Book review: How French imperialism in India was linked to the slave trade

To the untrained eye, the remains of a former French establishment look puny on the map of modern India: a bit of land along the rim of the Bay of Bengal, like Chandannagar in Bengal and Puducherry on the Coromandel Coast, and yonder west, a stronghold in Mahé on the Malabar Coast. So sparse compared to the British it seems, that some would think the French were merely passing through. Not quite as expansive and invasive as the Raj or even as pioneering as the Portuguese, who sliced the Indian Ocean to inaugurate a trade route with South and South-East Asia as early as 1498, the French remain just a rung above the Dutch, the most minuscule of the Europeans in India (the Danes barely register).

So, how did the relatively small French colony in India become the principal challenger to the mighty British presence? How did the French East India Company become middle managers to Versailles on one end and Indian rulers on the other as they negotiated France’s mercantile ambitions? Why did they build alliances with, and sometimes double-cross, local resistance to English dominion? How did they recoup frequent, often colossal, financial losses of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales (the French East India Company, which was reorganised, went bankrupt, and later revamped by Scotsman John Law)? To sate the French gap in canonical histories of European colonisation on the Indian subcontinent, Robert Ivermee offers Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India. France is no more chopped liver.

Ivermee’s condensed history is a tightly stacked relay of epochs. It is a bird’s-eye view of the history of French colonisation in India that is at times illuminating, but mostly a relentless repeating of history that moves at breakneck speed.

The French arrived in India, more than a century after the establishment of the Estado Português da Índia (Portuguese State of India) in 1505, and found the ports of Cochin and Goa not only peppered with mimicries of European architecture, but also the Portuguese stronghold in the subcontinent beginning to come slowly undone.

Ivermee begins his survey with François Pyrard de Laval, who arrived in Chittagong in Bengal in 1607 after a tumultuous few years of imprisonment in the Maldives, travelled westwards, and spent a few months in the court of Calicut’s Zamorin. Ivermee uses the French navigator’s arrival as his locus to build a constellation of France’s trade interests in regions surrounding the Indian Ocean, specifically Madagascar, Mauritius, Ceylon and Indonesia.

What follows could very well be Ivermee’s portrait of Puducherry: its creation, its consolidation, the tugs-of-war it endured, its transfers of power and the figure canonical to the history of both the region and the French empire in India: Joseph François Dupleix, who became the governor of Puducherry and French India, after 12 years of governorship of Chandannagar.

Ivermee’s Glorious Failure is many things at once. It is a survey of the global history of French trade. It is an assemblage of miniature biographies: of Law, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (who launched the Compagnie in 1664) and Dupleix, but also of key Indian players such as Ananda Ranga Pillai, who was Dupleix’s chief courtier and kept a journal that offers a peek into Dupleix’s day-to-day life, Muzaffar Jang, the nizam of Hyderabad and French ally, and Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, who received inconsistent French support. It is a critique of the economic fallacies of the Compagnie and missionary malpractices of the Jesuits in particular and Catholics in general. It is a dramatization of inchoate French-Indian allyship against the British.

Glorious Failure is not, however, an entirely immersive history of French India. Ivermee has tried to pack a multi-epoch history of French presence in the subcontinent into 400-odd pages. This overpacked history infuses his writing with a staccato tempo.

In the span of only two pages, for instance, Ivermee skips from the Mughal-Maratha war’s arrival in Puducherry in 1690 to a character vignette of Rajaram Bhosle, the Maratha empire’s third Chhatrapati, to Franco-Dutch hostilities and the Nine Years’ War, to French colonial stakes in America and the West Indies.

This engorged scale, along with the multinational coordinates, makes Ivermee’s prose flit here then there. It detracts. It distracts. It overwhelms. If this is, in fact, the premier text on French India to exist recently, why does it disappoint? Precisely because it tries to be many things at once. Very early in the narrative, it loses its essence, its thesis, even.

To understand and remind myself why Ivermee is recounting this history in the first place, I had to return to the blurb, which speaks of his aim to contest the “myth of a benign French presence on the subcontinent.” The French are often projected as the lesser of the European aggressors relative to the British. If they truly were agents of appropriation, trafficking and assault, Ivermee concedes a recurrent use of declarative gestures for his readers that tie his narrative back to his thesis. These callbacks could have helped signpost his challenge to a popularly conceived notion that French colonialism was merely a quirk in the annals of India: a cosmetic blip exemplified in Puducherry’s ville blanche (White Town). What Ivermee unearths from the usual practice of fetishising the architectural, literary, culinary, theological and other cultural metonyms in both the imaginations of India’s French colony is the inconsistency of French allyship and the failed narrative of syncretism.

Perhaps one of the more scintillating passages that undoes a notion of the French as an exotic western presence in India is one where Ivermee implicates France in the slave trade. Far from a simple outpost of Compagnie activities, the subcontinent often became the source and destination in slave trade routes. Even before any European engagement, the Indian Ocean was the playground of Persian, Arab, and Swahili slavers.

With the Estado, the Portuguese set a traffic of slaves between Mozambique and India, and farther east in South-East Asia. South Asian slaves were even shipped towards Mexico in the western hemisphere and the Philippines closer to home. The Dutch expanded this network to distribute South Asian labour to Java, Malacca, Cape Colony, and elsewhere. The British established Madras and Bombay as the premier sites for buying and selling South-Asian slaves to ship to South-East Asia.

When the French entered this market, out went the “principe du sol fibre” (freedom principle) that would have emancipated all those enslaved when they landed on French soil. This was done to serve the interests of the Compagnie, of course. In came Colbert’s Code Noir (or Black Code) justifying slavery for business.

Ivermee showcases quite brilliantly how it was possible for France to set up shop in India due to their human trafficking schemes in Senegal and Guinea that helped sustain the North American and Caribbean colonies. Whilst showcasing how slave trade across the Indian Ocean is often a minor focus in histories of slave trade routes, which frequently centre the transatlantic and Pacific pathways, Ivermee uses French colonialism to explain that these routes have historically nourished one another.

Oddly, these examples that should upend and complicate sunny perceptions of India’s French postings are buried in Ivermee’s prose, which is peppered with non-sequiturs. Now, these detours that he takes are essential for setting the context for those uninitiated in French maritime and colonial histories, but they do a disservice in the end, leaving no room for Ivermee’s story to breathe.

Could Ivermee have approached this bird’s-eye perspective differently? There is a wealth of South-Asianists who are reviving and revising history with apertures rather than panoramas, a methodology where the former often leads to the latter, and is kinder to the pace of the narrative, and to the reader.

There is an anxiety to the scope of Glorious Failure, and there is also a kind of audacity in it that is admirable. Despite or perhaps because of the ambitious vastness, readers who come to this book seeking a primer on India’s French history and legacy may be standing on a cracked foundation.

Rohit Chakraborty is a scholar and critic from Guwahati. They live in Kolkata.