Failed Legacies of Colonial Linguistics: Lessons from Tamil Books in French India and French Guiana

Abstract

The archives of French India and French Guiana, two colonies that were failing by the mid-nineteenth century, elucidate the legacy of colonial linguistics by drawing attention to the ideological and technological natures of colonial printing and the far-reaching and longstanding consequences of the European objectification of Indian vernaculars. Torn between religious, commercial, and imperialist agendas, the French in India both promoted Catholicism and advanced the scientific study of Tamil, the majority language spoken in the colonial headquarters of Pondicherry. There, a little known press operated by the Paris Foreign Missions shipped seventy-one dictionaries, grammars, and theological works printed in Tamil and French to Catholic schools undergoing secularization in French Guiana, a colony with several thousand Tamil indentured laborers. I analyze the books’ lexical, orthographic, and typographical forms, metalinguistic commentaries, publicity tactics, citational practices, and circulation histories by drawing on seldom-discussed materials from the Archives nationales d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, France. I propose a theoretical framework to investigate how technology intersects with the historical relationship between language and colonialism, and argue that printing rivalries contributed to Orientalist knowledge production by institutionalizing semiotic and language ideologies about the nature of “perfectible” and “erroneous” signs. My comparative approach highlights the interdiscursive features of different genres and historical periods of Tamil documentation, and underscores how texts that emerged out of disparate religious and scientific movements questioned the veracity of knowledge and fidelity of sources. Such metalinguistic labor exposed the evolving stances of French Indologists toward Dravidian and Indo-Aryan linguistics and promoted religious and secular interests in educational and immigration policies.

Transliterating Cities: The Interdiscursive Ethnohistory of a Tamil Francophonie

“…When these signs juxtapose and reconstitute the political space of la Francophonie and cultural realm of Tamilagam out of bifurcated colonial and postcolonial periods, graphic artifacts of translation and transliteration, whether affixed onto street signs or forgotten in obscure colonial handbooks, can potentially speak to distant or proximal addressees across community boundaries. Rather than literature or politics, the defining feature of the resultant Tamil francophonie is the use and occasional mixing of Tamil and French (and English) in both colloquial and literary registers (Das 2016). 5 Understanding addressivity is thus essential to developing a method of interdiscursive ethnohistory.…”

“…Sixteenth-century Jesuits considered Portuguese, the lingua franca of Catholic missionaries in Asia, as the most perfectible and suitable for translation of all languages due to the close influence of Latin (Županov 1998;Xavier and Županov 2015). Tamil was instead deemed "theologically deficient," "phonologically barbaric," "laborious," "difficult," and prone to errors caused by all manner of mispronunciations and idiosyncratic writing practices (Xavier and Županov 2015;Das 2017). By the nineteenth century, European writers had adopted a practice established by the prominent Italian Jesuit missionary, C.G.…”

“…For example, the lieutenant of a French battalion of cypahi (Indian infantry) soldiers, Amédée Blin, and the two abbots running the Missions Etrangères de Paris (MEP) press in Pondichéry, Louis-Savinien Dupuis and Louis-Marie Mousset, wrote bilingual dictionaries by printing the Tamil entries in Tamil script and French entries in Roman script. Although Mousset and Dupuis shared the scholarly opinion of their British counterparts in Madras concerning the recognizable differences between High and Low Tamil (Das 2016(Das , 2017, their decision to combine entries from both registers into a single dictionary obviated the need for creating different source-language orthographies (1895, xxii).…”

“…6. Father Louis-Noël de Bourzès, a missionary who lived in Madurai from 1710 to 1735, handwrote an earlier French-Tamil dictionary that he gifted to the king of France in 1734 (Das 2017).…”

“…In 1865 the governor of French India wrote on behalf of Dupuis and Mousset to the minister of the navy and colonies in Paris to inquire into whether French and Tamil books could be useful to the libraries in the metropole and plantation colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Réunion, and Mauritius, where indentured laborers of Tamil descent had settled from 1830 to 1920. Although there is little trace of such books existing in these remote parts, the colonial record does indicate that the governor of French Guiana ordered a medium shipment of books from Pondichéry in 1863 (Das 2017). Most books from the MEP press remained, however, in the Indian cities of Pondichéry and Karaikal, where mostly high-caste Indians educated in French schools, some claiming mixed-race ancestry as gens de couleurs, were literate in both languages (Carton 2012).…”