French Theatre, Orientalism, and the Representation of India, 1770-1865

India Lost and Regained

David Hammerbeck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367644291
• eBook ISBN: 9781000468779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

This book examines the French theatricalization of India from 1770 to 1865 and how a range of plays not only represented India to the French viewing public but also staged issues within French culture including colonialism, imperialism, race, gender, and national politics.

Through examining these texts and available performance history, and incorporating historical texts and cultural theory, David Hammerback analyses these works to illustrate a complex of cultural representations: some contested Orientalism, some participated in Western colonialist discourses, while some can be placed somewhere between these two markers of ideology in Western culture and the arts. He also assesses the works which participated in shaping the theatrical face of Western hegemony, ones directly participating in Orientalism as delineated by Edward Said and others.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, French literature, history and cultural studies.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003124481-1

The backdrop

Since the appearance of Edward Said’s landmark work Orientalism in 1979, more than 40 years ago, the field of Orientalism has witnessed a surfeit of books, articles, papers, and publications to the extent that one could well ask if room exists for yet another study of the Western representation of the non-Western world. Orientalism engendered an often fiercely partisan dialogue on culture, politics, representation, the power to represent, and those denied this power. Theater has been one such field for debate vis à vis Orientalism, with critical works assessing plays, authors, genres, and movements from The Persians in 472 BCE, to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great Parts I & II (1587 and 1587/88) and Dryden’s Aureng-zebe (1675/76) to contemporary works such as The Théâtre du Soleil’s 1999 Tambours sur la digue, Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (2010) to Qui Nguyen’s 2016 comedy Vietgone. Yet room does exist, and my efforts here endeavor to illuminate a subject that, although partially represented in other published works, still leaves considerable room for exploration, in this case, that of Orientalism in 18th- and 19th-century French theater and the representation of India. I select this particular time period, from around 1770 to almost 100 years later in 1865, as one can see not only a blossoming of French plays about India, but this stretch of time also witnesses the end of France’s colonial dreams in South Asia.We also see the continued rise of the Enlightenment, that transformative era in Western history that promulgates and disseminates radically new perspectives on the West as well as the non-West, setting the stage for a philosophical and aesthetic movement which Raymond Schwab referred to as The Oriental Renaissance (La Renaissance orientale), “a second Renaissance as opposed to the first…the Indian Renaissance, which signifies also the renewal of the atmosphere produced in the 19th-century by the arrival of Sanskrit texts.”¹ This forms a critical era in the French and Western representation of India as, in many ways, French perspectives on, perceptions of, and representations of India and South Asia had yet to settle completely into the tropes and stereotypes, “the unwarranted establishing of the specific values of one’s own society as universal values,” facilitated by Western colonialism and imperialism, and before the aesthetic, imaginative, and representative possibilities of Orientalism in theater and in other arts became affixed and subsidiary to economic and political agendas which suborned and subjugated large areas of the non-West, all in the name of progress and, ironically, enlightenment.²

Srinivas Aravamudan, in Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, dismantles the assumption that all Orientalism prior to the long 19th century, especially the Enlightenment, must necessarily “lead to negative forms of Orientalism,” most specifically Orientalism as defined by Said.³ I agree here with other critics including Aravamudan as well as Angela Pao, Sunil Agnani, David Worral, Kate Marsh, and Binita Mehta, among other contemporary cultural and literary theorists and historians who also question Said’s interpretation of Orientalism. Mehta pins Said upon the table of Orientalism as the unavoidable “point of departure” in that commencing with him seems, for a variety of reasons, inevitable and in some ways, obligatory.⁴ Said’s reading of Orientalism in Western culture famously typifies it as a monolithic discourse:

As a discipline representing institutionalized Western knowledge of the Orient, Orientalism thus comes to exert a three-way force on the Orient, on the Orientalist and on the Western “consumer” of Orientalism. It would be wrong, I think, to underestimate the strength of the three-way relationship thus established. For the Orient (“out there” towards the East) is corrected, even penalized, for lying outside the boundaries of European society, “our” world; the Orient is thus Orientalized, a process that not only marks the Orient as the province of the Orientalist but also forces the uninitiated Western reader [or spectator] to accept Orientalist codifications.⁵

The West, as Said expresses elsewhere in Orientalism, speaks for the “Orient,” a vast region stretching from Egypt to Japan, Turkey to Malaysia, including all of the countries that historically comprised “India” including India, Bhutan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Maldives, Afghanistan, and often portions of Tibet as well.⁶ The Orient does not speak or, more precisely is not allowed to speak for itself. This “Orientalization” marks a process of estrangement from the West as the Orient is marked as an alien entity exterior to the Western world, transgressing Western standards, norms, habits, and modes of perception in ways subtle to violent, but always deserving of correction. Even travel cannot help remedying this tendency to ostracize what is foreign to us; Tzvetan Todorov cites the example of the French 17th-century French philosopher Jean de la Bruyère, who critiqued interest in other cultures in his satirical essay “Of Freethinkers:”

Some men give the finishing-stroke to the spoiling of their judgement by their long travels, and thus lose the little religion which remained in them. They meet daily new forms of worship, different manners and morals, and various ceremonies…the variety puzzles them, and as each thing pleases their fancy more or less, they are unable to come to a decision.⁷

Bruyère’s comments, perhaps derisorily issued as a put-down of the then-recent British invention of the Grand Tour, if taken at face value, would condemn all cultures to xenophobia and nationalism, both political and cultural schools for exclusion which have had global resurgence in the 21st century.

However, Aravamudan wonders, per Said’s construction of Western Orientalism as a singular, monolithic, a-temporal discourse, if this is really the case, at least in one historical epoch: The Enlightenment. Countering critiques similar to those of Said attacking the Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Michel Foucault as “a façade for will-to-power,” Aravamudan instead sees the Enlightenment as, in regards to fiction, “gaining imaginative license where it does not have state power or corporate executive authority,” meaning that, prior to the rise of the realistic novel, fiction, freer in form and content, in a kind of Barthesian jouissance, Enlightenment Orientalism expanded outside the national, quickly evolving into a reflexive, often fantastical form of literature that replicated the myriad thoughts of the Radical Enlightenment and thinkers such as Spinoza, Bayle, Mirabeau, Diderot, Condorcet, and many others.⁸ My thesis is that same can be said about much of the theater of the latter 18th century and early 19th century: theater as a playground, or laboratory, for cosmopolitan Enlightenment ideals, one that preceded the formalization of Orientalism into what Said would have it to be, even within the generic limitations faced by playwrights in that era. I would argue that certain Orientalist works at the end of the 18th century and in the first few decades of the 19th century exploited the multivalent capabilities of Orientalism in the theater to produce texts and productions that explored tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and vaudeville for their different capabilities to critique and satirize society, politics, and culture in France through the representation of India onstage. These Orientalist plays—not all to be certain, but some certainly—as Aravamudan clarifies regarding “desiring” fiction “are not colonial propaganda or imperial blueprints, even if they can be refashioned as such after the fact,” a particular concern following the general acceptance of Said’s Orientalism as a unitary, imperialist discourse.⁹ I concur with Aravamudan that Enlightenment Orientalism in theater does not necessarily form a prologue to Saidean Orientalism; indeed some plays written in the latter decades of the 18th century and the first decades of 19th-century French theater are theatrical showings of resistance to imperialism and colonialism, and partake of an Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism promoting equality, liberty, and inclusivity. These plays do partake, in a fashion, in a “theater” of the Orient, as Said puts it, as Said expresses this performative metaphor for the transaction between the West and the Orient (both terms too simplistic, but necessary for argument’s sake) as, according to Said our:

initial description of Orientalism as a learned field now acquires a new concreteness. A field is often an enclosed space. The idea of representation is a theatrical one: The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical field affixed to Europe.¹⁰

While I find some of Said’s assertions in this, and other passages to be more than debatable, in particular this metaphor of the Orient as a confined space, I would argue that the Orient’s vastness in geographical size and unknown quality and capabilities, its placement outside the Judeo/Christian concepts of time and space, its status since the time of Herodotus as the locus of the fantastic and the unreal: all this simultaneously enticed and confounded the Western viewer. This brief quote from Said also underlines the inherently theatrical nature of representation, and the similarity to Said’s enclosed Orient to a theatrical space, though an enclosed space that contains the capability to exceed and expand upon these purported limitations by the simple act of being staged.

Said, in addressing the state of research on the then-present-day India states that “not until quite late in the century [the 19th] with the single major exception of Napoleon’s Institute d’Egypt, was much attention given to the academic study of the modern, or the actual.”¹¹ Who, or which nations (aside from France) Said refers to is not entirely clear, but evidence shows that from the early 17th century, there had been a steady increase in scholarship published in France, for example, that pertained to then-current customs, habits, and beliefs in India, as well as historical, geographical, and religious information and data. Interest in India, and scholarship produced about it, especially South India, had been a part of the corpus of Western knowledge on the world since the travels of Marco Polo in the 13th century. Joan-Pao Rubiés, in discussing European perceptions of the Vijayanagar Empire, notes that Marco Polo visited and wrote about the Coromandel and Malabar Coasts (effectively pre-Vijayanagar) around 1290, the same time that John of Montecorvino visited Malabar as well, both writing about the wealth of Malabar, the hot climate, spices and produce, sati and polygamy, monsters and strange animals and men—this a continuation of lore depicting India as a land of aberrations dating back to Herodotus—religious and political systems, as poorly understood as they were, and remarks on different races that confirmed already existing Western notions of superiority, setting a pattern, or template, that existed for well into the 20th century of praising and admiring certain aspects of India and Indians, while excoriating others.¹² Montecorvino, after baptizing over 100 Indians near the tomb of Saint Thomas in Thane, Maharashtra, “dismisses their beliefs and literature by declaring that they have no moral law or conception of sin.”¹³ Later came Ludovico Varthema to Malabar, in the early 16th century, while other Europeans visited the Mughal court of Akbar. Varthema spent seven years in Vijayanagar, returning to Italy in 1508. In 1510, his Itinerario came out in print, which for most of the first part of the 16th century would:

figure as one of the key modern authorities concerning the Portuguese discoveries in the East. In fact, his work is one of the most striking successes of travel literature in the early history of printing, with at least five editions in Italian, one in Latin, three in German, and two in Castilian between only 1510 and 1523. There were several more editions later in the century, including French, Dutch and English translations.¹⁴

Perhaps Varthema’s Itinerario piqued interest in French readers and publishers, as during the first half of the 17th century, around five books per decade devoted to travel accounts, histories, and/or accounts of the customs of India came out in print. Two of the most influential early 17th-century authors on India were Pierre de Jarric and Augustin Hiriart, the former responsible for compiling collections of Jesuit texts emanating from Portuguese territories (while never visiting India himself as he was not accepted into the order) and the latter through limited correspondence sent from India.

Then, around 1664, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of maps
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Les Veuves du Malabar: Sati, colonialism, and the Enlightenment
• 3 Ténaïs et Zéliska: Liberty and Revolution in India
• 4 France and Tipu, the forgotten ally
• 5 Les Etrangleurs de l'Inde: the India of their nightmares
• 6 Conclusion
• Index