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Creolisation in Pondicherry: The Superfluous Necessity

Pondichéry la française… Un petit coin de France en Inde… Un parfum de France en Inde… Voici plus de trois siècles que Pondichéry est considérée comme française. Or, elle est ni indienne, ni française. Elle est Kreyole. Oui, Pondichéry est une belle dame Kreyole qui étale sa beauté kreyole sur la côte Coromandel et danse le Dappankutthu dans le golfe du Bengale. À travers le contact avec les étrangers pendant des siècles, elle a su se défaire de son indianité pour revêtir ce caractère unique. La kreyolité est son arme de résistance pour ne pas devenir française. Et c’est cette valeur universelle que Le Thinnai Kreyol explore pour démontrer que Pondichéry est bel et bien Kreyole.

Ari Gautier

The term ‘creolisation’ signals certain historical processes that generate new, adaptive, often unexpected cultural forms, through the push and pull of collaboration, compromise, and resistance. Creolisation involves physical intimacy between peoples and the creation of Creole communities. But creolised cultures are disseminated through co-habitation, often violent and coerced, sometimes negotiated and adjusted. The contact zone is where this co-habitation and its unpredictable consequences take place. Pondicherry, on India’s Coromandel coast, is a contact zone par excellence.

Ananya Jahanara Kabir

Is there creolisation in India ? Was there ever creolisation in India ?

In May 2020 we (Ari Gautier, author, Oslo, and Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Professor, King’s College London) co-founded le thinnai kreyol, a multi-lingual online cultural platform that promotes our vision for a plural and creolised India. Through a praxis of collaboration, resistance and solidarity that takes inspiration from creolisation itself, le thinnai kreyol decolonises structures of knowledge and ensures its non-hierarchical dissemination beyond academic audiences. Our work together on le thinnai Kreyol also takes inspiration from the structure and social function of a thinnai (Tamil for ‘veranda’, and the centrepiece of Gautier’s novel, Le thinnai), and the radical potential of creolisation as a cultural process (Kabir’s research) to create new solidarities through the epistemic structure we call ‘the archipelago of fragments’. It activates memory of creole futures past, of creole Indias.

Are there, were there, can there be creole Indias? We offer a conversation in response.

AJK: What are we doing together through our work with creolisation? We are looking at negotiation, at push and pull, at different kinds of collaborations–

AG: It is wrong to think that for three hundred years we’ve been passively sitting here, being dominated…

AJK: In the immediate postcolonial moment it was important to think of the binary between domination/ dominated, but that’s not all that happened under colonialism. Culture was being created, and how did that happen? that’s the in-between space of resistance through collaboration.

AG: Of resistance through negotiation.

AJK: That’s creolisation, don’t you think?

AG: Indeed. You can’t take it for granted…you come here, you settle down, build a lodge, a factory, a settlement— that doesn’t mean you can start dominating me— I’ve been part of a 3000-year old civilisation. You can’t say, I’m bringing my Madras check, I’m going to draw your economy with my fabric, and that’s it— oh no! it’s not like that.

AJK: We want to bring our notion of creolisation to the general discussion on creolisation emanating from the Caribbean and other insular spaces. We want to point out that there was also creolisation in peninsular India— this is a point we want to make since people aren’t aware of it, don’t want to acknowledge it, and don’t know where to look for it. This is why for our project, the first step is Creole Indias, where we are turning the gaze back on the coastline of the peninsula.

AG: Basically it was your idea, which you generously invited me to share. Because I never thought about those cultural aspects of creolisation in India. For me, creolisation had happened uniquely in the plantations around the histories of slavery and indenture, and so I really didn’t think about any other type of creolisation till you put it into my mind.

AJK: But I put it in your mind, because I read in your novel Le thinnai about the presence of the Creoles of Pondicherry. So I had the theory of creolisation…

AG: But I had the memory.

AJK: Yes, you had the memory, which you transposed into fiction.

AG: I had that memory because in Pondicherry, the community of Creoles are not understood as participating in creolisation – they are seen as a community, they are not seen within a theory of creolisation.

AJK: They are a community that bear the word ‘créole’ in two ways— Haut Créole and Bas Créole— and you say they are not involved in a process of creolisation, but when I look at this issue from an outsider’s perspective, I see that a person like you is creolised because of the Creoles. You are Franco-Tamil; you are not a part of either the Haut Créole or the Bas Créole community. Yet why do you remember them, and why do you choose to valorise them by placing in prominence two Bas Créole characters within your novel ? The very fact that you put them in your novel is a hint to me that, as Pondicherry person, you have been creolised by contiguity, by growing up side by side with the Creoles…

AG: That is absolutely right. A lot of people talk about hybridity, creolisation, cosmopolitanism— but we need to think about context. The Pondicherry context during the 1960s, when I grew up there, and during which period my novel is set, is that of the most cosmopolitan city in South India. Here you could meet le résidu de l’impérialisme français… from Tahiti to Guadeloupe to Saigon to Martinique to Djibouti– all these people would converge or come back to Pondicherry with spouses, with children, with their different cultures.

AJK: As in your own family. What we can see, perhaps, is a process of hyper-creolisation in this small place…

AG: Without anyone knowing or putting on themselves the label of creolisation

AJK: That’s fine, very few people living in these places say ‘oh yes, I’m a product of creolisation’. People don’t do that, people just live their lives. However, some communities, like the Pondicherry Créoles, definitely bear that self-description because that is a label that was a memory of a process that began as a starting point in the horizon of history. To remember that starting point is not to embark on a search for origins but to just mark the start of a new phase of cultural genesis. Neither does this mean that, apart from these communities, there is no creolisation in these places but to calibrate this process is the work of theorists of creolisation. It is not the work of the communities that live in these spaces.

AG: Interestingly, Ananya, the community called Creole that first went through the process of creolisation remains conspicuous in the milieu of Pondicherry because they are distinct through some visible aspects, like wearing European dress.

AJK: Yes, tell us about some of the names they are called that allude to those clothes.

AG: There are some interesting Tamil words. The Bas Créoles are called ‘sattakari’— ‘satta’ means ‘shirt’ – or even ‘naatakavai’— ‘kavai’ means ‘skirt’, jupe, while ‘naata’ means ‘smelly’.

AJK: So it’s a derogatory word !

The Franco-Tamils are the specific group in Pondicherry descended from the ‘renonçants’, or those who renounced Indian personal laws in favour of becoming French citizens;

see Natasha Pairaudeau, Mobile Citizens: French Indians in Indochina, 1858-1954 (Copenhagen: NIAS, 2016), 40-53. 

They very often came from the lowest caste or pariah groups. In the 20th century, this group also entered the French army to create a distinct ‘soldat’ subculture within Pondicherry, and many of these families opted for French citizenship after 1947, thus creating a straight line between the ‘renonçants’ and ‘optants’. 

Ari Gautier’s family is part of this lineage. The Haut Créoles of Pondicherry descend from early French settlers in the comptoir and were historically the bastions of cultural, social and economic capital here, living in the mansions of the White Town and the custodians of impec- cable French. The Bas Créoles are a racially métis group that crystallized in the first centuries of European encounters with locals and with each other in peninsular India’s coastal enclaves. 

It is a subaltern and creolized community that descended from ‘early alliances between Portuguese traders and Indian or Christian free women of colour… testifying to a racial landscape already complex and hybridised before the first French traders arrived in India’; 

see Adrien Carton, ‘Shades of Fraternity: Creolization and the Making of Citizenship in French India, 1790-1792’, French Historical Studies 31.4 (2008), 581-607, at p. 586. This social taxonomy is explained by the narratorial voice in Gautier, Le thinnai, 69-70.

AG: It’s true they had a limited number of clothes that they wore over and over again. And the kavai was not very common— so they might have had a few jupes that were similar—made of the same cloth— so people seeing them from outside the community would think she was wearing the same one— this is how the imagination of people creates a prejudiced word for someone— but basically you call them dirty, because they are a mixed race community.

AJK: This is the important point. It brings us to the problems or difficulties of accepting that there is a creole element to Indian culture.3

AG: The fear of impurity.

AJK: In the middle of a caste-stratified society, there is a group inserting themselves within those strata. There is a deep horror that such impurity can even exist. The word naatakavai is thus extremely important, because it shows that there is a double valence, both economic and psychosocial. Creole is intrusion. It is disruption. But to acknowledge this is precisely also to acknowledge the force of Creole communities in changing the course or order of society.

AG: Society was so stratified that suddenly, when one group of in-between people appears, that is capable of navigating both sides, and is difficult to place culturally, linguistically, gastronomically, what do you do? You denigrate them, you marginalise them. You say that these people are not even worth mentioning in any way— historically, culturally, or through literature—since they cannot be put in one box.

AJK: And that is why, the fact that they would have definitely spoken a creole language is not even allowed to enter the linguistic discourses – those who are studying the language of these communities are even wondering if these languages are or are not creole.4 Why cannot we bring ourselves to accept that these languages would have existed? It would be interesting for you to talk about some of the strategies you adopted in your novel, Le thinnai, creating your Bas Créole character, Lourdes, and in making her speak a certain way, because that is exactly what you were trying to do, something different from the norm.

AG: People who have studied Creoles linguistically and technically have some patterns through which they assess a language as ‘creole’. This approach is a rather narrow-minded thinking that a creole language must have certain technical rules to be called a Creole. But there are various forms of Creole apart from the Plantation Creoles from Caribbean or Indian Ocean islands. What about Malay Chetti, which is Chetti creole from the Malay peninsula,5 or Pondicherry Creole itself ? What about South Sudan Creole, or the Creole of Socotra ?

People don’t think of these languages as ‘proper’ Creoles, because they were not languages born on plantations, because they were not languages born out of contact between Europeans, Afro-descendants, and indentured labourers from Asia.

AJK: The problem is that even though linguists continue to do linguistic work everywhere, to assess Pondicherry Creole they come via French. They see the insular French Creoles and wonder why the Pondicherry Creole doesn’t behave like that. For me, however, the fascinating thing is that there is a bifurcated Creole community in Pondicherry (Haut and Bas Créole); there is a clear understanding on the part of others in Pondicherry that Creoles constitute a specific kind of community; they possess, apparently, a distinct language and a distinct cuisine; but none of this exists in a bubble. Boundaries between groups are porous. Creole culture seeps into the cultures of other surrounding groups, such as the Franco-Tamils and the mercantile Muslims.6 That seepage, for me, is step two in the process of creating a space of creolisation, a process in which you participate as a Pondicherrian person, and a Pondicherrian author. You decided your book, Le thinnai, wouldn’t recreate a pure Pondicherry where all this creolised culture was brushed out of the way, sanitised.

AG: And you were the first to understand that the thinnai I was portraying was far away from the traditional thinnai, and that it made Pondicherry a creolised space.

AJK: The thinnai is a creolising space, that gives us a peninsular Indian alternative to the insular plantation as a creolising space.7 And in this story you put the Bas Créole character Lourdes Mascarenhas, who is by no means a major character—

AG: Let me stop you for a minute. Can you imagine the thinnai as a creolising space without Lourdes ? Can you ?

AJK: No.

AG: Through her, la conscience créole est rentrée.

AJK: So let’s look at it at in a literary critical way. The novel is about Gilbert Tata and little Gilbert arriving at the thinnai of the central character’s home, and telling stories about Pondicherry’s complex past, in which Gilbert Tata, the white Creole from the French Antilles, is implicated. The boys of the house are there to listen to these stories, and their father Paulin is the paterfamilias who allows this scenario to unfold. But Lourdes, their nurse and housekeeper, is a superfluous necessity.

AG: We wouldn’t be talking about Creole without her.

AJK: Without her it is still a creolising space, but she is the lens through which everything is focalised.

AG: Yes. The element of Lourdes is a voluntary element. But in the first sentence of Le thinnai— it is the character Three Balls Six Faces who tries to make love to Lourdes under the tree, under her skirt.

AJK: Is that skirt a naatakavai?

AG: It is indeed a naatakavai ! Sous sa jupe—Lourdes is already a sexually available person, she is the fantasy of the men, that’s what Jacqueline Couti talks about in her book;8 she is a fantasy of the village, whom everyone wants to fuck.

AJK: This is one of the few moments that the book opens up a space for sexuality. Lourdes is associated with a particular kind of cuisine and language, but she also has a sexual charge.

AG: Where does that come from ? From the jupe. Because girls don’t wear skirts that shows the legs. And this is why I start the book with this Creole figure at the beginning.

AJK: So she is a superfluous necessity. Narratively, there is no need for Lourdes. But she is there from the start.

AG: She is in the book’s first paragraph. Even the fête du roi that begins the book is a creolised fête – it is not the 14th July—it’s the day the king of France declared something important, though no one remembered what that was. And the day coincided with a local festivity. People took both these elements and created a new festival for Pondicherry called raja pandigai. Neither word is Tamil, and the phrase just means ‘king’s feast’ through two borrowings from other Indian languages. It is, very simply, a day for dancing and revelry.

AJK: so it’s a kind of mascarade

AG: Absolutely—and that’s why I describe here a rickshaw-puller decked out in the French colours of red, blue, and white, brandishing a bow and arrow, dancing like an Amerindian

AJK: This is a creole habitus.

AG: A creolised world !

AJK: So there are creole communities and they have a creolising function and potential—you are magnifying this process through Lourdes by putting her on the thinnai.

AG: that is what Animesh Rai wanted to demonstrate, but failed, because he lacks the experience of being a Tamil person from Pondicherry.9

AJK: Also, he was imprisoned by the Glissantian frame—he went to Pondicherry looking for the Caribbean and of course, he couldn’t find it.10

AG: Had he been a Pondicherrian who understood creolisation, he could have found it.

AJK: Or had he been you and me working together! But let us talk more about another Creole character who is never discussed in the many reviews of your novel. And this is the leper Digriss: another spectacular case of superfluous necessity. A new character who appears only at the very last minute within the novel’s Epilogue. He seems a total afterthought attached to the façade of the narrative, just as the thinnai is attached to the façade of a house. Digriss is an extraordinary character. He is a Bas Créole called De Cruz, and he is also a leper—an emblem of a repulsive impurity, a horror, since leprosy signals a fundamental contagion. You chose to end your book by introducing a new character who happens to be a leper and happens to be a Bas Créole ! Why did you this ?

AG: Like Lourdes, Digriss really existed.

He was a living character. Even though Lourdes was not really Creole, she was more like an African—an African person whose ancestors would have landed in Pondicherry via Goa—so I made for her a genealogy from Portugal, to explicate and locate her within a geographic logic, but she’s White, because she comes from the Mascarenhas aristocratic family who eventually fell on hard times by losing their fortunes. Actually, the real Lourdes was more African-looking.

AJK: So you whitened Lourdes !

AG: Yes. Because when I was writing the novel, I lacked the knowledge of the existence of African enslaved people in India.11 Simple. I didn’t know how to explain her. The writing of historical fiction changes according to what you discover.

AJK: But I don’t see her as a White woman ! You never describe her physiognomy.

AG: True, I don’t describe my characters as a rule. I don’t like to put them in a colour box.

AJK: If someone asked me how Lourdes looked, I’d say she is very dark. Just like many Anglo-Indians can be.

AG: I call her the Andalusian gipsy, so she is not really White anyway. She actually doesn’t have a colour—she carries the heritage of some European DNA, but her skin colour is indeterminate—like the ‘first firangis’ of Jonathan Harris’s book.12 Even Gilbert Tata has a colour vraiment indefini— this is ‘firangisation’!

AJK: Or creolisation ! Lourdes passes, because actually even though you whitened her in your mind, you didn’t commit it to paper and she is open to our imagination – she can be as dark or light as we want.

AG: Digriss is from the same community but he is a leper. He is the last person who occupied our thinnai when I left Pondicherry at the age of sixteen. Digriss was rejected from his family who lived 100 meters away, because he was a leper. So he came to our thinnai—before him there was an asthmatic who occupied it. When he died there, Lourdes cleaned out the place, and two days later Digriss moved in. He came with his mutilated hands and ugly face, and we were so horrified, but we welcomed him as part of our family.

AJK: Digriss seems to be an allegory of the way in which creolisation can change the taboos and stigmas associated with Indian society.

AG: No one in my family said, ‘don’t touch Digriss’. As a thirteen-year old, therefore, I related to him naturally. I was clearly not repulsed. He said to me, I think my name was originally De Cruz. He was never sure— he thought his ancestors were Creole, but his name was distorted from the day he was born.

AJK: This is an infinite vortex of creolisation. Digriss was born a Creole and his name was further creolised. His distortion was further distorted but, in your novel, the distortion was elevated as this is the sentence that closes your novel: just as in the last line of my novel: ‘Je m’appelle De Cruz, Oliveira de Cruz. Mais dans le quartier on m’appelle Digriss.’ The distortion is thus a strategy: placed at the very end, it emerges as the novel’s source.

AG: The entire society of Pondicherry is a distorted society. because no one can pronounce a foreign word – everything is—as you said about my own writing— stretched and bent !13

AJK: Bent, like Digriss’s mutilated hand with which he effects a military salute, a salute that the soldiers like your father would have been doing every day of their lives ? Did you know that, in one of your short stories, you made your favourite character, Tripod Dog Baba, do exactly the same thing: perform a military salute with his mutilated paw ?14

AG: Did I ? Really !

AJK: Yes ! I detect a continuity between the mutilated limb of Digriss and the mutilated paw of Tripod Dog Baba, and between the military salute you make them both perform.

AG: Yes, physical mutilation is very important for me. Because as a writer, I am trying to convey my inner experience of these people— after my father retired from military service, he worked for a while at les ateliers des fils d’Indra, a workshop run by a French woman in the leprosy quarter in Dubrayapet. I used to go and sit with my father, and watch these lepers weaving and drawing patterns with their mutilated hands. And Digriss had the most beautiful handwriting in the entire world, with his mutilated fingers, even carrying his pen in his crooked way like this…

AJK: So isn’t that too adaptation and innovation from the depths of adversity ?

AG: Yes. This is creolisation.




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