French Professor Jacques Weber's foreword to 'The Last Post- Inscriptions on French Graves in India' by K J S Chatrath

 

 Book available online at pothi.com

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“The Last Post: Inscriptions on French Graves in India” - by K J S Chatrath

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Avant Propos (Foreword)

(This is a rough translation of Prof. Jacques Weber's 'Avant Propos' in French.)

The French arrived in India after the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. However, in the eighteenth century, they were the rivals of the latter for the commercial and political control of the country, whose riches and luxury, the silks and the cottons, become the dreams of the entire Europe. Europe. Dupleix and Bussy, who, between 1749 and 1758, established the influence of the nation on the Deccan, were not supported by Versailles: France could not simultaneously become a land power, a European power a maritime power. How could she then retain her place in the Atlantic? Great Britain had, both the ambition and the means of exert influence over all the oceans, and Clive received the funding- which was refused to Dupleix. From the time of the Seven Years War, France was restricted to having control over only the five Colonies of Pondicherry, Karikal, Chandernagore, Mahe' and Yanam well as over some lilliputian Loges. These enclaves did not permit the different regimes which followed in Versailles and in Paris, nurture even the least political ambitions in India.

Nevertheless the French played an active role with the sovereign powers in India till 1840- they raised armies and trained troops. The names of Rene' Madec, who served the Moghul Emperor, of Benoit de Boigne, General of the Maratha armies of Scindia, Raymond with the Nizam of Hyderabad or of Jean Francois Allard who equipped Ranjit Singh with a modern army, all passed into posterity. The others spent their lives in India, not for serving this or that Raja or Nawab, not for any political reasons, far less for commerce, for which the French do  not have much of talent. They went there to propagate their faith: to man the Missions which France had sent in the sub-continent, as elsewhere in Asia and in Africa; most of them being Catholic Missionaries who evangalised the world in the XIX th century. The Capucins, priests of the Missions Etrangeres de Paris, Jesuits, undertook one way journeys to Pondicherry. (1) Their voyages were without any hope of return. They were buried in this land which they pretended to "civilize", and which they had come to love, in spite of their defeat, the “crash” of their evangelism in the face of a five thousand year old civilization.

It is these which interest Dr. K.J.S.Chatrath, as do the French of all conditions and of all ages, sometime just infants, who lost their lives so far away from their motherland, in an extreme climate. A long quest around the sub-continent has taken the author of this innovative book to the graves of the unknown who came here on vocation, for the taste of adventure, a dream of fortune, love for India, and sometimes for the dangers which lurked in these latitudes. He has made a compendium of the inscriptions on these gravestones, which are generally modest and ravaged by time in the memory of the deceased, These show us today the original and moving individual journeys through life, as well as the traces of uninterrupted relations between France and India since the XVIIth century.

The subject of the French presence in India produced, during the two World Wars, a flurry of publications relating to the height of the colonial period. The works of Alfred Martineau, Marguerite Labernadie, Edmond Gaudart and other members of the Society of the 'Societe' de l'Histoire de Pondichery', which had the merit of presenting the facts, even though their works suffered from methodological and deontological shortcomings of that period. They accorded more emphasis on the events rather than on the problems and sacrificed objectivity in favour of ideology. These historians were interested, in a significant manner, in the glorious period when Pondichery dominated "like the Mount Merou, Delhi, Agra and other grand cities" (2) and they ignored the humiliations and the defeats of the second half of the XVIIIth century.

After the Second World War, in the wave of decolonization, the five colonies and the French presence in India were all forgotten. It is only during the 1980s that universities started working on this theme. Besides the author of this Preface (3), there are notably Prof. Philippe Haudrère (4) and Gérard Le Bouëdec, Doctors Jean-Marie Lafont (5), Florence D'Souza (6) and Samuel Berthet (7), the independent researchers, Mireille Lobligeois, Georgette David, Rose Vincent, and a number of students following Masters and Doctorate studies. L'Institut Français de Pondichéry has encouraged the publications. Two international Symposiums of the specialists on these questions were held at Pondichery (8) in 1997 and at Nantes (9) in 2001. Simultaneously, some associations, like the Centre d'Information et de Documentation de l'Inde Francophone (CIDIF), are working towards a better understanding of the past shared by India and France. Of course the Indian researchers have also made their contributions towards better knowledge of the relations between the two countries. Amongst them are Kamakshi Misra,(10) Ajit K. Neogy (11) and Prof. K. S. Mathew of the University of Pondicherry.

The works of Dr. K.J.S.Chatrath, a Doctorate from the University of Paris, deal with the renewal of the histriography, started about thirty years back. This historian who loves France and who has been pursuing the history of the French presence in India, is the author of various books (12) which deserve to be translated and published in France. It is hoped that the present book will find success both in India and in France and would encourage new research on the three centuries of shared Franco-Indian history.

Jacques WEBER

Professor of Contemporary History, University of Nantes, France.

November, 2010.

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1 Tittle of a book by André DEROO, Aller simple pour Pondichéry, Paris, Téqui, 1978.

2. Le mot est d'Ananda Rangapillai, courtier de Dupleix.

3. Jacques WEBER, Les Établissements français en Inde au XIXe siècle, Paris, Librairie de l'Inde, 1988, 5 volumes, et Pondichery et les comptoirs de l'Inde après Dupleix. La démocratie au pays des castes, Paris, Denoël, 1996, 447 p.

4. Philippe HAUDRÈRE, La Compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Les Indes savantes, 2005, 2 volumes, 1 091 p. [1ère édition : Librairie de l'Inde, 1989, 4 vol.]

5. Jean-Marie LAFONT, La présence française dans le royaume sikh du Penjab, 1822-1849, Paris, École française d'Extrême-Orient, 1992, 557 p. + 15 cartes

6. Florence D'SOUZA, Quand la France découvrit l'Inde. Les écrivains-voyageurs français en Inde (1757-1818), Paris, L'Harmattan, 1995, 351 p.

7. Samuel BERTHET, Inde-France (1870-1962): Enjeux Culturels, Pondichéry, Institut français de Pondichery, Delhi, Centre de sciences humaines, 2006, 676 p.

8. International Seminar on Indo-French Relations and Indian Independence, Department of History, Pondicherry University, 22-26 September 1997.

9.Les relations entre la France et l'Inde de 1673 à nos jours, actes du colloque de Nantes des 8 et 9 juin 2001, Paris, Les Indes savantes, 2002, 585 p.

10. Kamakshi MISRA, Le mouvement nationaliste en Inde. Le cas de Chandernagor: le premier maillon de la décolonisation française, 1905-1952, thèse de Doctorat, Université de Nantes, 1998, 2 vol., 800 p.

11. Ajit K. NEOGY, Decolonization of French India. Liberation Movement and Indo-French Relations, 1947-1954, Pondichéry, Institut français de Pondichéry, 1997, 299 p.

12. K.J.S., Chatrath, India in the Debates of French Parliament, 1945-1988, Delhi, Indian Publishers Distributors, 1994, 224 p. ; Glance at France, Delhi, Indian Publishers Distributors, 1999, 342 p.; The French Collection, Delhi, Indian Publishers Distributors, 2006, 155 p.

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