Literature and Nation-Building in Vietnam

The Invisibilization of the Indians

Chi P. Pham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429582127
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria asiática

This book analyzes why Indians have been made invisible in Vietnamese society and historiography. It argues that their invisibilization originates in the formulaic metaphor Vietnamese nation-makers have used to portray Indians in their quest for national sovereignty and socialism.

The book presents a complex view on colonial legacies in Vietnam which suggests that Vietnamese nation-makers associate Indians with colonialism and capitalism, ultimately viewed as "non-socialist" and "non-hegemonic" state structures. Furthermore, the book demonstrates how Vietnamese nation-makers achieve the overriding socialist and independent goal of historically differing Indians from Vietnamese nationalisms whilst simultaneously making them invisible. In addition to primary Vietnamese texts which demonstrate the performativity of language and the Vietnamese traditional belief in writing as a sharp weapon for national and class struggles, the author utilizes interviews with Indians and Vietnamese authorities in charge of managing the Indian population.

Bringing to the surface the ways through which Vietnamese intellectuals have invisibilized the Indians for the sake of the visibility of national hegemony and prosperity, this book will be of interest to scholars of Southeast Asian Studies and South Asian Studies, Vietnam Studies, including nation-building, literature, and language.

1
Categorization of “Indians” in Vietnam: Lingering Colonial Ethnicization

Categorization of “Indians” in colonial Vietnam

People from the Indian subcontinent have been migrating to Vietnam since “the beginning of the Christian era” (Cœdès xv). In the pre-modern records of Vietnam, ¹ this migrant population appears in the stories about Buddhist monks, who came from a country named “thiên trước/thiên trúc” (Buddha’s place of birth). In other royal historical accounts, ² people who migrated from the Indian subcontinent also came from “Chà và” or “Đồ Bà”—“some southern archipelago”—and traded with the kings and court officials of Vietnam. In earlier colonial ethnographies, the term “Indien” or “Malabar” ³ in French and the terms “Thiên trúc/thiên trước,” “Ấn Độ,” and “Chà và” in quốc ngữ (Vietnamese) frequently appear to refer to people from the Indian subcontinent living in the lowland of Annam. ⁴ Specifically, early French-Annamese dictionaries adopted the terms “thiên trước/thiên trúc” to translate the terms “Inde” or “Indien” (Bon, Manuel de conversation Franco-Tonkinois 29; Vallot, Dictionnaire franco-tonkinois illustré 404; Ravier, Lexique franco-annamite = Tu vi phalangsaannam 262). The term “chà và,” despite the geographic incorrectness as emphasized by French scholars, was still used to refer to the subject of the French term “Indien” or “Malabar” in early colonial administrative, journalistic writings in quốc ngữ such as Lịch nam thuộc về sáu tỉnh Nam Kỳ. Tuế thứ kỳ tị by Trương Vĩnh Ký (1868, p. 42–3) and Lịch Annam thông dụng trong sáu tỉnh Nam kỳ: Tuế thứ Kỉ Mảo (1879) by Huc F (1879, p. 62).

Such allocation of these terms must have been in the context of colonial classification of the population living in the land of Annam. According to many historians and ethnographers, pre-modern Vietnam emerged as the result of dynamic interactions among individuals and groups (Dutton 174–5; Yu 118–20; Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam 31). Nevertheless, such dynamic images were stifled by what Salemink called “tribalization” or “ethnicization” of the French colonial administration from the mid-1800s. It is a process by which fluid entities, with no fixed boundaries differentiating them, became ethnic groups, or a process through which the French colonial administration created “tribes” on the basis of an ethno-linguistic classification. This “classificatory regime” aimed at knowing and controlling the colonial population; accounts of colonial Vietnam by Western ethnographers, missionaries, and travelers fixed “a field of fluid and multilayered interrelations into a mosaic of discrete, static and singular identities” (Sale-mink, The Ethnography of Vietnam 26). In this context, people associated with the southern archipelago—called “chà và” in Vietnamese—were categorized as “Malaisie,” “Java,” or “Malacca” (Bon, Manuel de conversation Franco-Tonkinois 29; Vallot, Dictionnaire franco-tonkinois illustré 403; Vallot, Grammaire annamite à l’usage des français 106). Jean Bonet in Dictionnaire annamite-français: (langue officially et langue vulgaire) (1899), ⁵ providing the Annamite word “chà và” of Java or Malay, commented that “Cochinchinese wrongly used this term [chà và] to denote Indians” (66). The administrative perception of “Chà và” as Malay and Java was, at the time, associated with the inhabitants of Chà bàn—a Hindu state (Coedès 93–6), commonly seen to have once had brisk exchanges and trading relations with the archipelago in the South. These inhabitants belonged to the Champa minority, one among many ethnic groups in the Central Highland that colonial administrators, missionaries, travelers, and ethnographers attempted to define in the nineteenth century (Pétrus Jean-Baptiste Vĩnh Ký, Cours d’histoire annamite à l’usage des écoles 28; Aymonier 19–21; Paris ii, 93–4; Salemink, Vietnam’s Cultural Diversity 65; Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam 35–45). People who are descendants of those, which Reddi V.M. defines as the first wave of Indian migrants to “Vietnam” (155), still form an ethnic minority in Vietnamese administrative writing about “the great Vietnamese family” (Pelley 374–91; Committee for Ethnic Minority Affairs’ Portal); in postcolonial Vietnamese textbooks, this ethnic minority is seen to follow Indian cultural practices and look like “Indians.” ⁶

In attempts to aggregate people into an “identity of type” for ruling purposes, colonial ethnographers of the late nineteenth century emphasized racial characteristics and professional differences to construct ethnic identities of the “Indians,” “thiên trước” or “chà và.” ⁷ In the use of the term “chà và” to refer to “Indien” or “thiên trước,” earlier colonial authors maintained that black skin was an important racial characteristic of this population (Trương, P. J. B. Vĩnh Ký, Cổ phong Gia định phong cảnh vịnh 11; Émile 367; French Indochina, Manuel opé ratoire franco annamite 65). The term “thiên trước” refers to black skin and other supposedly racial “strangeness,” such as big earlobes with enormous earrings (Huình Tịnh Paulus Của 325; French Indochina, Manuel opé ratoire franco annamite 65). On the other side, earlier colonial authors seem to have noticed the “Indien’s” business activities in Annam. In the Geography Society’s Bulletin (volume 2, 1882) and in Revue de l’ Anjou (1899), people from the Indian subcontinent are described as the fourth most populous group in Saigon, following the Annamites, Chinese, and French; Malabars worked as public horse drivers, cow herders, guardians (policemen), and moneylenders. ⁸ These ethnographic writings coin the term “cinq–six; dix–douze,” ⁹ which refers to the (excessive) interest rates charged by Indians, and it carries the same meaning in present-day Vietnamese about Indian moneylenders. ¹⁰ The association of the Indian population with the money-lending business appears in the popular dictionary of Huỳnh Tịnh Paulus Của (1834–1907); the idiom “Nó có hỏi bạc Chà và thì là có vay bạc chà và” (“he asks for Chà và silver coins; that would mean he borrows silver coins from chà và”) is used to explain the Vietnamese term “bạc” (silver coin) (438). In this dictionary, the Indians are also associated with textile-related businesses: the dictionary uses the idiom “may vải thiên trước” (sewing textiles of thiên trước) to expand meanings of the Vietnamese term “may” (sew) (534). In Recueil des compositions données aux examens de langue annamite et de caractè res chinois au Tonkin, Ché on Jean Nicolas (1899) also described textile-selling as a typical business of “chà và” (4). In a way, colonial writers codified professions including money-lending, driving, cattle herding, guarding, and trading textiles as ethnic particularities of the Indian population living in Annam.

What is more important is that this ethnicization leads to a more concrete meaning of the colonial use of the terms “Indien/Malabar” and “chà và”/thiên trúc/Ấn Độ:” These terms only refer to the Indians who do not hold French citizenship. The second wave of Indian migration to Vietnam, as defined by Reddi V.M., began with the establishment of French rule in Indochina (155), with two main groups of migrants. The first group included Indians who gained French citizenship by renouncing their native personal laws (their caste and customs) or through French Indian paternity. This group largely worked in the French colonial administration, for French firms, and the French military, as agents running commercial enterprises, tax collectors, and teachers (Brocheux, The Making Delta: Ecology, Economy and Revolution 103–4; Pairaudeau, “Indians as French Citizens” 85–127; Marie-Paule H 103–4). In 1880, the French migrants of Indian origin obtained the Ministry of Colonies’ approval to receive benefits similar to French bureaucrats in the colony; this approval also included a claim that the Indian French received special treatment, which was distinct from the Annamese natives and the Asians at large (Peters 201). The second group mainly included British Indians and French subjects of India, who refused to renounce their native personal laws; this population mostly ran their own businesses in Indochina (Pairaudeau, “Indians as French Citizens” 14–18; Chandra 31–2). The French terms “Malabar/Indien” and the associated quốc ngữ “Chà và/thiên trước/Ấn Độ” of earlier colonial ethnographies did not include any professional details of French citizens of Indian origin. Instead, earlier colonial writers used those terms exclusively to refer to Indians without French citizenship, people who, alongside the Chinese, formed the most powerful obstacles to French domination of the colonial economy. The economic power of Indians who were not within the colonial system as Indian Frenchmen must have made the French administrators decide to identify them as a separate ethnic group.

That the French authorities differentiated the French citizenship-non-Indians from the Indian Frenchmen is obviously related to the successful activities of the former in colonized Annam. As observed by Charles Reboquain (1944) in The Economic Development of French Indochina, the number of Indian migrants was negligible, less than “one percent.” Even so, prior to 1939, Indians owned one-third of the main shopping streets in Saigon and dominated the credit offered by non-governmental agencies in Indochina. In the early colonial period, the French introduced a number of policies to compete with Indians and Chinese in colonial Vietnam. Concurrent with Reboquain’s account, the Vietnamese historian Nguyễn Khắc Đạm (1957), in the textbook Những thủ đoạn bóc lột của tư bản Pháp ở Việt Nam (Exploitation of French Capitalists in Vietnam), states that the French established the Indochina Bank in 1875 and many other banking organizations in consecutive years in order to exercise control over the money-lending market in Indochina. In 1887, to defeat Chinese and Indian businessmen who succeeded in selling goods from their own countries, the French authorities initiated the import tax system, which imposed a high tax on goods from countries other than France (see more in Nguyễn Văn Khánh 31–2; Ngô Vĩnh Long, Before the Revolution 89; Brocheux 70–105; Thompson and Adloff 130–1; Ho Tai, Hue-Tam 123).

In addition to economic tools, demographic calculations and designs form a crucial instrument in constructing and maintaining the economic and political dominance of ruling groups (Hirschman 555–7). Demographic reports, presently stored at the Archive Center I (Hanoi), indicate the French government’s attempts to categorize the Indians who did not hold French citizenship as a single group differentiated from those with French citizenship. The census report “Protectorat de l’ Annam et du Tonkin” (April 9, 1890) categorizes the Malabar along with Tonkinese and Chinese under the umbrella label “indigenes.” ¹¹ The 1896 census report assigns the Indians who did not hold French citizenship to the group labeled “foreign Indian” among other ethnic foreigners: 67 Indian males, 9 Indian females, and 9 infants. These reports reveal that the colonial administrators defined the “Indiens” as more invisible than “us”—the French and the Indian French. This practice of ethnicizing non-French Indians indicates how the French administrators attempted to deal with and control their economic competitors to maintain dominance over the colony (cf. Salemink, The Ethnography of Highlander 26; Cohn 16–50).

The colonial ethnicization of “Indien,” “thiên trước/thiên trúc” and “chà và,” is most common in texts of colonial Vietnam from the early twentieth century onward. In these colonial accounts, the non-French citizens of India gradually transform from people with a certain association with other ethnic groups into a single foreign population. For example, colonial reports issued in Tonkin at the turn of the century disclose French administrators’ further attempts to render the non-French citizens of India invisible by ethnicizing these people as discrete, static, fragile, and controllable foreigners. In the 1900s, colonial administrators implemented the category “Asian foreigners” to categorize the Indians; this population was usually small. ¹² In 1902, the number of “Indian strangers” was 50 while there were 120,000 Annamese, 1900 Chinese, and 51 Japanese. ¹³ In 1904 and 1905, the colonial administration apparently continued categorizing the “Indien” as an insignificant group. The records show that the number of these foreigners is negligible: 37 “indigenous French subjects,” 7 “indigenous foreign subjects” (British Indians), and 111 “Indian non-assimilés.” In the 1910s, colonial authorities also grouped “Indiens” among other “foreign Asians,” including Annamese (Central Vietnamese), Cochinchinese, Japanese, Laos, and Cambodian. The number of Indian subjects is still insignificant: in 1910, there were 170 Indians; in 1911: 46, ¹⁴ in 1912: 25, ¹⁵ in 1913: 75, ¹⁶ and in 1918: 41. ¹⁷ On the basis of this number, apparently, the French could safely assume that the Indians were invisible and provided no threat of competition in the economic exploitation of Vietnam.

Journalistic, ethnographic, and literary writings of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• 1 Categorization of “Indians” in Vietnam: lingering colonial ethnicization
• 2 Constructing enemies of the revolution: bloodsucking “Chà và,” “Sét ty,” and “Tây đen” as metaphors of colonial capitalists
• 3 Continuing class and national struggles: bloodsucking Sét-ty and “Chà gác dan” metaphors in South Vietnam
• 4 Constructing a socialist image of nation: proletarianizing the Indians in North Vietnam
• 5 Writing the post-1975 nation: Indians as dead, voiceless and haunting remains
• 6 Haunting colonialism: Uncategorized Indians and the rise of “Ấn kiều” (overseas Indians)
• Afterword
• Index