A Colonial Affair

Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India

Danna Agmon

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781501709937
• eBook ISBN: 9781501713064
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Danna Agmon's gripping microhistory is a vivid guide to the "Nayiniyappa Affair" in the French colony of Pondicherry, India. The surprising and shifting fates of Nayiniyappa and his family form the basis of this story of global mobilization, which is replete with merchants, missionaries, local brokers, government administrators, and even the French royal family.

Agmon's compelling account draws readers into the social, economic, religious, and political interactions that defined the European colonial experience in India and elsewhere. Her portrayal of imperial sovereignty in France's colonies as it played out in the life of one beleaguered family allows readers to witness interactions between colonial officials and locals.

Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

PART ONE

The World of the Affair

CHAPTER 1

The Elusive Origins of a Colonial Scandal

When he was twenty years old, Nayiniyappa, a merchant of Madras, moved to the newly established French colony of Pondichéry. Forty-three years later, in 1717, he died in a prison cell in Fort St. Louis, Pondichéry’s center of French administrative and military power in India. At the time of his death he had served three months of a three-year prison sentence for the crimes of tyranny and sedition, having been removed from his post as the colony’s chief commercial broker and head of the town’s indigenous population, a position the French referred to as courtier and chef des malabars. As Pondichéry’s chief commercial intermediary, Nayiniyappa had amassed considerable property, but the French confiscated all his wealth, including precious gems, horses, elephants, and several houses. In a rite of public humiliation, he was whipped with fifty lashes in Pondichéry’s main bazaar. Had he lived out his prison term, he and his entire family would have been banished from the colony forever. None of these details are contested. The meanings of the scandal that came to be known in India and in France as l‘affaire Nayiniyappa are not nearly as straightforward.

The Nayiniyappa Affair has a haunting quality. Fort St. Louis no longer stands, so Nayiniyappa’s ghost hovers instead in the archives. Officials of the Compagnie des Indes in Pondichéry maintained detailed yearly logs of their doings, as well as copies of all their correspondence.¹ The logs for most years contained exhaustive and meticulous descriptions of changes in personnel, new building projects, and discussions of the political situation surrounding Pondichéry. But a large portion of the records for the years 1716 to 1724 is devoted to Nayiniyappa’s conviction, the subsequent appeals on his behalf, and the resulting official investigations. The wealth of documentation attests to the imaginative pull Nayiniyappa’s downfall exerted, as more and more actors in India and in France participated in the analysis, reinvestigation, and interpretation of the events surrounding his arrest. Nor was this interest limited to Nayiniyappa’s contemporaries. When the colonial exhibition of 1931 was mounted in Paris, officials in Pondichéry sent a small handful of documents to represent the history of French India.² They selected three that concerned the Nayiniyappa Affair.³

Why was Nayiniyappa arrested? No easy answer to this deceptively simple question exists. Several of Nayiniyappa’s contemporaries debated the story of his plummet from Pondichéry’s pinnacle of power, as did he himself. Different groups of actors—French government officials in both the colony and metropole; missionaries of various Catholic orders; friends and relatives of Nayiniyappa; traders employed by the Compagnie des Indes and trading associations in Brittany; and, later on, historians of French India—have interpreted Nayiniyappa’s investigation, conviction, and posthumous exoneration differently and provided divergent explanations for the origins of the affair.

Through the juxtaposition of these competing interpretations of the affair’s commencement, a picture of the colony emerges. The different origins ascribed to the Nayiniyappa Affair reveal starkly different understandings of colonial authority; the relation among metropolitan center, periphery, and colony; and the role of local intermediaries in the French overseas project. These parallel and contradictory versions of events, I argue, created a point of condensation that enabled different groups to articulate their own vision of the imperial project in relation to the Nayiniyappa Affair.

While each of the four interpretations of the affair’s origins examined here offers a different version of the unfolding of events, they all shared an underlying concern. Missionaries, colonial officials, Indian employees, and metropolitan traders all attempted to offer solutions to a vexing question: What was the basis for colonial authority and sovereignty? The issue was especially troubling in the early decades of the eighteenth century, when Pondichéry was a relatively new and unsettled seat of French power, facing constant threat of military attack and financial collapse. Its sovereignty was a very fragile construct, its hegemony more aspiration than reality. Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued that success is a matter of continuous historical articulation rather than fact.⁴ Colonial empires of the nineteenth century narrated themselves as inevitably successful. But early French and Indian concerns about the justifications for European sovereignty and the limits of authority offer a different tale, one that sheds light on the conditions in which colonial projects come into being and their subsequent historical and political retellings. Rather than presenting a teleological narrative of hegemony, the tensions driving the Nayiniyappa Affair and those that erupted in its multiple retellings allow for a more complicated understanding of authority in colonial settings. The affair reveals shifts and uncertainties in the distribution of authority, particularly in how forms of kinship, exchange, and belonging, both local and imported, supported and supplemented the state. The juxtaposing of the four accounts of the origins of the affair recounted in this chapter is what makes such shifts legible and knowable.

Where Do Go-Betweens Go? Commercial Brokers in South Asia

When employees of the French trading company and Catholic missionaries first arrived in Pondichéry in the 1670s, they found a region roiling with political upheaval and mighty military struggles, among both European and Indian polities, and the political landscape was in a state of bewildering flux. The commercial world posed a different challenge to French newcomers: the maritime trading associations of the Indian Ocean world were well established, cemented by centuries of contact and exchange and based on the familiarity of kinship and religious affiliation. Scholars of Indian Ocean trade have shown that European involvement in the region was less transformative of these networks than previously assumed. The preexisting structures were sustained throughout most of the eighteenth century, with European traders trying to position themselves within these structures rather than displacing or transfiguring them.⁵

One scholar has argued that to the extent to which the Indian Ocean was an integrated world system, it relied on the work of commercial brokers.⁶ And while it was not only Europeans who employed commercial brokers to facilitate trade, European trade companies in the Indian Ocean had no established networks of kinship or origin upon which they could draw for support and thus depended even more heavily on their brokers.⁷ In both commercial and political spheres, therefore, Europeans in general and French newcomers in particular, since they were the last of the European powers to arrive in India in the seventeenth century, needed to negotiate a place for themselves in densely populated and often confusing realms. To do so, they relied on the services of local intermediaries, who either introduced them into new markets or acted on their behalf. Commercial brokers—such as Nayiniyappa—who were employed by the Compagnie des Indes and by individual traders filled this function.

The many terms used to refer to these actors—intermediaries, gobetweens, middlemen, cultural brokers, middle figures, marginal men, passeurs culturels— are an indication of a certain murkiness inherent in the category. Arguably, anyone in a cross-cultural encounter acts as an intermediary, but such a definition renders the category too vague to have much analytic purchase. My own use of the term “intermediary” is intentionally narrow: Pondichéry’s intermediaries were men—and it was exclusively men who were appointed to these positions—whom French traders and missionaries retained as paid employees, as either commercial brokers or religious interpreters, known as catechists in the Catholic terminology. They thus intentionally and self-consciously acted as go-betweens. Nayiniyappa himself reflected on the meaning of the position and described it as a fundamentally public role at the center of the colony. He wrote, “For there to be communication between the Frenchman and the Indian, there is need for an intelligent man, who will act as an ambassador between the two nations. He is called the chef des malabars and is a public man. The [governor] addresses only him, and he alone is known by the Indians. It is a very distinguished position in this land.”⁸

The issue of nomenclature of commercial brokers in Pondichéry is a surprisingly thorny one. In Madras, Pondichéry’s neighbor to the north, these brokers were known as “dubashes”—according to one etymology, meaning “men of two languages.”⁹ Although South Indian historiography frequently uses the term “dubash” to refer to these actors, French sources of the period do so rarely. The French equivalent term, usually rendered daubachy, does show up in French documents but not in the first decades of the eighteenth century. In the first three decades of the eighteenth century in Pondichéry, several different terms were used to refer to the Tamil men who enabled French trade. One term was “modeliar,” which stems from the Tamil word for “first” (mudal); it is commonly used to designate a Vellala caste group to which many of these men belonged. A second term often used to refer to brokers is the French word courtier. Most often courtier referred to those, like Nayiniyappa, who had obtained the highest rank of commercial brokers, hired by the Compagnie des Indes as the most senior Tamil employee in the colony; the term was typically joined to chef des malabars (head of all Malabars).¹⁰

The double title, courtier et chef des malabars, points to two different aspects of these men’s position at the crossroads of two cultural systems and their ability to act at the intersection of needs. As courtiers, they were enmeshed in a French system of service, with a commitment to furthering the agenda of the French company and the Crown. But simultaneously, they were chefs des malabars, local leaders of the Tamil community and therefore responsible also for representing the interests and voices of local merchants and workers back to the company. This double positioning at the heart of both the French and the Tamil commercial and social infrastructure in Pondichéry enabled commercial brokers to become such central figures of authority. This double-sourced authority also motivated French anxiety about the repercussions of intermediaries’ power and influence in the colony and beyond.

The services commercial brokers provided were diverse; under French employment, their main task was to ensure that enough merchandise would flow into French hands, so that the ships leaving Pondichéry’s port would be fully stocked with the cloth and other commodities that were then sold in European markets. To this end, brokers negotiated with regional merchants who supplied goods but also set up both farming operations and artisanal centers, where raw materials were produced and transformed into commodities. In return, brokers received a percentage of the sale they had made possible—generally between 2 and 4 percent. They were also able to extend credit, to the French trading company, to individual French traders, and to their Asian partners. Well-positioned intermediaries not only supervised and made possible the flow of goods into company ships, but they also managed diplomatic relations with local rulers by writing letters, leading delegations to courts, and arranging for the exchange of gifts. In addition, they were responsible for local labor markets. In Pondichéry, this meant recruiting and managing the highly skilled textile workers (mostly weavers and dyers) who produced the colony’s most important commodity. As Shubhra Chakrabarti has noted in the context of Bengal, artisans and producers owed their allegiance and commitment not to the European company but to the local brokers and intermediaries who hired them and provided them with orders and capital.¹¹ This was also the case in Pondichéry, where the chief broker was charged with managing relations with local artisans, either directly or through a subordinate group of merchants who acted as intermediaries for him. But intermediaries were also involved in other labor markets. For example, hired intermediaries recruited and managed Indian seamen, or lascars, to serve on the ships of the English East India Company.¹²

Commercial brokers made the trade of the company possible, but they also enabled the private trade of French traders who were employed by the company but were eager to take advantage of opportunities to trade on their own account. This meant that every single employee of the Compagnie des Indes in Pondichéry, from the governor on down to the lowliest sailor at the port, had a strong, personal incentive to see the colony’s commerce in the region flourish and continue to grow. The fact that the Nayiniyappa Affair engendered such committed and passionate involvement from so many was a result of this shared investment in Pondichéry’s commercial prospects. In his role as chief commercial broker to the French company in Pondichéry, the job Nayiniyappa held from 1708 to 1716, he held the general responsibility for creating a robust market in Pondichéry, drawing capital-rich merchants to settle in the town, ensuring the timely production of textile goods, and generally enhancing French commercial reputation in the region. Nayiniyappa made money in the colony flow. Arresting and convicting him, argued his diverse supporters, jeopardized the colony’s commercial success and by extension its very existence. Nayiniyappa’s importance for the success of Pondichéry was a feature of the position of brokers in India in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As Michael Pearson has noted, in the early modern Indian Ocean “relations between brokers and their clients were by and large ones of equality rather than (as became the case later) of domination and subordination.”¹³ The Nayiniyappa Affair, then, gives rise to the following question: In exchanges between French traders and missionaries and their local intermediaries, who was the patron and who was the client?

The French reliance on intermediaries in India did not begin in Pondichéry but dated back to Surat, a cosmopolitan and prosperous port in Gujarat where the Compagnie des Indes first tried to established itself. A French comptoir, or trading “factory,” was established in Surat in 1666. For centuries, Surat had occupied an important place in the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean, with a bustling local trade spreading across Asia and to Africa, a wealthy Armenian trading population, and English and Dutch factories. A French Jesuit, Father Guy Tachard, who arrived in Gujarat late in the seventeenth century, described Surat as “the most beautiful, the wealthiest, and largest commercial city I have seen in the Indies, not even excepting Batavia or Goa.”¹⁴ Indian cities such as Surat drove the image of an ideally cosmopolitan town that French administrators later sought to achieve in Pondichéry. Brokers facilitated and managed the diversity such cosmopolitanism entailed. It was the attempt to reconcile commercial and cultural diversity with Catholic authority that later became so divisive for traders and missionaries in Pondichéry.

The status of the French as late arrivals in Surat did not appear initially to be a great impediment, thanks to aid the French received from local brokers. In 1666, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb granted the French a firman, a royal decree, that allowed them the same trading privileges in Surat as the Dutch and the English had, and in 1669 the French were granted a firman by the court in Golconda to establish a factory in Masulipatnam on the Coromandel coast. This latter success largely depended on the connections and efforts of an Armenian go-between, Martin di Marcara Avachintz, who acted as a broker and diplomatic emissary for the French in the 1660s.¹⁵ Marcara had been born in Isfahan, in present-day Iran, and possessed many of the most desirable traits of a broker: he was well connected in a variety of ports, spoke many languages, and had traveled extensively between India, Persia, and Europe, settling for a while in the Italian port of Livorno before heading to Paris.¹⁶ He set sail to the East in 1666 as part of a French fleet that went first to Madagascar, then to Surat. From Surat he was sent to advance French interests on the eastern coast of India, but he soon fell out with François Caron, the director of the French initiative in India. Caron had the Armenian broker arrested in 1671, following the spread of rumors that Marcara had poisoned a French colleagu...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• The Actors
• Introduction
• Part One: The World of the Affair
• Part Two: The Unfolding of the Affair
• Part Three: The Afterlives of the Affair
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index