Since the publication of Edward W. Said's Orientalism (1978), the self-reflexivity of representations has become axiomatic in works on the European colonial encounter with other cultures. Examining inter-cultural perceptions at the moment of the British encounter with the subcontinent, Ainslee T. Embree, for example, emphasizes the historical contingency essential to every meeting, arguing that ‘each new generation of every society, in coming to terms with other cultures, encounters afresh its own past and its own identity’. As Pagden asserts, however, ‘the “other” has always had to be equipped with a dense and particular cultural identity’.

As numerous critics have demonstrated, an important characteristic of Indian cultural identity, according to early-modern European perceptions, was femininity; as Rajan comments, ‘Perceiving India as feminine is a familiar practice of the literary imagination’. The portrayal of India as feminine is not only a matter of unequal power relations, with learned Westerners surveying and then articulating the East; it is also concerned with the prevalence of female stereotypes in writings on India, notably the figures of the bayadère (temple dancer) and the sati (the Indian widow who carries out self-immolation on the funeral pyre of her husband). In recent years, these female stereotypes have generated great critical interest, not least because of the role accorded to the sati by Spivak in postcolonial debates.

Given the wealth of critical material on the perceived femininity of India in eighteenth-century writing, it might appear doubtful whether any further insight can be added. Yet, while this technique of representation may be all too obvious, it does not necessarily follow that it was used in a consistent or a homogeneous way. By charting its use across a range of French-language texts (both factual and fictional) produced during this formative period in the European colonization of India, this chapter will examine the persistence of the strategy and its malleability – a malleability which was not governed by historical contingency alone. The chapter will begin by examining how Indian female characters and the rhetoric of feminization were used in eighteenth-century French writings on India.