39 Similarly, when Nayiniyappa was sentenced to pay the Compagnie des Indes an enormous fine upon his conviction, the inflow of cash supported the always cash-strapped company.
FIGURE 1. The Coromandel coast of India in the eighteenth century. In the large map and in the inset, the five French comptoirs are in bold font. Map by William L. Nelson.
There were multiple reasons for the financial difficulties of the Compagnie des Indes. French merchants and financiers were reluctant to invest in the company, preferring regional opportunities; the company had high operating costs; and the occasional capture of French ships and subsequent heavy losses posed a serious problem. As a result, the company relied on the sale of one load of cargo to finance its next Asia-bound voyage. It also saw multiple reorganizations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This institutional upheaval and the persistent shortage of capital lay behind many of the political struggles that characterized Pondichéry’s administration in the first decades of the eighteenth century.
If the French political context was one of uncertainty and flux, the same held true in the Indian subcontinent, where the states that surrounded Pondichéry were in a state of ongoing war for much of the first part of the eighteenth century.40 With battles between the Deccani sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda, tension between the Maratha armies and the Mughal empire, the general decline of Mughal power, and intra-European rivalries about their relations with local patrons, the political landscape in South India was extremely volatile. Given the fact that one of Nayiniyappa’s roles as chief broker was to mediate political relations with local rulers, the uncertainty of local political systems made the position of chief broker more crucial than ever. Taken together, the French and South Asian political uncertainty on the one hand and the financial difficulties of the Compagnie des Indes on the other would inform the debates that animated the struggle over Nayiniyappa’s conviction and subsequent acquittal.
Despite this fraught context, the first half of the eighteenth century was a period of significant growth in Pondichéry, in both its urbanization and its demographics (figures 2 and 3). In this period, Pondichéry was transformed into an important regional center, with several thousand Frenchmen and tens of thousands of mostly Tamil-speaking inhabitants and a growing trade reliant on the export of textiles.
FIGURE 2. A 1704 map of Pondichéry exhibits the city’s grid and highlights its religious diversity by noting Jesuit, Capuchin, and numerous local places of worship, described as “pagodas.” “Plan de Pondichéry à la côte de Coromandel occupé par la Compagnie royale des Indes orientales/mis au jour par N. de Fer—1704.” Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Cartes et plans, GE D-17834.
FIGURE 3. This 1716 map, drawn by Nayiniyappa’s ally, the engineer Denyon, shows the growth of Pondichéry in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. “Plan des ville et fort Louis de Pondichéry par M. Denyon.” Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS-6432 (1BisA).
The town’s physical setting was a crucial feature of its commercial and demographic success in the first decades of the century. During much of the year the town’s port was relatively sheltered from the monsoons, and a river flowing into the sea, navigable by small, flat-bottomed boats, made it an attractive spot for trade.41 The port did not allow for the anchoring of large ships, so the town had no wharves; instead, small vessels darted through the water, loading and unloading merchandise.42 The fort on the water’s edge where Nayiniyappa was held was meant for the town’s protection, but it also was used as Pondichéry’s commercial and administrative center, with the Compagnie des Indes’s offices and chambers of the Superior Council housed within.
French ships left Pondichéry carrying a dizzying array of textile products, cotton, silk, and wool in well over one hundred different varieties.43 The volume of trade in textiles over these years was quite variable; in general, however, the first three decades of the eighteenth century were a period of steady expansion of French investment in Pondichéry.44 Nevertheless, the French company got a smaller share of trade than the English and Dutch companies, and ships sent by the Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company consistently outnumbered French ships heading to the East.45
The exact demographic makeup of Pondichéry’s population in the first decades of the eighteenth century is difficult to determine, since the first existing census dates from 1769.46 At the time of the Nayiniyappa Affair, the French population of Pondichéry is estimated to have been only 1,000 to 2,000 souls, among a general population numbering in the tens of thousands.47 The French residents were mostly employees of the Compagnie des Indes—traders, clerks, soldiers, sailors, doctors, engineers, and the like—but some French residents arrived there independently, lured by the opportunity to trade on their own account. The non-French population made up the vast majority; in 1740, a French writer estimated Pondichéry’s population to have grown to 120,000.48 Roughly one-third of these residents were weavers, who manufactured the cotton textiles that were the central commodity of French trade in India, and their presence in the colony was therefore of paramount importance. Throughout this period, when textile workers in South India enjoyed significant mobility, weavers and merchants migrated to Pondichéry, as the company was engaged in labor-intensive projects of fortification, acquired several villages surrounding Pondichéry, and grew its textile production operations.49 The new residents were mostly practitioners of local religion (what today would be glossed as Hindu) and diverse in caste. The fact that they formed the town’s majority would figure prominently in the Nayiniyappa Affair, as traders and missionaries tried to decide precisely what place a non-Christian broker should play in the town’s commerce and politics. The town’s judicial and administrative records, as well as maps from the period, also attest to the presence of a much smaller population of local converts to Christianity, a small community of Muslims,50 and a handful of Armenian merchants, as well as new arrivals from other parts of India beyond the Coromandel coast. Many French households also held Indian domestic slaves, both Christians and Hindus.51
The town’s spatial layout was segregated, separated into so-called White Town and Black Town. In this, the town was organized according to urban plans conceived by the Dutch during the brief period late in the seventeenth century when Pondichéry was under their control.52 White Town was adjacent to the water, encompassing the port and the fort, and the larger Black Town lay mostly to the west, in the area of higher elevation, but the line between the two was a porous one.53 Despite the town’s explicitly segregated layout, French and Indian actors who came together at Pondichéry’s founding in the late seventeenth century attempted to paint it as a religiously and culturally diverse and cosmopolitan locale, a location that would be both a port of departure and a point of destination. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the residents of Pondichéry were indeed a fairly cosmopolitan bunch. The marriage and death records, kept by the Capuchins who acted as the Catholic population parish priests, revealed that the town’s residents hailed from all over the globe: various locales in South Asia, the Indian Ocean island colonies, Bagdad, Isfahan, Ireland, England, Germany, Venice, and as far afield as Canada.
Religious Tensions in a Commercial Town
In 1708, Pondichéry’s colonial officials issued a proclamation on behalf of the company’s board of directors. It proclaimed in Tamil, French, and Portuguese that merchants of every nation should pursue commerce in Pondichéry and would not be disturbed.54 The 1708 proclamation promising a welcome haven for all, on the one hand, and the cityscape’s grid of racial and religious segregation, on the other, reveal an unresolved tension that lay at the heart of the French presence in Pondichéry. The goals of French officials to make the town both a place in which authority took a Catholic form and a commercially successful city in a landscape that was emphatically non-Christian seemed at times to be mutually exclusive. The ongoing conflicts about the integration of commercial ambitions and missionary agendas tried but did not succeed in resolving this tension.
When the Compagnie des Indes was created, its charter charged the company not only with commercial profit making but also with propagating and supporting Christianity in the territories under its control.55 The relationship between religious mission and the state in early modern colonial projects was hugely variable, with different fault lines appearing in different contexts. French India not only highlights this variability but also reveals the challenges that religious agendas posed to commercial and political efforts in newly established colonial settings with existing strong local state systems. Such challenges were much less visible in cases where political, cultural, and religious hegemony was achieved.56 In Pondichéry, the multiple agendas of rival missionary groups made the bifurcated nature of French empire in India—the simultaneous mandate to advance both commerce and Christianity—all the more difficult to achieve. Missionaries of different orders all sought to advance conversion agendas through cooperation with the state and state-supported commercial projects. French missionaries of different orders in Pondichéry were thus adversaries vying for resources and influence. Nayiniyappa’s body was a site for the unfolding of this battle.
In the seventeenth century and early in the eighteenth century, Christian missionary work in South Asia was the exclusive domain of Catholics. The missionaries who made Pondichéry their base were Frenchmen of three separate Catholic orders: Jesuits, Capuchins, and members of the Missions étrangères de Paris. The Capuchins, an offshoot of the Franciscans, were the first to appear in the colony, arriving in Pondichéry in 1674 and serving as both parish priests to the European Catholics and missionaries to the local population. From the very earliest days of the Compagnie des Indes’s presence in India, the Capuchins often positioned themselves as allies to and participants in the royal commercial project. The collaboration between the company and the Capuchins both stemmed from and exacerbated the Capuchin rivalry with the Jesuits—a rivalry so pronounced that some locals once asked a Venetian living in Pondichéry whether he worshipped the God of the Jesuits or the God of the Capuchins.57
The Jesuit-Capuchin conflict originated with the arrival of the Jesuits in Pondichéry in 1689, when the ambitious newcomers compromised the Capuchins’ position as sole religious providers. Upon the Jesuits’ arrival, Governor François Martin divided the spiritual field, declaring that the Capuchins would serve as chaplains to the European parish, and Jesuits would tend to the flock of indigenous Christians and potential Christians. This compromise suited neither side. Internal divisions and bitter exchanges between the groups would figure prominently in the Nayiniyappa Affair. The squabbles between the Jesuits and the Capuchins consistently unfolded before both ecclesiastical authorities and the institutions of the French state.58
The deepest and most persistent struggle between Capuchins and Jesuits in French India revolved around the form of religious ministration to neophytes and potential converts. Conflicts between Jesuits, members of other Catholic orders, and the church hierarchy writ large were by no means limited to Pondichéry, manifesting as the “Malabar Rites” controversy in South Asia and the “Chinese Rites” controversy in China. In both sites, Vatican officials and rival orders objected to the Jesuits’ conversion practice and ideology known as “accommodation,” which allowed new converts to maintain local customs (for example, those pertaining to marriage and burial rites) after conversion to Christianity. The Jesuits’ opponents argued that accommodation diluted Christianity.59 This controversy had higher stakes in Pondichéry, which was ruled by Catholics, unlike, say, Madurai, the Tamil city where Jesuit accommodationist practice in India was developed. Contestations over accommodation led to bitter conflicts between missionaries of different orders. But the debate also informed the conflict between the Jesuits and officials of the Compagnie des Indes because while the Jesuits were willing to accommodate their converts in an effort to bring them to Christ, they saw no reason why the company officials would reward and advance those local residents, such as Nayiniyappa, who refused to convert to Christianity.
The Second Empire of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would feature frequent conflicts between a state seeking anticlericalism and colonial ventures dependent on missionary labor, as J. P. Daughton has shown.60 No such inherent conflict underlay the struggles in French India early in the eighteenth century that would explode in the course of the Nayiniyappa Affair. Administrators and religious workers were sent to India long before the invention of laïcité, the secular nature of the state, as a French ideal. Commercial and religious agents alike were acting on behalf of a divinely ruling king, the head of the Gallican church, and were furthering the ambitions of a state explicitly and timelessly Catholic. Colonial officials and traders in the early eighteenth century would therefore have shared many of the goals and attitudes of their missionary contemporaries. Yet the repeated struggles in Pondichéry among lay and religious agents indicate that the ideal of a shared commercial-religious agenda, manifest in both the charter of the company and missionary texts, remained elusive in practice. As the French in India tried to enhance their commercial, administrative, judicial, military, and spiritual position, the bifurcated nature of a colony in which traders and missionaries were struggling over control hampered their efforts.
The Nayiniyappa Affair as a Prism for Empire
Tensions about the interpenetration of secular and religious authority drove the Nayiniyappa Affair, and an examination of the affair sheds new light on their significance. Using the Nayiniyappa Affair as a prism for French empire more generally makes possible a new understanding of both. Yes, the Nayiniyappa Affair was in part a battleground for powerful Jesuits, their missionary rivals, and factions within the French commercial venture. But if we simultaneously consider the broader imperial context and the local struggle for prominence in Pondichéry, a fuller understanding of events emerges. The Nayiniyappa Affair was neither French nor Indian but a Pondichéry affair. It grew into existence in the landscape of the colony, and thereby it inevitably wove together strands both local and metropolitan, French and Tamil. The affair brought together the interests of the town’s petty shopkeepers and its wealthiest traders, the highest echelons of French officialdom with illiterate Tamil widows, well-connected missionaries born in France, and multilingual children of the Jesuits’ local employees. The Nayiniyappa Affair also affords a unique entry into the life of an indigenous actor and his social, familial, religious, and commercial milieu. Affaires, the scandalous and well-publicized trials that were a feature of public life in the Old Regime, were also common in the colonies.61 Yet the Nayiniyappa Affair stands out for having an indigenous actor at its center, one who is doubly exceptional for having managed to attract significant advocacy to his cause and overturn the decision against him.
This study, then, considers the contested and unstable aspects of imperial claims, and of French claims in India in particular. It situates the agency of indigenous actors, and especially brokers and intermediaries, at the center of these contestations and as a result at the very center of the colonial experience. Imperial sovereignty had to be continually constructed, and in this period it was never fully achieved. The example of French India demonstrates how early imperial formations relied on dispersed and fractured authority, shared and contested among agents with diverse agendas, backgrounds, and political and religious allegiance, whose hierarchical relations to one another were in a state of flux.
Chronology soothes as it smooths, its unfolding coming to seem inevitable and logical. In the following chapters, I resist a chronological narrative of the affair, instead opting for a prismatic history, returning to the same details and events in each chapter, slightly shifting the analytic lens in each one to go over the same narrative material. The thematic approach aims to excavate the overlapping layers of the Nayiniyappa Affair, to show that it cannot be reduced to a tidy event, one with a linear narrative, heroes and villains, or unitary meaning. The metaphor of the prism is especially apt here. As a prism reflects, returns, and refracts light in multiple directions, so the documentary richness distributed by the Nayiniyappa Affair in archives in France and India sheds new light on the role of trade and religion in the making and unmaking of colonial authority.
French colonial administrative records of the Compagnie des Indes form the central archive on which this book relies, but it also draws on a diverse set of materials held in archives in France and India, including missionary letters, court records, notarial records, and personal diaries. While most of the source material was written in French and collected by French institutions, its authors are both Frenchmen and South Asian–born residents of Pondichéry.62 Surely, Tamil and other Indian actors appear in this archive with their voices refracted through multiple processes of translation and often with French coauthors; but their involvement in the production of these archives—an issue explicitly taken up in greater detail in the book’s final chapter—means that local intermediaries played an important role in the construction of the French colonial bureaucratic and judicial record. Bringing together these authors, genres, and modes of archival production is a crucial methodology of the prismatic history that follows. The result is both a microhistory of the Nayiniyappa Affair and a broad consideration of French imperialism in this period. As a French imperial history that pays close attention to the fine details of a largely forgotten local affair, this study draws out the intricate negotiations that situate empire in place.63
The book is composed of three parts. The first part examines the reliance of both trader-administrators and missionaries in the newly established colony of Pondichéry on local intermediaries and discusses the social, political, and commercial structures in which French colonists, missionaries, and intermediaries all intersected. Chapter 1, “The Elusive Origins of a Colonial Scandal,” provides multiple answers to a deceptively simple question: Why was Nayiniyappa arrested? Chapter 2, “Kinship as Politics,” considers the role of family networks, both French and Tamil, in the development of French empire in India.
The second part centers on Nayiniyappa’s days in court and the details of his investigation, appeals, and the reinvestigation of the affair. Chapter 3, “The Denial of Language,” serve as a corrective to the tendency in European imperial history to overlook the centrality of polylinguistic scenarios in colonial encounters. It examines the relationship among French, Portuguese, and Tamil in colonial politics of commerce and conversion and in the unfolding of the Nayiniyappa Affair. Chapter 4, “Conflict at Court,” examines the affair as a court case, addressing the judicial setting in which it took place and the legal questions it attempted to resolve.
The third part considers the repercussions of Nayiniyappa’s conviction, death, and posthumous rehabilitation. Chapter 5, “Between Paris and Pondichéry,” focuses on mobility in the Indian Ocean and between France and India. Chapter 6, “Archiving the Affair,” describes the archives in which traces of the Nayiniyappa Affair are sedimented and reveals the agentive processes by which these archives and subsequent historical narratives were created. The book’s epilogue reflects on how Nayiniyappa’s role in the imperial project in Pondichéry shaped his life and in turn shaped the politics of the colony. In other words, it inquires into the effect of empire on individual lives and the impact of individuals on the development of empires.