Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Translations
- Introduction
- 1 The French Presence in India between 1754 and 1815: From the ‘Beaux Jours Du Gouvernement De Dupleix’ to Annihilation?
- 2 Constructing India as Other: Fiction, Travelogues and Ambassadors
- 3 Emasculating India: The Indienne, Feminization and Female Writers
- 4 Mythical India
- 5 Historical India: Narratives of the Past
- 6 The Philosophes, ‘Anticolonialism’ and the Rule of the British East India Company
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
5 - Historical India: Narratives of the Past
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Translations
- Introduction
- 1 The French Presence in India between 1754 and 1815: From the ‘Beaux Jours Du Gouvernement De Dupleix’ to Annihilation?
- 2 Constructing India as Other: Fiction, Travelogues and Ambassadors
- 3 Emasculating India: The Indienne, Feminization and Female Writers
- 4 Mythical India
- 5 Historical India: Narratives of the Past
- 6 The Philosophes, ‘Anticolonialism’ and the Rule of the British East India Company
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The popularity of historical writing in the eighteenth century has long been an idée reçue in the academic study of pre-revolutionary France. Given the fashion for texts which posited themselves as ‘histories’, it should come as no surprise that India lent itself to such a mode of representation. Alongside a fascination with history was a growing interest in the wider world. Indeed, the proliferation of texts produced at the end of the eighteenth century on India and, more generally, Asia – texts which posit themselves as ‘histories’, and purport to favour fact over fantasy, analysis over fictionalization – are symptomatic of what Mita Choudhury, discussing contemporaneous English-language representations, has described as the ‘demand for more of the real Orient’. The general introduction to abbé de Raynal's Histoire philosophique et politique du commerce et des établissements des Européens dans les deux Indes, first published in 1770 and estimated to have been one of the three most widely read books in France in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1789 (along with Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloïse and Voltaire's Candide), exemplifies this interest in the real, an interest which was shared by the reading public and authors alike:
J'ai interrogé les vivants et les morts: les vivants, dont la voix se fait entendre à mes côtés; les morts, qui nous ont transmis leurs opinions et leurs connaissances, en quelque langue qu'ils aient écrit. J'ai pesé leur autorité j'ai opposé leurs témoignages; j'ai éclairci les faits.
(I have interrogated the living and the dead: the living, whose voices can be heard by my sides; the dead, who have conveyed their opinions and their knowledge to us in whatever language they wrote in. I have weighed up their authority; I have compared their eyewitness accounts; I have illuminated the facts.)
Despite the increasing interest in India and the Orient, knowledge of India's physical situation remained vague. The eighteenth-century American traveller John Ledyard developed the term ‘Philosophic Geography’ to describe his ‘freely constructed geographic sentiment’, which bore little relation to physical topography and borders.
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- India in the French ImaginationPeripheral Voices, 1754–1815, pp. 85 - 114Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014