The following abbreviations are used in the notes:
| ADLA | Archives départementales de Loire Atlantique, Nantes, France |
| ADN | Archives de Nantes, Nantes, France |
| AMEP | Archives, Missions étrangères de Paris, France |
| AN | Archives nationales de France, Paris, France |
| ANOM | Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France |
| BC | Bibliothèque franciscaine des Capucins, Paris |
| BNF | Bibliothèque nationales française |
| COL | Fonds des colonies |
| DPPC | Dépôt des papiers publics des colonies |
| FM | Fonds ministériels |
| GR | Greffes |
| INDE | Fonds territoreaux, Établissements français de l ‘ Inde |
| MAR | Fonds de la Marine |
| MF | Manuscrits français |
| NAF | Nouvelles acquisitions françaises |
| NAIP | National Archives of India, Puducherry Record Centre, India |
| Vanves | Archives Jésuites, Vanves, France |
1. “Journal de bord de navires le Mercure, le Jason et la Vénus, formant une escadre envoyeé aux Indes orientales sous le commadement de M. Guimont du Coudray, pour aller faire la course puis la traite, commencé en 1712 et fini en 1714,” ADLA, série C, 875.
2. The writer of the journal, one M. Robert, unfamiliar with Indian names, wrote the name phonetically as “Aniaba” but references him as the company’s chief agent, the role filled by Nayiniyappa in this period. The description of his influence and the phonetic similarity of the name’s rendering make clear that the man in question was Nayiniyappa.
3. The ship’s journal is not paginated, but the entries describing the marriage celebrations are for May 30, 1714; May 31, 1714; and June 1, 1714. “Journal de bord de navires le Mercure, le Jason et la Vénus.”
4. This description of Guruvappa’s baptism is taken from a memoir written in the latter half of the eighteenth century by one of his relatives. NAIP, eighteenth-century documents, folder 20.
5. Guruvappa is referred to by this name in a record of a 1724 commercial transaction in Pondichéry, held in ANOM, FM, DPPC, GR/675.
6. For an examination of partial and contingent sovereignty of company rule in a Dutch context in the Indian Ocean, see Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
7. Both Indian and Hindu are anachronistic categories that do not appear in the French sources of this period. The French sources refer to practitioners of local religions, who today would be glossed as Hindu, as “gentiles,” “pagans,” or “idolaters.” I use “Hindu” occasionally when not quoting French actors to dispense with the pejorative stance implicit in these designations. “Indian” is just as anachronistic. The sources most often use “malabar,” and occasionally “blacks” (noirs) to refer to Pondichéry’s residents with origins in the Tamil region. I also use “Tamil,” which does appear in French sources (tamoul) albeit rarely.
8. K. S. Mathew, “Missionaries from the Atlantic Regions and the Social Changes in French Pondicherry from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” in Les relations entre la France et l’Inde de 1673 à nos jours, ed. Jacques Weber (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2002), 349–69. On MEP, see Adrien Launay, Histoire générale de la société des missions étrangères (Paris: Téqui, 1894).
9. Seema Alavi, The Eighteenth Century in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); P. J. Marshall, The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). On decentering colonialism in narratives of eighteenth-century India, see Jon E. Wilson, “Early Colonial India beyond Empire,” Historical Journal 50, no. 4 (December 2007): 951–70.
10. Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale, eds., French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 1.
11. Reviews of the growing scholarship on French empire are in Sophie Dulucq and Colette Zytnicki, “Penser le passé colonial français, entre perspectives historiographiques et résurgence des mémoires,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, no. 86 (April 2005): 59–69; Alice L. Conklin and Julia Clancy-Smith, “Writing Colonial Histories: Introduction,” French Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 497–505; Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth, “Absolutely Atlantic: Colonialism and the Early Modern French State in Recent Historiography,” History Compass 8, no. 1 (January 2010): 101–17.
12. Even historians of French India characterize “failure” as its dominant feature. Catherine Manning, Fortunes à Faire: The French in Asian Trade, 1719–48 (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996), xiii; Philippe Haudrère, Gérard Le Bouëdec, and Louis Mézin, Les compagnies des Indes (Rennes, FR: Ouest France, 2001), 70–71; Michael Smithies, A Resounding Failure: Martin and the French in Siam, 1672–1693 (Chiang Mai, Thai.: Silkworm Books, 1998); Paul Käppelin, La Compagnie des Indes Orientales et François Martin: Etude sur l’histoire du commerce et des établissements français dans l’Inde sous Louis XIV (1664–1719) (Paris, 1908), 1; Aniruddha Ray, The Merchant and the State: The French in India, 1666–1739 (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2004). For a work that aims to implicitly critique the trope of failure, arguing for a strong post-1763 French trade in South India, see Arvind Sinha, The Politics of Trade: Anglo-French Commerce on the Coromandel Coast 1763–1793 (Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2002).
13. On slavery, see, in New France, Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); in Mauritius, Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). On race and métissage in New France and Louisiana, Gilles Havard, Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’en Haut, 1660–1715 (Paris: Les éditions du Septentrion, 2003); Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). On trade and privateering, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
14. Cécile Vidal, ed., Français? La nation en débat entre colonies et métropole, XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Éd. de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2014).
15. Central for this scholarship is Richard White’s identification of the “middle ground,” a place where mediation is relied upon. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Recent considerations of White’s argument are Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Pekka Hamalainen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Michael McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015); Robert M. Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
16. For examples from the early modern period, see Alida C. Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Brian Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Noel Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). In the Indian Ocean world more specifically, see Kenneth McPherson, “A Secret People of South Asia: The Origins, Evolution and Role of the Luso-Indian Goan Community from the Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries,” Itinerario 11, no. 2 (July 1987): 72–86; Mark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2011).
17. Some recent examples are Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Kapil Raj, “The Historical Anatomy of a Contact Zone: Calcutta in the Eighteenth Century,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 48, no. 1 (2011): 55–82; Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts, Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
18. Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Frank Trentmann, Philippa Levine, and Kevin Grant, eds., Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c.1880–1950 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
19. Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
20. While this is still a dominant framework in European history, other fields have productively considered the situated, contingent construction of sovereignty. In the Indian Ocean, see Sebastian R. Prange, “Fluid Sovereignties: Maritime Claims and Contests in the Early Modern Indian Ocean” (paper presented at the Global Maritime History Conference, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, March 4, 2016). In Ottoman history, see Gabor Kármán, “Sovereignty and Representation: Tributary States in the Seventeenth-Century Diplomatic System of the Ottoman Empire,” in The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empires in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Gabor Kármán and Lovro Kunčevič (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2013), 155–85; Joshua M. White, “Fetva Diplomacy: The Ottoman S¸eyhülislam as Trans-Imperial Intermediary,” Journal of Early Modern History 19, no. 2–3 (April 2015): 199–221.
21. In a study reflecting a dominant approach, Anthony Pagden has suggested an undivided concept of sovereignty in the early modern period that fractured into “divided” sovereignty in the modern period, in a simple chronological progression. Anthony Pagden, “Fellow Citizens and Imperial Subjects: Conquest and Sovereignty in Europe’s Overseas Empires,” History and Theory 44, no. 4 (December 2005): 28–46.
22. The royal grip was tight in the case of the French Company of the Indies but less so in the context of Mediterranean trade. On this, see Junko Thérèse Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
23. Charles Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1964); Glenn Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996).
24. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam has noted, “The English Company, from its very inception, was not merely a commercial but a political actor.” Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Frank Submissions: The Company and the Mughals between Sir Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris,” in The Worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2004), 70. Philip Stern has also suggested that the distinction between commercial and political stages in British presence in India does not reflect the reality of the English East India Company’s early days. Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
25. Emily Erikson and Valentina Assenova, “Introduction: New Forms of Organization and the Coordination of Political and Commercial Actors,” in Chartering Capitalism: Organizing Markets, States, and Publics, ed. Emily Erikson (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing, 2015), 2–3.
26. Maxine Berg et al., “Private Trade and Monopoly Structures: The East India Companies and the Commodity Trade to Europe in the Eighteenth Century,” in Ericson, Chartering Capitalism, 127.
27. On the background and responsibilities of the directors of the Compagnie des Indes in Paris, see Philippe Haudrère, “La direction générale de la Compagnie des Indes et son administration au milieu du XVIIIe siècle,” in Les Français dans l’océan Indien (XVIIe–XIXe siècle) (Rennes, FR: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 51–57.
28. Sixteen percent of the initial capitalization came from merchants; 45 percent from the royal family; 19.5 percent from the nobility in the court, parliamentarians, and ministers; and 8.5 percent from financiers. Philippe Haudrère, La compagnie fran-çaise des Indes au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Indes savantes, 2005), 1:25. For a detailed account of the difficulties Colbert encountered in raising sufficient capital and the recurrent liquidity crises faced by the Compagnie des Indes, see Käppelin, La Compagnie des Indes Orientales et François Martin, esp. pt. 1, chap. 1.
29. On charter companies, see Erikson, Chartering Capitalism.
30. Ernestine Carreira, “La factorie française de Surat et les ports de l’Inde portugaise (1668–1778),” in Les relations entre la France et l’Inde de 1673 à nos jours, ed. Jacques Weber (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2002), 23–38.
31. On Martin’s relationship with Sher Khan Lodi, see G. David, “Sher Khan Lodi et François Martin ou les première relations Franco-Indiennes à Pondichéry,” in French in India and Indian Nationalism, ed. K. S. Mathew (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corp., 1999), 1–24.
32. L.A. Bellanger de Lespinay, Mémoirs de L. A. Bellanger de Lespinay, Vendômois, sur son voyage aux Indes Orientales (1670–1675) (Vendôme, FR: Typ. C. Huet, 1895), 204.
33. Historians of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean have charted the longstanding networks of exchange that connected ports such as Goa, Aden, and Aceh. More recent work has focused on how Indian Ocean communities were constituted by relationships forged both in and beyond the commercial sphere. For the importance of kinship and genealogy in Indian Ocean trade, see Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). For linguistic exchanges in the Indian Ocean, see Pier Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For the binding power of religious community, see Sebastian R. Prange, “The Social and Economic Organization of Muslim Trading Communities on the Malabar Coast, Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries” (PhD diss., University of London, 2008). On the quotidian contours of Islamic networks connecting India and Middle East, see Gagan Sood, India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
34. The literature on South Asian merchant communities in the Indian Ocean and their relations with European trading companies is extensive. Some foundational studies are Ashin Das Gupta, Malabar in Asian Trade 1740—1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies, and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast, 1650–1740 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); Tapan Raychaudhuri, Jan Company in Coromandel, 1605–1690: A Study in the Interrelations of European Commerce and Traditional Economies (’s Gravenhage, Neth.: M. Nijhoff, 1962); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1700 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
35. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Laurence Fontaine, The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
36. For a review of work on intermediaries and empires, see the introduction to Rothman, Brokering Empire. See also Louise Bénat-Tachot and Serge Gruzinski, eds., Passeurs culturels: Mécanismes de métissage (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2001); Simon Schaffer, The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009).
37. Examples from South Asian historiography that do account for intermediaries are Nicholas B. Dirks, “Colin Mackenzie: Autobiography of an Archive,” in The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India, ed. Thomas R. Trautmann (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 29–47; Raj, Relocating Modern Science ; Raman, Document Raj.
38. On the fiscal crisis of the French state, and its relationship to the War of Spanish Succession, see Guy Rowlands, The Financial Decline of a Great Power War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
39. On the chambres de justice, see John F. Bosher, “Chambres de Justice in the French Monarchy,” in French Government and Society 1500–1850: Essays in Memory of Alfred Cobban, ed. John F. Bosher (London: Athlone Press, 1973), 19–40; Jean Villain, “Naissance de la Chambre de justice de 1716,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 35, no. 4 (1988): 544–76; Erik Goldner, “Corruption on Trial: Money, Power, and Punishment in France’s Chambre de Justice of 1716,” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies 17, no. 1 (May 2013): 5–28.
40. Bhaswati Bhattacharya, “The Hinterland and the Coast: The Pattern of Interaction in Coromandel in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Politics and Trade in the Indian Ocean World: Essays in Honour of Ashin Das Gupta, ed. Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Lakshmi Subramanian (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 22–24.
41. G. B. Malleson, History of the French in India, from the Founding of Pondichery in 1674 to the Capture of That Place in 1761 (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), 33.
42. Wilbert Harold Dalgliesh, The Company of the Indies in the Days of Dupleix (Easton, PA: Chemical Publishing Co., 1933), 154; Donald C Wellington, French East India Companies: A Historical Account and Record of Trade (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2006), 62.
43. Wellington, French East India Companies, 137–42; Käppelin, La Compagnie des Indes Orientales et François Martin. On the trade and impact of textiles from India in France, see Felicia Gottmann, Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France 1680–1760 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
44. Each of the years 1712 and 1714 saw the export of nearly 150,000 pieces of cloth, with the number falling to 82,851 in 1715 and further still in 1716, the year of Nayiniyappa’s arrest, down to 67,813 pieces of cloth. Wellington, French East India Companies, 188. On growing investments, see Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies, and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast, 203.
45. For example, the year prior to Nayiniyappa’s arrest, 1715, was a fairly typical one that saw thirty-eight Dutch VOC ships, twelve English East India Company ships, and only two French ships. Haudrère, La compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle, 2:845.
46. Ibid., 1:214. In that census, conducted only eight years after the English mostly razed the city in 1761, the town had 27,473 residents, of whom 971 were described as blancs. The census is published in Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer, “Le Recensement de la population de Pondichéry en 1769,” Revue de l’histoire des colonies fran-çaises, 1927, 444–45.
47. A recent overview of the available demographic data is in Kévin Le Doudic, “Les Français à Pondichéry au XVIIIe siècle: Une société redessinée par sa culture matérielle,” in L’Asie, la mer, le monde: Au temps des Compagnies des Indes, ed. Gérard Le Bouëdec (Rennes, FR: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 177–98.
48. Haudrère, La compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle, 1:214.
49. On Pondichéry’s urbanization, see Françoise L’Hernault, “Pondicherry in the Eighteenth Century: Town Planning, Streetscapes and Housescapes,” in French in India and Indian Nationalism, 1700 A.D.–1963 A.D., ed. K. S. Mathew, vol. 2 (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corp., 1999), 371–94; Jean Deloche, Le vieux Pondichéry (1673–1824): Revisité d’après les plans anciens (Pondichéry: Institut français de Pondichéry; École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2005); Stephen Jeyaseela, “Urban Growth of Pondicherry and the French: A Study of the Town Plans 1702–1798,” in Mathew, French in India and Indian Nationalism, 405–22. On the mobility of Indian textile workers, see David Washbrook, “Land and Labour in Late Eighteenth-Century South India: The Golden Age of the Pariah?,” in Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India, ed. Peter Robb (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).
50. On the close relationship between Muslim trading networks and the French company during the late seventeenth century, see Sinnappah Arasaratnam, “The Chulia Muslim Merchants in Southeast Asia, 1600–1800,” in Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World, ed. Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996), 173–75.
51. Much work remains to be done on the topic of slaveholding in French India. Notarial and legal records indicate that domestic slave ownership was the norm among French arrivals in Pondichéry. A rich and growing vein of scholarship exists on slavery in the Indian Ocean French colonies of Réunion and Mauritus. Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island ; Philippe Haudrère, “Projets et échecs de la Compagnie fran-çaise des Indes dans le commerce des esclaves au XVIIIe siècle,” in Les Français dans l’océan Indien; Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015); Sue Peabody, Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies, 1750–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Slaves in the French settlements in India were by and large domestic servants, but in the Mascarene islands they worked in plantation fields as artisans, manual laborers in towns and fortifications, and occasionally as sailors and soldiers. Allen, European Slave Trading, 19. On slavery in the South Asian context more generally, see Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton, eds., Slavery in South Asian History (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2006); Sundararaj Manickam, Slavery in the Tamil Country: A Historical Over-View (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1982); Ravi Ahuja, “Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context: Madras, C. 1750–1800,” Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 4 (2002): 793–826.
52. Jean Deloche, Origins of the Urban Development of Pondicherry according to Seventeenth Century Dutch Plans (Pondicherry: Institut français de Pondichéry, 2004).
53. Kévin Le Doudic, “Encounters around the Material Object: French and Indian Consumers in Eighteenth-Century Pondicherry,” in The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, ed. Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015), 164.
54. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Société de l’Histoire de l’Inde Française, 1913), 1:46.
55. Dernis, Recueil ou collection des titres, édits, déclarations, arrêts, règlemens et autres pièces concernant la compagnie des indes orientales établie au mois d’août 1664 (Paris: Boudet, 1755). A tangible example of the company’s responsibility to support missionaries was the fact that missionaries were offered free passage to the east on company ships.
56. In North America, in both French and British cases, missionaries were, as a general rule, better integrated into the state’s agendas, with resettlement of the native population into colonial holdings, such as New England’s “praying towns” or New France’s missions, even if native converts found ways to shape their experiences. For examples of this dynamic, see Kristina Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). In Iberian empires, missionaries were important economic actors in ways not available to them in Asia, with large-scale agricultural holdings, as well as power exerted through institutions of the colonial state. See, for example, Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). In India itself such variability was also evident within European enclaves: Goa was converted by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, and the state and church were well integrated there. On the other hand, missionary work was effectively banned from holdings of the English East India Company until the very end of the eighteenth century. Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, 1698–1858 (Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2012).
57. Niccolaò Manucci, Storia do Mogur, Or, Mogul India, 1653–1708, trans. William Irvine, Indian Texts 1 (London: J. Murray, 1906), 3:334.
58. The Conseil de la Marine, the body that supervised French colonial efforts during the Old Regime, was consistently involved in the struggle between missionary groups in Pondichéry, see for example AN, MAR, B¹ /14, fols. 2–5 verso and fols. 54 verso–58 verso.
59. On this global debate, Ines G.Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahminical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001); Paolo Aranha, “The Social and Physical Spaces of the Malabar Rites Controversy,” in Space and Conversion in Global Perspective, eds. Giuseppe Marcocci et al. (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2015), 214–32.
60. J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
61. For historical investigations of colonial affaires, see, in New France, John F. Bosher, “The French Government’s Motives in the Affaire du Canada, 1761–1763,” English Historical Review 96 (1981): 59–78; in Martinique, D. G. Thompson, “The Lavalette Affair and the Jesuit Superiors,” French History 10, no. 2 (1996): 206–39; in Louisiana, Alexandre Dubé, The Common Goods: Political Culture of French Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming); in French Guiana, Marion F. Godfroy, Kourou, 1763: Le dernier rêve de l’Amérique française (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2011). In metropolitan France, examples are Dale K. Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Regime, 1750–1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Sarah C. Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Scandals also played an important role in the politics of British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); James Epstein, Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
62. Historians of the Indian Ocean have long reflected on this unresolved problem: how to tell a story that does not expose exclusively the European perspective while using European archives, especially the archives of the European trading companies. Examples of recent work that examines the Indian Ocean mercantile world by relying on sources produced by non-European merchant communities in the Indian Ocean are Dirks, The Scandal of Empire ; Epstein, Scandal of Colonial Rule.
63. This study owes a conceptual and methodological debt to the foundational works of microhistory situated in early modern Europe, such as Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). It also follows in the footsteps of historians who have used microhistorical methods as entry into the worlds of colonized and indigenous actors, such as Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith. On the need to bring together global history and microhistory, see Francesca Trivellato, “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z94n9hq.
1. The logs are held at ANOM, FM, sous-série C² (Correspondance générale de l’Inde).
2. On French India in the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, see Danna Agmon, “Failure on Display: French India, the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, and a Forgotten Historiography of Empire,” in progress.
3. ANOM, INDE, série N.
4. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
5. On the durability of pre-European networks, see Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Maritime India in the Seventeenth Century (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994); Christopher A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
6. Michael N. Pearson, “Brokers in Western Indian Port Cities: Their Role in Servicing Foreign Merchants,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988): 427. On the importance of commercial brokers in Indian Ocean trade and South Asia see Sinnappah Arasaratnam, “Indian Intermediaries in the Trade and Administration of the French East India Company in the Coromandel (1670–1760),” in Maritime Trade, Society and European Influence in South Asia, 1600–1800 (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1995), 135–44; Joseph J. Brennig, “Chief Merchants and the European Enclaves of Seventeenth-Century Coromandel,” Modern Asian Studies 11, no. 3 (January 1977): 321–40; Ashin Das Gupta, “The Broker at Mughal Surat,” Review of Culture (Macao) nos. 13–14 (1991): 173–80; A. J. Qaisar, “The Role of Brokers in Medieval India,” Indian Historical Review 1, no. 2 (1974): 220–46; Michael N. Pearson, “Wealth and Power: Indian Groups in the Portuguese Indian Economy,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 3 (1973): 36–44; G. V. Scammell, “Indigenous Assistance in the Establishment of Portuguese Power in India,” Modern Asian Studies 14, no. 1 (1980): 1–11.
7. Pearson, “Brokers in Western Indian Port Cities.” For an analysis of the creation of trust among merchant communities, using as a case study the Armenian network of Julfan merchants, see Sebouh Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 166–201. On the issue of trust and market making among Gujarati Vāniyā merchants in the Western Indian Ocean, exchanging Indian textiles for ivory from Mozambique, see Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, C. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 44–57.
8. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 251 verso.
9. See the entry “Dubash, Dobash, Debash” in Henry Yule, A. C Burnell, and Kate Teltscher, Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India (Oxford: Oxford University press), 2013. On this professional group see Susan Neild-Basu, “The Dubashes of Madras,” Modern Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (1984): 1–31. Three decades after Susan Neild-Basu noted that much still remains to be learned about this commercial cadre, her statement still holds true. Dubashes in Madras and other parts of British India have mostly been examined in light of the high-profile corruption cases involving these figures. But the English debate about the power of dubashes, described by Kanakalatha Mukund as “bordering on paranoia,” did not take place until the end of the eighteenth century, when the English hold over the colony was firm, which obscured the more subtle dynamics the earlier events in Pondichéry made visible. For a discussion of dubashi-related scandal in Madras, see Kanakalatha Mukund, The View from Below : Indigenous Society, Temples, and the Early Colonial State in Tamilnadu, 1700–1835 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005), 147–48. See also Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies, and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast, 1650–1740 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 256–63. The scholarship on the commercial agents known as banians is more plentiful than that on their South Indian counterparts. See Dilip Basu, “The Early Banians of Calcutta,” Bengal Past and Present 90 (1971): 30–46; Dilip Basu, “The Bania and the British in Calcutta,” Bengal Past and Present 92 (1973): 157–70; P. J. Marshall, “Masters and Banians in Eighteenth-Century Calcutta,” in The Age of Partnership: Europeans in Asia before Dominion, ed. Blair Kling and M. N. Pearson (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1979), 191–213; Ranjit Sen, “A Note on the Banian, the Bengali Capitalist in the Eighteenth Century,” Indian Historical Congress Proceedings, 1980, 563–71. Shubhra Chakrabarti has unpacked the category of middlemen or brokers in Bengal, revealing the complex hierarchy among them, from banian to dewan, contractor, gomastah, dalal, and pykar, in a descending order of status. Shubhra Chakrabarti, “Collaboration and Resistance: Bengal Merchants and the English East India Company, 1757–1833,” Studies in History 10, no. 1 (February 1994): 107.
10. For example, ANOM, COL, C²/71, fol. 309.
11. Chakrabarti, “Collaboration and Resistance.”
12. These intermediaries, working in the ports of Bombay and Calcutta, were known as “ghat serang.” Shompa Lahiri, “Contested Relations: The East India Company and Lascars in London,” in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2002), 171. Accusations of corruption against these maritime brokers were common, much as such accusations were frequently made against the dubashes (commercial brokers) in Madras in the late eighteenth century.
13. Michael N. Pearson, “Connecting the Littorals: Cultural Brokers in the Early Modern Indian Ocean,” in Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean, ed. Pamila Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Michael Pearson (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010), 32.
14. Tachard, Relation de voyage aux Indes, 1690–1699, BNF, MF 19030, fol. 184 verso.
15. Paul Kä ppelin, La Compagnie des Indes Orientales et François Martin: Etude sur l’histoire du commerce et des établissements français dans l’Inde sous Louis XIV (1664–1719) (Paris, 1908), 67. On Marcara, see also Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, 4; Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India (1530–1750) (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 309–11. A contemporaneous account of Marcara and his dealings with the French is found in the memoirs of François Martin, the company employee who became the first governor of Pondichéry. Franç ois Martin, India in the 17th Century, 1670–1694 (Social, Economic, and Political): Memoirs of François Martin (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981).
16. Gabriel Ranpoandro, “Un marchand arménien au service de la Compagnie française des Indes: Marcara Avanchinz,” Archipel 17, no. 1 (1979): 100–101.
17. Ibid., 108–10.
18. Das Gupta, “The Broker at Mughal Surat.”
19. Chakrabarti, “Collaboration and Resistance.”
20. NAIP, eighteenth-century documents, folder 20, holds this family history, written in French by Nayiniyappa’s great-nephew (or great-great nephew).
21. S. Jeyaseela Stephen, “Diaries of the Natives from Pondicherry and the Prose Development of Popular Tamil in the Eighteenth Century,” Indian Literature 50, no. 2 (March 2006): 144–55.
22. Ananda Ranga Pillai, The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, Dubash to Joseph François Dupleix, Knight of the Order of St. Michael, and Governor of Pondichery. A Record of Matters Political, Historical, Social, and Personal, from 1736 to 1761 ed. J. Fredrick Price (Madras: Printed by the superintendent government press, 1904), 3:22–23.
23. French sources use a variety of spellings of the broker’s name, most commonly Nainiapa or Naniapa. The spelling I employ (Nayiniyappa) is a more accurate transliteration of the name in Tamil, as it appears signed by Nayiniyappa himself on a document held at ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 164 verso.
24. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Société de l’Histoire de l’Inde Française, 1913), 1:42–44.
25. Ibid., 1:66–68.
26. On the use of the anachronistic category “Hindu,” see note 7 in the introduction.
27. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 1:139–44.
28. Ibid., 1:140.
29. Ibid., 1:141.
30. Ibid., 1:142, 144.
31. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/69, fol. 103.
32. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/69, fol. 103 verso.
33. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/72, fol. 53 verso.
34. Pillai, Private Diary, 3:9.
35. Ibid., 2:62.
36. On the import of sedition charges in metropolitan France, see Lisa Graham, If the King Only Knew: Seditious Speech in the Reign of Louis XV (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Jill Maciak Walshaw, A Show of Hands for the Republic: Opinion, Information, and Repression in Eighteenth-Century Rural France (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014).
37. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 200 verso.
38. Ibid.
39. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 201.
40. Ibid. The text offers another explanation for why Hébert might have turned against Nayiniyappa. When Hébert arrived in Pondichéry he was, in the broker’s words, “so poor and lost” that he had to borrow significant amounts of money from the broker on three different occasions. Putting Nayiniyappa in jail was also a way to avoid repaying the debt. This account would explain why Hébert did not renege on his supposed deal with the Jesuits once he was back in Pondichéry.
41. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 251 verso.
42. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 255 verso.
43. ANOM, FM, COL, F³/238, fols. 263–267. By the seventeenth century there were few corners of the globe that had not welcomed—or rejected—Jesuit missionaries. Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
44. Danna Agmon, “Striking Pondichéry: Religious Disputes and French Authority in an Indian Colony of the Ancien Régime,” French Historical Studies 37, no. 3 (June 2014): 437–67.
45. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 251 verso.
46. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/69, fol. 91.
47. Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
48. Mukund, The View from Below. See especially chapter 7, “Dubashes and Patronage: Construction of Identity and Social Leadership under the Colonial State.”
49. Venkata Raghotham, “Merchant, Courtier, Shipper, Prince: The Social and Intellectual World of an Eighteenth Century Tamil Merchant,” Journal of the Institute of Asian Studies 9, no. 2 (March 1992): 14–16.
50. ANOM, INDE, série N, folder 58. Copies of the letter appear in ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 92–92 verso, and ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 208.
51. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 1:162.
52. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 208 verso.
53. ANOM, FM, C²/70, COL, fol. 209.
54. “Mémoires sur la compagnie des Indes Orientales 1642–1720,” BNF, MF 6231, fol. 55 verso.
55. On the symbolic meanings of cloth in Old Regime France, see William M. Reddy, “The Structure of a Cultural Crisis: Thinking about Cloth in France before and after the Revolution,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 261–84. On the exceptionally rich semiotic canvas provided by cloth in India, for both locals and Europeans, see C. A. Bayly, “The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930,” in Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, 285–321; Bernard S. Cohn, “Cloth, Clothes and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century,” in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 106–62.
56. On religious borrowing in this period in South India, see Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses, and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
57. Pillai, Private Diary, 1:237.
58. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 103.
59. Sharon Kettering, “Gift-Giving and Patronage in Early Modern France,” French History 2, no. 2 (June 1988): 131–51.
60. Alfred Albert Martineau, ed., Résume des actes de l’Etat civil de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Société de l’histoire de l’Inde française, 1917), 1:ii.
61. Bayly, “The Origins of Swadeshi,” 294.
62. Alexandre Dupilet, La Régence absolue: Philippe d’Orléans et la polysynodie (1715–1718) (Syssel, France: Champ Vallon, 2011).
63. Quoted in Isabelle Vissière and Jean-Louis Vissière, Lettres édifiantes et curieuses des jésuites de l’Inde au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2000), 43.
64. “Mémoires sur la compagnie des Indes Orientales 1642–1720,” BNF, MF 6231, fol. 42 verso.
65. AMEP, Lettres, vol. 959, pp. 223–229.
66. Ibid., p. 223.
67. For the letter appointing Hébert to the position, see ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 239–240.
68. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/69, fol. 225.
69. ANOM, FM, C²/70, COL, fol. 221. Many of the complaints that Hébert and Dulivier sent to Paris complaining against each other also appear in AN, MAR, B¹ /14.
70. AN, MAR, B¹ /14, fol. 5 verso.
71. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252 verso.
72. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 221 verso.
73. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 222.
74. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 1:140–41.
75. Guy Rowlands, The Financial Decline of a Great Power War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). In addition to the enormous debt of the state and its financial reverberations, the Compagnie des Indes orientales was dealing with its own massive debt; in 1708, it carried a debt of 6,500,000 livres.
76. On the company’s liquidity shortages, see Philippe Haudrè re, Les Français dans l’océan Indien (XVIIe-XIXe siècle) (Rennes, FR: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 14. These liquidity crises put the French company in a markedly different situation from that of the English East India Company, which was in a position to extend significant loans to the state. H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 30.
77. Kä ppelin, La Compagnie des Indes Orientales et François Martin, 437; Philippe Haudrère, La compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Indes savantes, 2005), 1:25. The definitive work on the St. Malo merchant association is André Lespagnol, Messieurs de Saint-Malo: Une élite négociante au temps de Louis XIV (Saint Malo: Éd. l’Ancre de Marine, 1991).
78. Haudrère, La compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle, 1:25. On the impact of John Law’s reforms on the Compagnie des Indes, see G. B. Malleson, History of the French in India, from the Founding of Pondichery in 1674 to the Capture of That Place in 1761 (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), 39–61. On the newly organized company, see Haudrère, La compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle. In the existing scholarship on French India, the year 1719 acts as a watershed, with most studies devoted either to the period 1664–1719 (from the Compagnie des Indes’s creation to Law’s restructuring) or to the period beginning in 1719 to the end of the century. This study bridges that divide, since if the first three decades of the eighteenth century are viewed from the vantage point of Pondichéry, there is as much continuity as rupture. Most important, the same employees and relationships, Tamil and French, stayed in place and continued to inform decision making in the colony.
79. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/14, fol. 260 verso.
80. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/14, fols. 260 verso–261 verso.
81. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/14, fol. 260.
82. Ibid.
83. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/14, fol. 268.
84. AN, MAR, B¹ /14, fol. 24 verso.
85. AN, MAR, B¹ /15, fols. 514–514 verso and B¹ /16, fols. 83–83 verso.
1. Paul Olagnier, Les jésuites à Pondichéry et l’affaire Naniapa (1705 à 1720) (Paris: Société de l’histoire des colonies françaises, 1932).
2. Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). In the French colonial context, John Bosher has highlighted the importance of family for merchants in Canada in the same period. John Bosher, The Canada Merchants 1713–1763 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). An important example of mercantile and family connections in the Indian Ocean is that of Armenian merchants. On the kinship networks underlying the trade of merchants with roots in New Julfa, see Sebouh Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 144–64.
3. Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad, eds., Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing, 2015). For an example of the diversity of French colonial approaches to local patrimonial power, the North African example is instructive. Mounira Charrad and Daniel Jaster have argued that in Algeria French officials tried to destroy patrimonial power and displace it with French institutions, while in Tunisia, the French tried to maintain and then co-opt these networks. Mounira M. Charrad and Daniel Jaster, “Limits of Empire: The French Colonial State and Local Patrimonialism in North Africa,” in Adams and Charrad, Patrimonial Capitalism, 63–89.
4. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
5. Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Rothschild’s study is part of a wave of works in Atlantic and British history that examine the global mobility of families and individuals in early imperial contexts. See Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007); Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011); Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
6. David Schneider’s work galvanized scholars to actively reimagine kinship beyond the limits of biological reproduction, and question the assumption that blood is thicker than water. David Murray Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 174.
7. This conjuncture of family and global structures is highlighted in Patrick Manning, “Frontiers of Family Life: Early Modern Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (January 2009): 315–33. On the intersection of the “new imperial history” and the history of the family, see Kathleen Wilson, A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For a recent consideration of the father-son tie in Islamicate Eurasia in this period, see Gagan Sood, “A Familial Order: Ties of Blood, Duty and Affect” in India and the Islamic Heartlands : An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 79–94.
8. On “vernacular kinship” see Nara B Milanich, Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), chap. 5. Originally cited in Bianca Premo, “Familiar: Thinking beyond Lineage and across Race in Spanish Atlantic Family History,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 2 (April 2013): 298.
9. Sarah Hanley, “Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France,” French Historical Studies 16, no. 1 (April 1989): 6. On the intersection of the familial, judicial, and commercial in France on a more popular level, see Julie Hardwick, Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in Early Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
10. Sumit Guha, “The Family Feud as a Political Resource in Eighteenth-Century India,” in Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia, ed. Indrani Chatterjee (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 78.
11. The scholarship on the French family under the Old Regime is too vast to review here, but Suzanne Desan and Jeffrey Merrick offer an excellent overview of the state of the field in their edited volume Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), xi–xxvi. In South Asia, as the historian Indrani Chatterjee has noted, “the history of the family has long been the poor relation in the great household of South Asian history.” Chatterjee, Unfamiliar Relations, 3. Other scholarship that has attempted to address this lack can be found in Patricia Uberoi, Family, Kinship and Marriage in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); Ákos Östör, Lina Fruzzetti, and Steve Barnett, Concepts of Person: Kinship, Caste, and Marriage in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
12. The category of caste technically encompasses that of family (castes are endogamous; members of the same kin group, as a general and widely practiced rule, belong to the same caste), but the reverse is not true (not all members of the same caste are related to one another). For an in-depth discussion of caste as a historical and particularly colonial phenomenon, see Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Sumit Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2013). The category of caste did occasionally come into play in the course of the Nayiniyappa Affair. For example, Governor Hébert’s second interrogation of Nayiniyappa in 1716 includes a line of questioning that is premised on caste divisions: the official asks Nayiniyappa why he forced a man of the right-hand castes to go and eat in the house of a man of the left-hand castes, a charge the broker denied. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 54.
13. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Société de l’Histoire de l’Inde Française, 1913), 1:30.
14. On the arrest of the sons, see ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252. The arrest of sons along with their broker father had precedent in French India. In the late seventeenth century, the Compagnie des Indes employed an Armenian merchant, Marcara, to advance their interests in the Coromandel. When the Armenian fell out of favor with his French employers and was arrested in 1670, his two sons were arrested alongside him. Gabriel Ranpoandro, “Un marchand arménien au service de la Compagnie française des Indes: Marcara Avanchinz,” Archipel 17, no. 1 (1979): 108, 110.
15. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 201 verso.
16. A letter by La Morandière to the directors of the company, dated January 25, 1719, ANOM, FM, COL, C² /71, fol. 58.
17. Pagodas, a gold coin currency, were minted in Pondichéry and elsewhere in India. On currencies in French India and their relative value, see Philippe Haudrè re, “La monnaie de Pondichéry au XVIIIe siècle,” in Les relations entre la France et l’Inde de 1673 à nos jours, ed. Jacques Weber (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2002), 39–47.
18. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 302.
19. For Ceylon, see Patrick Peebles, Social Change in Nineteenth Century Ceylon (New Delhi: Navrang in collaboration with Lake House Bookshop Colombo, 1995). For Surat, Ashin Das Gupta, The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant 1500–1800: Collected Essays of Ashin Das Gupta (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 401–2.
20. Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India (Madras: Government Press, 1909), 1:84. During one of his interrogations, when Nayiniyappa was asked to name his caste, his answer is rendered in French as “of pastoral caste.” ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 84.
21. On the joint use of the Mudali and Pillai suffixes by the Vellala caste, and the caste members’ association with colonial bureaucracy in Madras and Pondichéry, see Sinnappah Arasaratnam, “Trade and Political Dominion in South India, 1750–1790: Changing British-Indian Relationships,” Modern Asian Studies 13, no. 1 (1979): 20, 24. For more on the dubashes of Madras and their caste position, see Susan Neild-Basu, “The Dubashes of Madras,” Modern Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (1984).
22. For a rare but incomplete discussion of this family, see Ajit Neogy, “Early Commercial Activities of the French in Pondicherry: The Pondicherry Authorities, the Jesuits and the Mudaliars,” in Mariners, Merchants and Oceans: Studies in Maritime History, ed. K. S. Mathew (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1995), 333–40.
23. Ananda Ranga Pillai, The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, Dubash to Joseph François Dupleix, Knight of the Order of St. Michael, and Governor of Pondichery. A Record of Matters Political, Historical, Social, and Personal, from 1736 to 1761, ed. J. Fredrick Price (Madras: Printed by the superintendent government press, 1904), 2:150; 12:87. Eugene Irschik describes Poonamalee as a locale that “formed a base for the growth of power of many Kondaikatti vellala families”—perhaps the caste subgroup to which Lazare and his descendants belonged, since Kondaikatties were known as Mudalis. Eugene F. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 34–35.
24. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 1:67.
25. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 90 bis.
26. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 90 bis-90 bis verso.
27. Here the translation of kinship terminology into French or English does not adequately reflect the Tamil terms. The term beau-frère, used to refer to Tiruvangadan in French sources, might have referred to Nayiniyappa’s sister’s husband, his wife’s brother, or a single individual who was both sister’s husband and wife’s brother. On Dravidian kinship terminology, see Thomas R. Trautmann, Dravidian Kinship (New York: Sage, 1996).On the general problem of describing South Asian kinship in English, with its relative paucity of kinship terminology, see Sylvia Vatuk, “‘Family’ as a Contested Concept in Early-Nineteenth-Century Madras,” in Chatterjee, Unfamiliar Relations, 161–91.
28. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/73, fol. 23 verso.
29. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 2:104.
30. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/73, fol. 23. There is a bit of historical revisionism at play here, given that Nayiniyappa was appointed to the post in 1708 to replace Pedro’s father, who was deemed incompetent.
31. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 117.
32. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 116. Another witness who had prior disagreements with Nayiniyappa was one Pautrichecli, who was said to have quarreled with Nayiniyappa over tobacco dealings and then served as a certifier for one of the testimonies against the broker. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 296–297 verso.
33. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 117 verso.
34. BNF, MF 6231, fol. 29 verso.
35. Nayiniyappa’s son Guruvappa did convert to Christianity, an issue discussed in chapter 5, but subsequent family members employed by the company were not Christians.
36. Durba Ghosh has insightfully discussed both the problems posed by the “namelessness” of local women in the archives of colonial India. Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 15–31.
37. For a more extensive discussion of the widow Guruvappa’s engagement with the French administration, see Danna Agmon, “The Currency of Kinship: Trading Families and Trading on Family in Colonial French India,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 2 (2014): 137–55.
38. The fact that these claims repeatedly received favorable response by French authorities speaks to the widow’s position in the colony but also to the liminal status of widows in French society. In early modern France, widowed women could serve as heads of households and enjoyed the legal and economic benefits attendant on that position. Even if widows often found it difficult to take advantage of the benefits due to them in an intensely patriarchal society, as Julie Hardwick has shown, the conceptual and legal framework for their autonomy was in place. Julie Hardwick, “Widowhood and Patriarchy in Seventeenth Century France,” Journal of Social History 26, no. 1 (1992): 133–48.
39. AMEP, Lettres, vol. 992, p. 2.
40. There are at least two letters in which the widow uses the first person to make her claims: AMEP, Lettres, vol. 992, pp. 1–3; and ANOM, FM, COL, C²/73, fols. 29–30.
41. AMEP Lettres, vol. 992, p. 3.
42. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/73, fol. 29.
43. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/73, fol. 29 verso.
44. AMEP, Lettres, vol. 992, p. 2.
45. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/73, fol. 210 verso.
46. Ibid.
47. Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 27.
48. Amalia D. Kessler, A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 142.
49. For a fascinating account of the importance of family in advancing global early modern European commerce, see Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
50. Catherine Manning, Fortunes à Faire: The French in Asian Trade, 1719–48 (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996), 57.
51. Paul Kä ppelin, La Compagnie des Indes Orientales et François Martin: Etude sur l’histoire du commerce et des établissements français dans l’Inde sous Louis XIV (1664–1719) (Paris, 1908), 385.
52. Colbert was responsible for the company in the period 1661–1683. The responsibility then passed to his eldest son, the Marquis de Seignelay (1683–1690). His successor was Louis Phélypeaux, Comte de Pontchartrain (1690–1699), who passed the position on to his son Jérome Phélypeaux (1693–1715).
53. Yvonne Robert Gaebelé, Créole et grande dame: Johanna Bégum, marquise Dupleix, 1706–1756 (Paris: Leroux, 1934), 15–16.
54. ANOM, INDE, série N (exposition coloniale), folder 70. Other European trading companies in India had a similar approach to staffing. In the English company, members of only three families supplied ten members to the Council in Bengal early in the eighteenth century. Philippe Haudrè re, Les compagnies des Indes orientales: Trois siècles de rencontre entre Orientaux et Occidentaux (1600–1858) (Paris: Desjonquères, 2006), 180. Closer still, in Madras, members of a handful of families became “dynasties of recruits” for the company over many generations. David Washbrook, “South India 1770–1840: The Colonial Transition,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (July 1, 2004): 489.
55. Robert Morrissey provides an analysis of godparenthood in a French colonial context, using social network analysis to determine the density of connections. Robert Michael Morrissey, “Kaskaskia Social Network: Kinship and Assimilation in the French-Illinois Borderlands, 1695–1735,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 1 (January 2013): 103–46. See also Jennifer L. Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). On the work accomplished by godparenthood in Europe in the same period, see Jürgen Schlumbohm, “Quelques problèmes de micro-histoire d’une société locale. Construction de liens sociaux dans la paroisse de Beim (XVIIe–XIXe siècles),” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 50, no. 4 (1995): 775–802.
56. For the Pondichéry notariat, see ANOM, INDE, série P. For the records of the Etat-civil, see Alfred Albert Martineau, ed., Résume des actes de l’Etat civil de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Société de l’histoire de l’Inde française, 1917).
57. Martineau, Résume des actes, 1:77.
58. Ibid., 1:76.
59. Ibid., 1:93.
60. Niccolaò Manucci, Storia Do Mogur, Or, Mogul India, 1653–1708, trans. William Irvine, Indian Texts 1 (London: J. Murray, 1906). On Manucci’s career, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 133–72.
61. Martineau, Résume des actes, 1:98.
62. Ibid., 1:108.
63. Ibid., 1:190.
64. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 96 verso.
65. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 201.
66. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 97.
67. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 101.
68. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 293 verso.
69. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 83 verso.
70. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 204.
71. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 57 verso.
72. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 299 verso.
73. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 58.
74. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 299 verso–300 verso.
75. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/67, fol. 272. Another account of this arrest appears in BNF, MF 6231, fol. 30.
76. Danna Agmon, “Striking Pondichéry: Religious Disputes and French Authority in an Indian Colony of the Ancien Régime,” French Historical Studies 37, no. 3 (June 2014): 458–61.
77. Manuel is described in a letter Dulivier sent to the Marine Council as “the catechist who served as clerk” during Nayiniyappa’s interrogation. AN, MAR, B¹ /27, folio 65.
78. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 292 verso.
79. A. Lynn Martin, “Jesuits and Their Families: The Experience in Sixteenth Century France,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13, no. 1 (April 1982): 3–24.
80. Quoted ibid., 5.
81. “Lettre du Père Martin, missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus aux Indes: Au Père de Villette de la même Compagnie,” in Jesuits, Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangères (Paris: Chez Nicolas Le Clerc, 1703), 9:173.
82. Ibid.
83. “Lettre du Père Martin, missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus, au Père Le Gobien de la même Compagnie,” Camien-naiken-patty, Madurai, June 1, 1700, in Jesuits, Lettres édifiantes, 5:94.
84. Jesuits, Lettres édifiantes, 9:173.
85. Ibid., vol. 9, preface.
86. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/69, fol. 18 verso.
87. “Le paganisme des Indiens, nommés Tamouls,” BNF, NAF 2627, p. 582.
88. Ibid., p. 583.
89. Pillai, Private Diary, 1:21.
90. Raman, Document Raj.
1. The description in these opening paragraphs is compiled from Nayiniyappa’s own account of his first interrogation, in ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252, and from the official transcribed record of this interrogation prepared by the governor’s secretary, in ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 48 verso–52.
2. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252.
3. Even Marcara, the Armenian merchant who led the French efforts to establish commerce in Coromandel in 1699–1670 and had lived in Europe, was described by his employer, François Caron, as “not very well versed in French.” ANOM, FM, COL, C²/62, fol. 37. Cited in Gabriel Ranpoandro, “Un marchand arménien au service de la Compagnie française des Indes: Marcara Avanchinz,” Archipel 17, no. 1 (1979): 113n22.
4. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 302. The fact that Hébert spoke Portuguese fluently was also attested to in a letter sent by Hébert’s rival Dulivier. AN, MAR, B¹ /27, fol. 65.
5. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2003), 156.
6. ANOM, INDE, Série M/25.
7. See, for example, the French-speaking dubash David Moutou, employed by a French officer in India. Mautort, Mémoires du Chevalier de Mautort: Capitaine au régiment d’Ausrasie Chevalier de l’ordre royal et militaire de Saint-Louis (1752–1802) (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1895), 207. Nayiniyappa’s nephew, Ananda Ranga Pillai, who was chief commercial broker in Pondichéry in the mid-eighteenth century, also spoke French with his employers.
8. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252.
9. Well into the seventeenth century, extreme linguistic diversity was a defining feature of French society. Paul Cohen, Kingdom of Babel: The Making of a National Language in France, 1400–1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming). Cohen has also demonstrated how polyglossia—the use of French, Latin, and regional languages—was the norm in French courts of law. Prior to 1789, judges, lawyers, and scribes all accommodated linguistic diversity in the courts. Paul Cohen, “Judging a Multilingual Society: The Accommodation of Linguistic Diversity in French Law Courts, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries” (paper presented at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Boston, January 2011).
10. S. Arokianathan has found some evidence of French influence on the form of Tamil spoken in Pondichéry in the eighteenth century. S. Arokianathan, “Influence of French in 18th Century Pondicherry Tamil Dialect,” in French in India and Indian Nationalism, ed. K. S. Mathew (Delhi: Distributed by BRPC, 1999), 2:357–63.
11. BNF, NAF 6557, fol. 64 verso.
12. Ibid.
13. The need to examine polylingual scenarios was also raised in Michael N. Pearson, “Connecting the Littorals: Cultural Brokers in the Early Modern Indian Ocean,” in Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean, ed. Pamila Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Michael Pearson (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010), 32–47.
14. Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 3.
15. Legal scholars have increasingly paid attention to the role of language in constituting legal and sovereign power. John M. Conley and William M. O’Barr, Just Words: Law, Language, and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Anthropologists and historians alike have contributed to this strand of scholarship by demonstrating the centrality of language to the making of jurisdiction, and by extension sovereignty, in legal contexts. For an excellent review of this scholarship, see Justin B. Richland, “Jurisdiction: Grounding Law in Language,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1 (2013): 209–26. The intersection of law and language has been studied in the specific context of colonialism in Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
16. Ines G. Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th–17th Centuries) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 14.
17. “Lettre du Père Martin, Missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus, au P. de Villette, de la même Compagnie,” Balassor, Royaume de Bengale, January 30, 1699, in Jesuits, Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangères (Paris: Chez Nicolas Le Clerc, 1703), vol. 1:1–29.
18. “Lettre du Père Tachard, Missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus, au R. P. du Trevou, de la même Compagnie, confesseur de S.A.R. Monseigneur de Duc d’Orléans,” Chandenagore, January 18, 1711, in Jesuits, Lettres édifiantes, 12:366–442. Also quoted in Isabelle Vissière and Jean-Louis Vissière, Lettres édifiantes et curieuses des jésuites de l’Inde au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2000), 42.
19. 1703 letter by P. Paul Vendôme, BC, manuscript 92, fol. 158 verso.
20. Quoted in Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (New York: Penguin, 1986), 153–54.
21. “Le paganisme des Indiens, nommés Tamouls,” BNF, NAF 2627, p. 15. On Jesuit struggles with Tamil, see also Ines G.Županov, “Twisting a Pagan Tongue: Portuguese and Tamil in Sixteenth-Century Jesuit Translations,” in Conversion: Old Worlds and New, ed. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003).
22. “Lettre du Père Mauduit, missionnaire de la compagnie de Jésus, au Père Le Gobien de la même compagnie,” Carouvepondi, Carnat, January 1, 1702, in Jesuits, Lettres édifiantes, 6:4–5.
23. “Lettre du P. Bouchet, missionnaire de la compagnie de Jésus, à Monsieur Cochet de Saint-Valliér, président des requétes du palais à Paris,” in Jesuits, Lettres édifiantes, 11:7.
24. “Lettre du Père Martin, missionnaire de la compagnie de Jésus, au Père Le Gobien de la même compagnie,” Camien-naiken-patty, Madurai, June 1, 1700, in Jesuits, Lettres édifiantes, 5:92–93.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 5:94.
27. Ibid., 5:93.
28. Simon de La Farelle, Deux officiers français au XVIIIe siècle: Mémoires et correspondance du chevalier et du général de La Farelle (Paris: Berger-Levrault et cie, 1896), 85.
29. The Tamil broker Ananda Ranga Pillai described Jeanne Dupleix performing this service for her husband on several occasions. Pillai, The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, Dubash to Joseph François Dupleix, Knight of the Order of St. Michael, and Governor of Pondichery. A Record of Matters Political, Historical, Social, and Personal, from 1736 to 1761 (Madras: Printed by the superintendent government press, 1904), ed. J. Fredrick Price, 3:96.
30. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 251 verso.
31. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 86.
32. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 88 verso–89.
33. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 129 verso.
34. Quoted in Marcel Thomas, Le Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 1702–1820: Essai sur les Institutions Judiciaires de l’Inde Française (Paris: L’auteur, 1953), 104.
35. Scholars of medieval and early modern Europe have examined the transmission of data from scribal and printed forms to oral ones and vice versa. See M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Natalie Zemon Davis, “Printing and the People,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 189–226.
36. Gnanou Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Bibliothèque publique, 1935), 8:126.
37. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Société de l’Histoire de l’Inde Française, 1913), 1:163–64.
38. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 255.
39. Only the French version would be archived. Manuel’s statement is cited here from ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 293 verso–294 verso. The same text is also reproduced in C²/71, fol. 82, as well as C²/71, fol.156. The multiple appearance of the testimony in the French archives is further evidence of the centrality of interpretation in the Nayiniyappa Affair.
40. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 293 verso.
41. Writing on palm leaves remained a common medium for Tamil writing until the end of the nineteenth century. Stuart H. Blackburn, Print, Folklore, and Nationalism in Colonial South India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), 21–23.
42. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 293 verso.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid. Xaveri Moutou was likely the Christian who had been appointed co-broker with Nayiniyappa in 1714; see chapter 1.
45. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 255. The law in question appears in section 14, article II of the 1670 Criminal Ordinance, discussed in the next chapter. Nayiniyappa’s appeal cites here from Philippe Bornier, Conférences des nouvelles ordonnances de Louis XIV roy de France et de Navarre, avec celles des rois predecesseurs de Sa Majesté, le droit écrit, & les arrêts, Nouvelle édition reveuë, corrigée & augmentée (A Paris chez les associez choisis par ordre de Sa Majesté pour l’impression de ses nouvelles ordonnances. M. D C C. Avec privilege du roy, 1700).
46. For example, the testimony of Nicolas Piri was thus heard by the council in 1739. Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry, 1:68.
47. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 292 verso–293.
48. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 294 verso.
49. For mentions of Cordier and his biography, see ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 292 verso and C²/71, fol. 82. Cordier the elder arrived in India as a sous-marchand in 1686 and was the chief official of a small French presence in Caveripatam (Kaveripakkam). Paul Kä ppelin, La Compagnie des Indes Orientales et François Martin: Etude sur l’histoire du commerce et des établissements français dans l’Inde sous Louis XIV (1664–1719) (Paris, 1908), 252.
50. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 292 verso.
51. The denial of shared language in interrogations has more often been studied in modern context; see Susan Berk-Seligson, Coerced Confessions: The Discourse of Bilingual Police Interrogations (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009).
52. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 110 verso.
53. There is no discernible pattern to the shift in the eighteenth century between the two nomenclatures used for this institution. Henri Joucla, Le Conseil supérieur des colonies et ses antécédents, avec de nombreux documents inédits et notamment les procès-verbaux du Comité colonial de l’Assemblée constituante (Paris: Les Editions du monde moderne, 1927), 15. The term “Sovereign Council” appears to be more common in the early eighteenth century, with “Superior Council” coming to be the more common term later in that century. I use the two terms interchangeably, as do the primary sources.
54. See the dossiers held in ANOM, INDE, série M.
55. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 294.
56. Ibid.
57. Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry, 8:95–96.
58. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 1:191.
59. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 56 verso.
60. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 61.
61. Ibid.
62. See, for example, in ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 59 verso.
63. The Nayiniyappa Affair was not the only case heard by Pondichéry’s Sovereign Council in which Tamil witnesses deposed by the council claimed that they had signed documents in French without understanding their contents. In a case heard in 1729, regarding the forging of Tamil receipts, the Brahman Vingayen testified that only after he had signed a certain French document was it read to him. ANOM, INDE, série M/25.
64. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70 fol. 202.
65. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252 verso.
66. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 205 verso.
67. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 202.
68. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252 verso.
69. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 89.
70. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 296 verso.
71. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 296.
72. Ibid.
73. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 254.
74. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 295.
75. Ibid.
76. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 299.
77. For a description of the Hundi system, see Franç ois Martin, India in the 17th Century, 1670–1694 (Social, Economic, and Political): Memoirs of François Martin (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981), vol. 1, app. 2. See also Lakshmi Subramanian, Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat, and the West Coast (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). Originally cited in Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750–1950 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 5. For a critical evaluation of the system, focusing on recent usage but providing historical background, see Marina Martin, “Hundi/Hawala: The Problem of Definition,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 4 (July 2009): 909–37. On the use of Hundi among Gujarati merchants in the Western Indian Ocean, see Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, C. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 65–67. For a discussion of signing practices in the Tamil region in India in the modern period, see Francis Cody, “Inscribing Subjects to Citizenship: Petitions, Literacy Activism, and the Performativity of Signature in Rural Tamil India,” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 3 (November 2012): 347–80.
78. Pillai, Private Diary, 1:3.
79. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 296.
80. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 296 verso.
81. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 61.
82. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 108.
83. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 60 verso.
84. François Pouillon, Dictionnaire des Orientalistes de Langue Française (Paris: Karthala Editions, 2008), 348–49.
85. Alfred Albert Martineau, ed., Correspondance du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry et de la Compagnie [des Indes] (Pondichéry: Société de l’histoire de l’Inde française, 1920), 1:165.
86. Ibid.
87. Two centuries later, French colonial administrators in Africa were still facing very similar problems and were prompted to “learn the language of the country that they govern.” Emily Lynn Osborn, “Interpreting Colonial Power in French Guinea: The Boubou Penda-Ernest Noirot Affair of 1905,” in Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa, ed. Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 56–76.
88. Pillai, Private Diary, 3:266.
1. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 130.
2. David Parker, “Sovereignty, Justice, and the Function of the Law in Seventeenth-Century France,” Past and Present 122 (1989): 36–74. For an example of this dynamic at work in provincial France, see Zoë A. Schneider, The King’s Bench: Bailiwick Magistrates and Local Governance in Normandy, 1670–1740 (Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press, 2008). In a colonial context, Éric Wenzel has argued that Québec’s Superior Council in the same period was a tool used by local elites to shape legal and social realities, bypassing the central authority of the metropolitan state. Éric Wenzel, La justice criminelle en Nouvelle-France (1670–1760): Le grand arrangement (Dijon, FR: Editions universitaires de Dijon, 2012), 27–29. An important difference between the two cases is that local elites in New France were a much better established and stronger group than the employees of the Compagnie des Indes in Pondichéry in the first decades of the eighteenth century, who held a much weaker position in relation to the state.
3. On French legal terms and procedures in the period, a useful reference tool is Claude de Ferrière, Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique (Paris: V. Brunet, 1769). On French criminal procedure, see Arlette Lebigre, Les Institutions de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Les Cours de droit, 1976); Benoît Garnot, Crime et justice aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Imago, 2000). For a review of the growing field of early modern French legal social history, see Michael Breen, “Law, Society, and the State in Early Modern France,” Journal of Modern History 83, no. 2 (June 2011): 346–86.
4. The minutes describing this decision, made on February 7, 1718, are in AN, MAR, B¹ /27, fols. 102–112 verso. A copy of the decision is reproduced in ANOM, FM, COL, F³ /238, fols. 381–387.
5. The declaration of Nayiniyappa’s innocence, made on January 20, 1719, appears in ANOM, FM, COL, C² /71, fols. 190–191.
6. This order was made on September 10, 1720. ANOM, FM, COL, F³ /238, fols. 391–410.
7. On such uses of the legal arena in medieval Marseille, see Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
8. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Eric Lewis Beverley, “Frontier as Resource: Law, Crime, and Sovereignty on the Margins of Empire,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 2 (2013): 241–72; Brian Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
9. Katherine A. Hermes, “Jurisdiction in the Colonial Northeast: Algonquian, English and French Governance,” American Journal of Legal History 43, no. 1 (January 1999): 52.
10. Laurie M. Wood discusses the global legal regime of the First Empire in “Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire” (unpublished manuscript in progress). The work on law and crime in the French empire has been especially rich in the context of New France. See Wenzel, La justice criminelle en Nouvelle-France ; Elise Frêlon, Les pouvoirs du Conseil souverain de la Nouvelle France dans l’édiction de la norme, 1663–1760 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002); A. J. B. Johnston, Control and Order in French Colonial Louisbourg, 1713–1758 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001); David Gilles, “Les acteurs de la norme coloniale face au droit métropolitain: De l’adaptation à l’appropration (Canada, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles),” Clio@Themis 4 (2011): 1–41; André Lachance, Vivre, aimer et mourir: Juger et punir en Nouvelle-France (Montreal: Libre Expression, 2004).
11. In the French context, see Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). The scholarship on the intersection of slavery and law in colonial contexts more generally is expansive. For a review, see David S. Tanenhaus, “Law, Slavery, and Justice: A Special Issue,” Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (November 2011): v.
12. Lauren A. Benton and Richard Jeffrey Ross, eds., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 (New York: NYU Press, 2013).
13. Voltaire quoted in Suzanne Desan, “ ‘War between Brothers and Sisters’: Inheritance Law and Gender Politics in Revolutionary France,” French Historical Studies 20, no. 4 (October 1997): 602.
14. David Avrom Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 23.
15. In addition to these two judicial forums, a tribunal of the admiralty was created in 1717 in Pondichéry, to deal with maritime matters and sailors, and a conseil de guerre in 1729, for military affairs and soldiers.
16. The two terms were used interchangeably to describe this institution throughout the eighteenth century.
17. This and similar decrees were modeled after a 1645 royal decree creating a sovereign council in French island holdings in the New World. Joucla, Le Conseil supérieur, 12. See also Jean Gingast, De l’oeuvre et du rôle des gouverneurs coloniaux (Rennes: Imprimerie Rennaise, 1902), 56.
18. “25 Septembre 1702, Création du Conseil souverain de Pondichéry.” Reproduced in Lettres du Centre d’information et de documentation de l’Inde francophone, no. 36, http://cidif.go1.cc/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=364:25-septembre-1702-creation-du-conseil-souverain-de-pondichery&catid=40:lettrend36&Itemid=3.
19. Joucla, Le Conseil supérieur, 24. In Quèbec, for example, some of the councillors were respected members of the local commercial society with no legal experience, but others had arrived from France with formal legal instruction. Wenzel, La justice criminelle en Nouvelle-France, 37.
20. On the making of the various coutumes, see Martine Grinberg, Écrire les coutumes. Les droits seigneuriaux en France (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2006). On the use of the coutume in a colonial context, see Jerah Johnson, “La Coutume de Paris: Louisiana’s First Law,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 30, no. 2 (April 1989): 145–55.
21. For an example in which the rules of the 1670 ordinance were disregarded in cases involving indigenous populations in New France, see Jan Grabowski, “French Criminal Justice and Indians in Montreal, 1670–1760,” Ethnohistory 43, no. 3 (July 1996): 405–29. On the impact of the ordinance in New France, see Wenzel, La justice criminelle en Nouvelle-France, 63–112.
22. In British India, the early colonial period was one of great legal variability, and even once India came largely under British control, the Raj did not implement a universal codified body of law until the implementation of the Code of Criminal Procedure in 1861. Elizabeth Kolsky, “Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India,” Law and History Review 23, no. 3 (October 2005): 631–83.
23. Gagan D. S. Sood, “Sovereign Justice in Precolonial Maritime Asia: The Case of the Mayor’s Court of Bombay, 1726–1798,” Itinerario 37, no. 2 (August 2013): 48.
24. Much more work is needed on the Pondichéry Chaudrie. Its surviving records are held at NAIP. The most important current work, as well as a published selection of cases, is in Jean-Claude Bonnan, Jugements de la tribunal de la Chaudrie de Pondichéry 1766–1817 (Pondicherry: Institut française de Pondichéry, Ecole française d’Extrême Orient, 2001). See also Joseph Minattur, Justice in Pondicherry (Mumbai: N. M. Tripathi, 1973); Joseph Minattur, “Tribunal de la Chaudrie, 1728–1827,” Revue historique de Pondichéry 12 (1974–75): 12–18; Jaganou Diagou, “The Judicial Set-up in Pondicherry between 1701 and 1819,” Revue Historique de Pondichéry 11 (1973): 71–72; Jean-Claude Bonnan, “L’organisation judiciare de Pondichéry au 18ème siècle: L’example du tribunal de la Chaudrie,” in French in India and Indian Nationalism, ed. K. S. Mathew (Delhi: BRPC, 1999), 2:535–52.
25. Allan Christelow, Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
26. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
27. Grabowski, “French Criminal Justice.”
28. Wenzel, La justice criminelle en Nouvelle-France, 50.
29. Sood, “Sovereign Justice,” 46.
30. James Jaffe, Ironies of Colonial Governance: Law, Custom and Justice in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Amrita Shodhan, “The East India Company’s Conquest of Assam, India, and ‘Community’ Justice: Panchayats/Mels in Translation,” Asian Journal of Law and Society 2, no. 2 (November 2015): 357–77. For the British legal setup in the early colonial period, see Charles Fawcett, The First Century of British Justice in India: An Account of the Court of Judicature at Bombay, Established in 1672, and of Other Courts of Justice in . . . to the Latter Part of the Eighteenth Century (Darmstadt, Ger.: Clarendon Press, 1934).
31. The records of the interrogation are themselves copies made by the council in 1718 as a result of the reinvestigation of the Nayiniyappa Affair. They appear in ANOM, FM, COL, C² 70, fols. 48 verso–75 verso. In Nayinoyappa’s 1717 appeal, the mediated account of the interrogations appears in ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 251–256.
32. Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice, 53.
33. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 51–51 verso.
34. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 68 verso–69.
35. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 253.
36. Gnanou Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Bibliothèque publique, 1935), 1:xiv. Later on the use of lawyers in French India was both allowed and regulated. An 1818 ordinance aimed at the French-run tribunal in Bengal serving locals (the equivalent of the Pondichéry Chaudrie) noted that the parties appearing before this tribunal always had the right to be represented by “Moktayers, or procureurs,” except in cases where the judge ordered otherwise. Indian defendants could choose to be represented by a gentile (Hindu) or a Moor (Muslim). In cases in which either a European or a métis (known in French India as gens à chapeau) was the plaintiff, the defendant could choose to be represented by a European or a métis. Article 39 of “11 mars 1818—Tribunal de la cacherie de Chandernagor.” Reproduced in Lettres du Centre d’information et de documentation de l’Inde francophone, no. 36, http://cidifoliogo1.cc/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=315:11-mars-1818-tribunal-de-la-cacherie-de-chandernagor&catid=40:lettre-nd36&Itemid=3.
37. Gene Edwin Ogle, “Policing Saint Domingue: Race, Violence, and Honor in an Old Regime Colony” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2003), 179.
38. My thanks go to Alexandre Dubé for his insights on this issue.
39. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 109.
40. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 202.
41. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252 verso.
42. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 255.
43. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252.
44. Criminal Ordinance of 1670, article 8 of title 14. On rights due to the accused under the Old Regime, see Antoine Astaing, Droits et garanties de l’accusé dans le procès criminel de l’Ancien Régime, XVIe et XVIIe siècle: Audace et pusillanimité de la doctrine pénale française (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 1999).
45. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252 verso.
46. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 254.
47. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 13–48 verso.
48. The confrontations are at ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70 fols. 77 verso–83 verso. On witnesses in the French legal system in this period, see Éric Wenzel, “Forcer les témoignages : Le délicat recours au monitoire sous l’Ancien Régime,” in Les témoins devant la justice : Une histoire des statuts et des comportements, ed. Benoît Garnot (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 83–90.
49. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 299.
50. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 254.
51. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252 verso.
52. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 253 verso.
53. ANOM, FM, COL, F/³ /238, fol. 394.
54. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 299. The inquest is reprinted along with other supporting evidence in an appeal filed by Nayiniyappa’s heirs in 1720. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 282–302. Other reprinted evidentiary materials that I have been able to compare with the earlier original sources have been accurately reproduced in this appeal, so there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the testimony of the judges reproduced here.
55. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 300–300 verso.
56. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 300 verso.
57. La Prévostière’s suggestions for sentencing, dated May 16, 1716, are at ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 75 verso–76.
58. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 299 verso.
59. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 76–77 verso.
60. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 76 verso.
61. Ibid.
62. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 77.
63. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution ; Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law, repr. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On the rejection of state law through the use of private violence, see Sumit Guha, “Wrongs and Rights in the Maratha Country: Antiquity, Custom and Power in Eighteenth-Century India,” in Changing Concepts of Law and Justice in South Asia, ed. Michael Anderson and Sumit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 14–29.
64. Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry, 8:28.
65. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 110 verso.
66. The record of Nayiniyappa’s brief interrogation by the judges is at ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 83 verso–84.
67. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 299 verso.
68. Ibid.
69. Nayiniyappa’s sentencing is at ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 84 verso–85.
70. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 84 verso.
71. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252.
72. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 301.
73. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 300–300 verso.
74. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 301.
75. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 301 verso.
76. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Société de l’Histoire de l’Inde Française, 1913), 1:104.
77. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 251.
78. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 89.
79. Hébert’s letter naming La Morandière as the author is ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 255 verso; La Morandière’s admission is in ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 54.
80. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 59.
81. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 54.
82. Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry, 8:95.
83. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 50–53; and fols. 54–65.
84. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 59 verso. One of these Portuguese manifestos appears in the French archive, in ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 155–166. Its translation into French is at ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70 fols. 200–207 verso.
85. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 83.
86. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 59 verso.
87. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 61.
88. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 138.
89. La Morandière’s reference to finding the records is in ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 60. The actual exchange between Hébert and Father Turpin, to which he is referring, is at ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70 fols. 138–139 verso, and is a reproduction made in the course of the 1718 inquiry into Nayiniyappa’s conviction.
90. On the Malabar Rites controversy in Pondichéry, Paolo Aranha’s work is key. See Paolo Aranha, “‘Glocal’ Conflicts: Missionary Controversies on the Coromandel Coast between the XVII and the XVIII Centuries,” in Evangelizzazione e Globalizzazione: Le Missioni Gesuitiche Nell’età Moderna Tra Storia e Storiografia, ed. Michael Catto, Guido Mongini, and Silvia Mostaccio (Castello, It.: Società Editrice Dante Alighieri, 2010), 79–104; Paolo Aranha, “Les meilleures causes embarassent les Juges, si elles manquent de bonnes preuves: Père Norbert’s Militant Historiography on the Malabar Rites Controversy,” in Europäische Geschichtskulturen um 1700 zwischen Gelehrsamkeit, Politik und Konfession, ed. Thomas Wallnig, Thomas Stockinger, Ines Peper, and Patrick Fiska (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 239–68; Paolo Aranha, “The Social and Physical Spaces of the Malabar Rites Controversy,” in Space and Conversion in Global Perspective, ed. Giuseppe Marcocci, Aliocha Maldavsky, Wietse de Boer and Ilaria Pavan (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2015).” Another account of the Pondichéry context of the Malabar Rites controversy appears in K. S. Mathew, “Missionaries from the Atlantic Regions and the Social Changes in French Pondicherry from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” in Les relations entre la France et l’Inde de 1673 à nos jours, ed. Jacques Weber (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2002). On the Malabar Rites conflict at its point of origin in seventeenth-century Madurai, the definitive work is Ines G.Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahminical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).
91. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 60 verso.
92. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 58 verso.
93. Ibid.
94. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 63 verso–64.
95. Cuperly’s letters are at ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 86–88.
96. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 86.
97. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 86 verso.
98. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 261.
99. AN, MAR, B¹ /27, folio 62–67 verso.
100. Dale K. Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Regime, 1750–1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 101.
101. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 88–88 verso.
102. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 88 verso.
103. An analysis of Bouchet’s letter is in Ludo Rocher, “Father Bouchet’s Letter on the Administration of Hindu Law,” in Studies in Hindu Law and Dharmasastra, ed. Donald R. Davis Jr. and Richard W. Lariviere (London: Anthem Press, 2012), 111–14.
104. The Padroado was the legal and political arrangement by which the Portuguese Crown exercised authority over the Catholic Church in India (and other colonial holdings). Under the Padroado, bishops in India were appointed by the Portuguese Crown; other figures of religious authority were vicars apostolic, who were appointed by the papal Propaganda Fide, with authority similar to bishops’ but without territorial powers. For this distinction and the power struggles it entailed, see Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India: 1707–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 436–38. On the Capuchins’ and other missionaries’ relationships with the bishopric of Mylapore see Mathew, “Missionaries from the Atlantic Regions,” 353–57.
105. For example, Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry, 8:38–42.
106. Ibid., 8:40.
107. Ibid., 8:41.
108. Ibid., 8:60.
109. Ibid.
110. Ibid., 8:61.
111. Ibid., 8:61–62.
112. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 1:176.
113. Ibid.
114. Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry, 8:36.
115. Ibid., 8:43.
116. Ibid., 8:44.
117. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 1:232–33.
118. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 190.
119. Ibid.
120. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 58.
121. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 58 verso.
122. Niels Brimnes, “Beyond Colonial Law: Indigenous Litigation and the Contestation of Property in the Mayor’s Court in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras,” Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 3 (July 2003): 517.
123. Alexis De Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 117, cited in Bell, Lawyers and Citizens, 21.
1. For a representative example, see Steve Clark’s introduction to Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed. Steve Clark (London: Zed Books, 1999), where he refers to colonists as belonging to “the mobile culture.” Mary Louise Pratt, in her definition of “contact zones,” similarly refers to colonizers and colonized, or travelers and “travelees,” a formulation that opposes the condition of being colonized to the act of traveling. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7.
2. For a review of the Annales school’s tendency to overlook mobility in the study of French history, see the special issue of French Historical Studies devoted to the subject, especially Carla Hesse and Peter Sahlins, “Introduction,” French Historical Studies 29, no. 3 (July 2006): 347–57. Two influential works in the field of French mobility studies are James B. Collins, “Geographic and Social Mobility in Early-Modern France,” Journal of Social History 24, no. 3 (April 1, 1991): 563–77; Daniel Roche, Humeurs vagabondes: De la circulation des hommes et de l’utilité des voyages (Paris: Fayard, 2003). For a similar attempt to overturn the assumption of stability in premodern South Asian history, see David Ludden, “History outside Civilisation and the Mobility of South Asia,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 17, no. 1 (June 1994): 1–23; David Ludden, “Presidential Address: Maps in the Mind and the Mobility of Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 4 (November 2003): 1057–78.
3. Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750–1950 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003).
4. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette M. Burton, Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
5. Stephen Greenblatt, Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 250.
6. On French commercial efforts in the Mascareignes in the eighteenth century, see Auguste Toussaint, Le mirage des îles: Le négoce français aux Mascareignes au XVIIIe siècle, suivi de la correspondance du négociant lyonnais Jean-Baptiste Pipon (Aixen-Provence: Édisud, 1977), 19–46.
7. “Observations sur l’Etablissement d’une nouvelle Compagnie des Indes,” AN, Ancien régime séries administrative, M/1026, fols. 4–5.
8. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/72, fol. 10 verso.
9. Alfred Albert Martineau, ed., Correspondance du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry et de la Compagnie [des Indes] (Pondichéry: Société de l’histoire de l’Inde française, 1920), 1:33.
10. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 173.
11. NAIP, eighteenth-century documents, folder 20, fol. 2.
12. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 173.
13. Ibid.
14. NAIP, eighteenth-century documents, folder 20, fol. 4.
15. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Société de l’histoire de l’Inde Française, 1913), 1:234–35.
16. Ananda Ranga Pillai, The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, Dubash to Joseph François Dupleix, Knight of the Order of St. Michael, and Governor of Pondichery. A Record of Matters Political, Historical, Social, and Personal, from 1736 to 1761 (Madras: Printed by the superintendent government press, 1904), 1:35–36.
17. NAIP, eighteenth-century documents, folder 20, fols. 11–12.
18. Ibid., fols. 8–9.
19. Ibid., fol. 9.
20. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 123–123 verso.
21. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 123 verso.
22. BNF, MF 6231, fol. 56 verso.
23. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 124.
24. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 124–124 verso.
25. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 125.
26. Quoted in Yvonne Gaebelé, “Du nouveau sur la famille d’Ananda Ranga Poulle—Dubash de Dupleix,” Revue Historique de l’Inde Française 8 (1952), 129–31.
27. ANOM, INDE, N/61, fol. 2.
28. For mention of Guruvappa’s British-enabled itinerary, see ANOM, INDE, N/61, fols. 1–2, and NAIP, eighteenth-century documents, folder 20, fol. 3. Mention of Guruvappa’s trip to Paris also appears in AMEP, Lettres, vol. 991, pp. 783–85.
29. AMEP, Lettres, vol. 960, p. 115.
30. Ibid., vol. 992, p. 2.
31. Ibid., vol. 960, p. 116.
32. Adrien Launay, Histoire des missions de l’Inde (Paris: Indes savantes, 2000), 1:xxxv. The Pillai family memoir in Pondichéry has the duchesse du Berry serving as the godmother. NAIP, eighteenth-century documents, folder 20, fol. 3.
33. ANOM, FM, DPPC, GR/675.
34. ANOM, FM, COL, F³ /238, fols. 391–410.
35. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 313–328.
36. Jean Luquet, Considérations sur les missions catholiques et voyage d’un missionnaire dans l’Inde (Paris: Au bureau de l’Université catholique, 1853), 306.
37. NAIP, eighteenth-century documents, folder 20, p. 3.
38. Pillai, Private Diary, 1:21.
39. A letter from Ananda Ranga Pillai, dated November 17, 1757. Printed in “Enfance et Adolescence d’Ananda Rangapoullé,” Revue historique de l’état de Pondichéry 9 (1955): 99.
40. Ibid., 100.
41. All French governors of the colony, beginning with François Martin, were made knights of the order of Notre dame de mont carmel et de St. Lazare de Jérusalem.
42. Luquet, Considérations sur les missions catholiques, 307n1.
43. For the discussion of Guruvappa’s Christian descendants, see ibid., 306. For the widow Guruvappa’s profession of faith, see AMEP, Lettres, vol. 992, p. 2.
44. Alfred Albert Martineau, ed., Résume des actes de l’Etat civil de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Société de l’histoire de l’Inde française, 1917), 1:269.
45. H. de Closets d’Errey, Précis chronologique de l’histoire de l’Inde française (1664–1816), suivi d’un relevé des faits marquants de l’Inde française au XIXe siècle (Pondichéry: Librairie E. Léroux, 1934), 20.
46. Luquet, Considérations sur les missions catholiques, 307.
47. Ibid., 307n1 (quoting the eighteenth-century missionary Mathon).
48. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/73, fol. 40 verso.
49. The supercargo on French voyages was always French except on the yearly voyage to Manila. Catherine Manning, Fortunes à Faire: The French in Asian Trade, 1719–48 (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996), 144.
50. ANOM, INDE, série M/91.
51. On Indians living in France during the eighteenth century, see Erick Noël, “Les Indiens en France au XVIIIe siècle,” in Les relations entre la France et l’Inde de 1673 à nos jours, ed. Jacques Weber (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2002), 203–19. Noël’s account relies on the French census of 1777, and most of the India-born residents of France he identified were domestic servants. Much earlier, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, another instance of an Indian traveling from Pondichéry to Paris demonstrates how such travels were shared with missionaries and could be framed as touristic expeditions. In a 1702 letter written, in French, by a young Indian convert to an unnamed Jesuit, the writer mentions seeing St. Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris, and the Notre Dame Cathedral. See “Rélations et lettres de Jésuites de l’Inde (1699–1740): Missions dans le Maduré, journaux de voyages dans l’Inde par les P. Martin, Lalanne, Barbier, de Bourses [sic], de la Breville etc etc. [sic]. 1699 à 1740,” BNF, NAF 11168, Manuscrits et lettres autographes, fols. 53–54 verso. A better-known example of an Indian in France is of the Pondichéry-born slave Francisque, who demanded his freedom based on the “Free Soil Principle” in 1759, as described by Sue Peabody in “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 57–71. An interesting example of a European but locally born woman making such a trip is the wife of M. Dumas, who would become governor of Pondichéry. She was a Lutheran named Marie Gertaude Van Zyll, who converted to Catholicism in 1724. Martineau, Résume des actes de l’Etat civil de Pondichéry, 1:198, 260. The Indian-born, Dutch-bred Madame Dumas was quite cosmopolitan, having lived for several years in France. She was described by one French observer as “possessing all the charm one could find among the fair sex in Paris.” Simon de La Farelle, Deux officiers français au XVIIIe siècle : Mémoires et correspondance du chevalier et du général de La Farelle (Paris: Berger-Levrault et cie, 1896), 90.
52. Vanves, fond Brotier, vol. 80, fol. 127.
53. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 254 verso. Clearly, Nayiniyappa had an interest in claiming that Manuel’s return to Pondichéry was tied to Hébert’s reinstallment in the colony, but it is also possible the two events were unrelated.
54. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 197 verso.
55. Other colonial servants traveled with Jesuits to France. In fact, Father Tachard not only took a gardener with him from Siam to Paris but then brought this Siamese gardener with him to India. BNF, MF 19030, fol. 185. For British examples, see Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).
56. The Danish Tranquebar mission provides an example analogous to Manuel’s global travels: Peter Maleiappen (1700–1730), who taught Tamil to the Protestant missionaries there, went with the head of the mission, the German missionary Bartholomaüs Zeigenblag, to Europe in 1714–1716. Heike Liebau, “Country Priests, Catechists, and Schoolmasters as Cultural, Religious, and Social Middlemen in the Context of the Tranquebar Mission,” in Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500, with Special Reference to Caste, Conversion, and Colonialism, ed. Robert Eric Frykenberg and Alaine M. Low (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 87. See also Heike Liebau, Cultural Encounters in India: The Local Co-Workers of the Tranquebar Mission, 18th to 19th Centuries, trans. Rekha V. Rajan (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2013).
57. “Lettre du Père Martin, Missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus, au P. de Villette, de la Même Compagnie,” Balassor, Royaume de Bengale, January 30, 1699, in Jesuits, Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangères (Paris: Chez Nicolas Le Clerc, 1703), 1:13.
58. For an account of dramatic instance of conflict between French Jesuits and their catechists in the Nayaka-ruled city of Madurai, see Danna Agmon, “Conflicts in the Context of Conversion: French Jesuits and Tamil Religious Intermediaries in Madurai, India,” in Intercultural Encounter: Jesuit Mission in South Asia, 16th–18th Centuries, ed. Anand Amaladass and Ines G.Županov (Bangalore, India: Asian Trading Company, 2014), 179–98.
59. “Lettre du Père Pierre Martin, missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus, au Père Le Gobien de la même Compagnie,” Aour, Madurai, December 11, 1700, in Jesuits, Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, 6:180–81.
60. “Lettre du Père Le Gac, missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus, à Monsieur le Chevalier Hébert, Gouverneur de Pondichéry,” Chruchsnabouram, December 10, 1718, in Jesuits, Lettres édifiantes, 16:176–77.
61. Ibid., 16:178–79.
62. Ibid., 16:179.
63. Ibid., 16:188–90.
64. Ibid., 16:190.
65. BNF, MF 19030, fol. 137 verso.
66. Vanves, fond Brotier, vol. 80, fols. 124–161.
67. Ibid., fols. 124–124 verso.
68. Ibid., fols. 125–127 verso.
69. Ibid., fol. 128 verso.
70. Ibid., fols. 130 verso–131.
71. Ibid. fol. 131 verso.
72. Ibid., fols. 146 verso–147.
73. Georges Roques, La manière de négocier aux Indes, 1676–1691: La Compagnie des Indes et l’art du commerce, ed. Valé rie Bé rinstain (Paris: Ecole française d’Extrême Orient, 1996), 33.
1. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 101 verso.
2. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 113–113 verso.
3. Ann L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 19–20.
4. For a review of this scholarship, see Matthew S. Hull, “Documents and Bureaucracy,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41, no. 1 (2012): 251–67. On scribal culture in the context of American capitalism, see Michael Zakim, Accounting for Capitalism: The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). On the fashioning of identity more generally through practices of writing, see Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
5. Early influential work on the construction of historical narrative through archives is Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). See also Paul Ricoeur, “Archives, Documents, Traces,” in Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 116–26. Recent reflexive work by historians about archives includes Antoinette Burton, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Nicholas B. Dirks, “Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History,” in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, ed. Brian Keith Axel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 47–65; Carolyn Kay Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. On the so-called archival turn in multiple disciplines, see Renisa Mawani, “Law’s Archive,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, no. 8 (2012): 337–65.
6. This focus on documentary practices contributes to historians’ efforts to look not only through papers but at them. Ben Kafka, “Paperwork: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 12, no. 1 (2009): 340–53. On documentary practices in bureaucratic regimes, see Annalise Riles, Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). In India, for work that has considered the role of organizing paper in colonial rule, see Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
7. David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (January 2012): 461–80.
8. On archives and colonialism in the South Asian context, see Tony Ballantyne, “Archive, Discipline, State: Power and Knowledge in South Asian Historiography,” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 3, no. 2 (2001): 87–105; Antoinette M. Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Nicholas B. Dirks, “Colin Mackenzie: Autobiography of an Archive,” in The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India, ed. Thomas R. Trautmann (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 29–47; Saloni Mathur, “History and Anthropology in South Asia: Rethinking the Archive,” Annual Review of Anthropology 29, no. 89 (2000), 89–106.
9. These archives are mostly held in the Archives nationales d’outre-mer over a wide range of different archival series. A good finding guide to these collections is Philippe Le Tréguilly and Monique Morazé, L’Inde et la France: Deux siècles d’histoire commune, XVIIe–XVIIIe siecles: Histoire, sources, bibliographie (Paris: CNRS editions, 1995). A not insignificant portion of these materials was also published at the beginning of the twentieth century by French colonial administrators in India who were devoted historians, chief among them Alfred Martineau and Edmond Gaudart. Their efforts are the topic of an ongoing research project about the meaning and uses of the eighteenth century for twentieth-century French colonial administrators. Danna Agmon, “Failure on Display: French India, the 1931 Paris Exhibition, and a Forgotten Historiography of Empire,” journal article in progress.
10. Ananda Ranga Pillai, The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, Dubash to Joseph François Dupleix, Knight of the Order of St. Michael, and Governor of Pondichery. A Record of Matters Political, Historical, Social, and Personal, from 1736 to 1761, ed. J. Fredrick Price (Madras: Printed by the superintendent government press, 1904), 3:38.
11. Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), xvii. For more on documentary practices of the British East Indies Company, see H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire : The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 151–81.
12. On the early modern “relation” as genre, artifact, and practice, see Thomas V. Cohen and Germaine Warkentin, “Things Not Easily Believed: Introducing the Early Modern Relation,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 34, no. 1–2 (2011): 7–23.
13. Alfred Albert Martineau, ed., Correspondance du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry et de la Compagnie [des Indes] (Pondichéry: Société de l’histoire de l’Inde française, 1920), 1:2n2.
14. Colonies in the French Atlantic in the same period had less independence from metropolitan authority because news from Paris arrived there with greater rapidity.
15. On distance, empire, and paperwork, see Sylvia Sellers-García, Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
16. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 12 verso. The St. Malo complaint they mention and the directors’ response are at ANOM, FM, COL, C²/14, fols. 260–270.
17. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 12 verso–13.
18. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 12 verso.
19. Martineau, Correspondance du Conseil supérieur, 1:24–25. Letter written in Paris on December 28, 1726.
20. Ibid. Letter written in Pondichéry, October 8, 1727.
21. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 12.
22. The analysis here has been informed by Donna Merwick, “A Genre of Their Own: Kiliaen van Rensselaer as Guide to the Reading and Writing Practices of Early Modern Businessmen,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 65, no. 4 (October 2008): 669–712. A work that demonstrates the potential of mercantile archives for crafting global narratives of the early modern world is Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
23. Merwick, “A Genre of Their Own,” 671.
24. Ibid., 672–73.
25. The Jesuit letters were collected and disseminated in the multivolume Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangères (Paris: Chez Nicolas Le Clerc, 1703). The lesser-known but still voluminous correspondence of the MEP missionaries is held at the order’s archives in Paris on Rue de Bac. Scholarly and historical works written by French missionaries in India in this period were authored by members of all three orders active in Pondichéry.
26. Gnanou Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Bibliothèque publique, 1935), 8:104–5.
27. Ibid., 8:105–6.
28. Irina Paperno, “What Can Be Done with Diaries?,” Russian Review 63, no. 4 (October 2004): 561–73, cited in Heather Beattie, “Where Narratives Meet: Archival Description, Provenance, and Women’s Diaries,” Libraries & the Cultural Record 44, no. 1 (January 2009): 83. On diaries, see also Lynn Z. Bloom, “‘I Write for Myself and Strangers’: Private Diaries as Public Documents,” in Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, ed. Suzanne Bunkers (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 23–37; Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries (St. Paul, MN: Hungry Mind Press, 1995).
29. Pillai, Private Diary, 1:1.
30. Ibid., 1:xii; 2:300.
31. Ibid., 1:17.
32. Ibid., 1: 98–99, 101.
33. Ibid., 1:177–78.
34. Ibid., 1:67–68.
35. The translators of the diary from Tamil to English suggested that this unnamed writer was the dubash’s nephew, who went on to keep his own diary, also published. Ibid., 12:402n1.
36. Ibid., 12:408.
37. Rangappa Thiruvengadam Pillai, The Diary of Rangappa Thiruvengadam Pillai: 1761–1768, ed. S. Jeyaseela Stephen (Pondicherry: IIES, 2001). On the Tamil diaries of the eighteenth century and the significance of these texts for the development of a prose style in Tamil, see S. Jeyaseela Stephen, “Diaries of the Natives from Pondicherry and the Prose Development of Popular Tamil in the Eighteenth Century,” Indian Literature 50, no. 2 (March 2006): 144–55.
38. S. Jeyaseela Stephen provides the following account of diarists and their period of activity: Ananda Ranga Pillai (diary of 1736–1760), Rangappa Thiruvengadam Ananda Ranga Pillai (1760–1781), Veera Nayakar (1778–1792), and Muthu Vijaya Thiruvengadam Pillai (1794–1796). Stephen, “Diaries of the Natives from Pondicherry,” 148. A different list appears in M. Gobalakichenane’s account of the diarists’ lineage: Vijaya Tirouvengadapillai (diary 1760–1791) and Muttu Vijaya Tirouvengadapillai (1791–1799). M Gobalakichenane, “La relation du siège de Pondichéry de 1778 et son auteur,” in Les relations entre la France et l’Inde de 1673 à nos jours, ed. Jacques Weber (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2002), 103.
39. The manuscript is held at NAIP, eighteenth-century documents, folder 20. The text makes reference to the existence of this document also in Tamil (p. 13), but the archive doesn’t hold this version.
40. For his appointment to this post, see NAIP, French Correspondence of the Eighteenth Century, file 54.
41. NAIP, eighteenth-century documents, folder 20, p. 1.
42. Ibid., p. 2.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., p. 3.
45. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 164 verso.
46. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 129 verso.
47. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 301 verso.
48. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 61 verso.
49. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 300.
50. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/73, fol. 210.
51. The notion of an archive acting as a “monument” to the colonial state’s power is introduced and then elaborated in, respectively, Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2, no. 1–2 (March 2002): 87–109, and Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.
52. The family relationship is not mentioned in the contemporaneous French sources but is revealed in the family history written by Tiruvangadan’s grandson later in the eighteenth century, which refers to “Nainiapapoullé, brother-in-law to Tirouvengadanpopoullé, my grandfather.” NAIP, eighteenth-century documents, folder 20, p. 1. Later in the text Nayiniyappa is referred to by the author as “my grand uncle.” Ibid, p. 2. The author was a son of Ananda Ranga Pillai’s younger brother.
53. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 173.
54. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 173 verso.
55. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 173 verso–174.
56. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 174.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 174 verso.
60. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 175.
61. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 176 verso.
62. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 176 verso177.
63. Tiruvangadan’s description of this is in ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 177; the French translation of Pedro’s very brief letter in Tamil is in ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 192.
64. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 177–177 verso; Pedro’s three letters are in ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 192–192 verso.
65. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 192 verso.
66. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 192.
67. Ibid.
68. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 192 verso.
69. The letters to de Nyons are at ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fols. 181–184 and fols. 184–184 verso.
70. On the early modern prison as a site for the production of texts, albeit literary instead of legal, see Molly Murray, “Measured Sentences: Forming Literature in the Early Modern Prison,” Huntington Library Quarterly 72, no. 2 (June 2009): 147–67.
71. Pillai, Private Diary, 1:viii.
72. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Société de l’Histoire de l’Inde Française, 1913), 1:118–19.
73. Paul Kä ppelin, La Compagnie des Indes Orientales et François Martin: Etude sur l’histoire du commerce et des établissements français dans l’Inde sous Louis XIV (1664–1719) (Paris, 1908), 619.
74. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 1:119.
75. Kä ppelin, La Compagnie des Indes Orientales, 619n7.
76. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 1:192–93.
77. There are hints that indicate that the removal of Hébert from office might not have been tied solely to his mistreatment of Nayiniyappa. Dulivier wrote to the Marine Council multiple times in 1715 and 1716 to complain about Hébert. In one of these letters, he wrote that he had been working on a potentially lucrative deal, regarding the purchase of a large amount of pepper, but that Hébert was holding up the negotiations. When this complaint was inscribed in the Marine records in January 1717, a marginal comment noted tersely, “M. Hébert said nothing of this [in his letter.]” AN, MAR, B¹ /14, fol. 6 verso.
78. The order installing la Prévostière as the new governor of Pondichéry was dated January 1, 1718, but its execution was delayed by the time of travel from France to India. The order is reproduced in Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry, 8:111–113. In fact, the king had ordered a company employee stationed in Bengal, d’Hardencourt, to serve as governor, but his death led to La Prévostière’s being sworn in as interim governor. Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 1:192–194.
79. Procès-verbaux des délibérations, 1:195.
80. Ibid., 1:204–5.
81. Ibid., 1:205.
82. Ibid., 1:205–6.
83. Ibid., 1:206.
84. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 256.
85. Ibid.
86. ANOM, COL, FM, C²/71, fol. 258.
87. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 262.
88. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 59.
89. Ibid.
90. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 255.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid.
93. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 255 verso.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid.
97. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 256.
98. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/70, fol. 252 verso.
99. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 256.
100. The officials of the Compagnie des Indes also sent a report to Paris in 1718, complaining about Hébert’s refusal to hand over his papers. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 19.
101. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 257 verso.
102. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 255 verso.
103. Ibid. Hébert was referring here mainly to his rival La Prévostière, who replaced him as governor.
104. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 117 verso.
105. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 56 verso.
106. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 57.
107. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 256 verso.
108. Ibid.
109. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fol. 257.
110. ANOM, FM, COL, C²/71, fols. 262–262 verso.
111. Some materials were left in Pondichéry and are currently housed at NAIP—for example, the original records of the Chaudrie court. The process by which this decision was made—which sources belonged in France, which did not—merits further scholarly examination.
112. A reminder of this fact, and a discussion of the historiographic legacy from von Ranke on down that has tended to obscure the processes by which archives are created, is in Filippo De Vivo, “How to Read Venetian ‘Relazioni,’” Renaissance and Reformation /Renaissance et Réforme 34, no. 1–2 (2011): 25–59.
113. A list of the goods brought to France by the Jason and sold in 1715 is at ADN, série HH 201, item 44.
114. “Journal de bord de navires le Mercure, le Jason et la Vénus,” ADLA, série C, 875. The journal is not paginated, but the entries about the wedding are for the dates May 30, 1714; May 31, 1714; and June 1, 1714.
115. Ibid., entry for May 30, 1714.
116. Ibid.
117. Ibid., entries for May 31 and June 1, 1714.
118. I am indebted to Natalie Rothman for highlighting this point. An important meditation on the intersection of power and archives is Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
1. Letter to Paris from Beauvollier de Courchant, ANOM, FM, COL, C²/73, fol. 23.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. ANOM, FM, COL, A/20, fol. 76 verso.
5. James Pritchard has considered the relationship of absolutism to colonialism in the Atlantic but concluded that absolutism failed in the colonial context—a formulation that assumes that empire requires hegemony and subscribes to the paradigm of French “failure” that has also informed much of the work on India. James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The scholarship on absolutism in France is vast; for an influential account of the provincial limits on the Crown, see William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
6. William H. Sewell, “Historical Events as Transformations of Structure,” in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 226.
7. A similar point is made in Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
8. It has been suggested that when Dupleix incorporated the notion of territorial expansion in India into French colonial policy, he changed the dynamic and practice of European presence in the subcontinent, thereby ushering in a new era of modern imperialism. Jay Howard Geller, “Towards a New Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century India: Dupleix, La Bourdonnais and the French Compagnie des Indes,” Portuguese Studies 16 (January 2000): 240–41.
9. Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4. For further reflections on this methodological strategy, and the suggestion that a “case” is neither general nor singular, see Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel, “Penser par cas: Raisonner à partir de singularités,” in Penser par cas, ed. Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2005), 9–44. On the necessity of simultaneously employing multiple scales of analysis, see the programmatic suggestions in Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (February 2006): 30–50; Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: Seuil, 1998).
10. Few historians of the eighteenth century are so fortunate as to meet the descendants of their research subjects and walk into their homes. I am immensely grateful to Dr. Parasuraman of the Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture for making the introductions.
11. Gérard Le Bouëdec and Brigitte Nicolas, eds. Le goût de l’Inde (Rennes, FR.: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008).
12. For a meditation on the processes by which imperial pasts continue to structure postcolonial presents, which Ann Stoler terms “ruination,” see the essays in Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).