Vine on Trellis: Pondicherry's Creolising Culture
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-07-21

Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Ari Gautier in conversation on Pondicherry's creolising culture

Pondicherry, an enclave on the Coromandel Coast founded by the French East India Company (1674) and shaped in different ways by the Portuguese, Dutch, and British, is an exemplary site for studying creolising processes (by which elements of different cultures are blended together to create a new culture) in peninsular India.

Using various categories of material culture as evidence, Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Ari Gautier demonstrate how creolisation theories help us understand Pondicherry as a contact zone where global and local met in transoceanic taste-making. Pondicherry’s creolising culture brought together commodities, techniques, and people in innovative and adaptive ways with often unpredictable results. What is gained by using creolisation, a theoretical approach rarely mobilised within cultural histories of South Asia, to remember through analysis a space like Pondicherry? Why, indeed, have we forgotten about Creole Indias, and how do we go about retrieving them? Ananya and Ari will present a case for the importance of bringing creolisation (back) to peninsular India, especially at this political juncture.

Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London, and the author of Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009) and Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia (2013); her new research project is ‘Creole Indias’. 

Ari Gautier is a Franco-Tamil author of historical fiction, currently resident in Oslo, whose novels are Carnet secret de Lakshmi (2015) and Le thinnai (2017); he is now writing Pondichéry: une saga kreyole.

In May 2020, they co-founded the cultural platform, le thinnai kreyol, to promote their vision of a multicultural, plural, and creolised India.

Image: Pondicherry: Governor’s Garden Trellis Arcade [British Library Images Online P2260: 1780-1800]
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