Transcript for Conversations on South Asia with Jessica Namakkal
>> Lhost: All right! Hello everyone and welcome to the April event in the Conversations on South Asia series here at Dartmouth College. It’s wonderful to see so many friends, colleagues, and students in the audience today. Thanks for coming out.
I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation which features a great lineup of panelists, who will all be commenting on Jessica Namakkal’s book Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India, which was published in the Columbia Studies in International and Global History Series with Columbia University Press last year in 2021.
For those of you who are new to the series, I’m Elizabeth Lhost, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and a lecturer in the Department of History at Dartmouth College, and I’m one of the organizers of this year’s series. It’s my great pleasure to be hosting and moderating today’s discussion with all of you.
Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that Dartmouth College, which hosts this series, sits on the ancestral, unceded lands of the Abenaki people, who belong to the Wabanaki confederacy. I would also like to thank our series’ sponsors: the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth. Without their support the series would really not be possible.
I would also like to mention the support and assistance the series receives from Professor Douglas Haynes and our Bodas Family Undergraduate South Asian Studies Fellow Sri Sathvik Rayala. Thank you to both of them for their help.
Today we have four panelists joining us for the discussion. So, in order to give them the maximum amount of time possible, I’m trying to keep my introductions brief today.
So our first speaker will be the author Jessica Namakkal, who is an Associate Professor of the Practice of International Comparative Studies, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, and History at Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. In addition to Unsettling Utopia, which was published last year, Dr. Namakkal has published articles like “Decolonizing Marriage and the Family: The Lives and Letters of Ida, Benoy, and Indira Sarkar” in the Journal of Women’s History and “The Terror of Decolonization: Exploring Pondicherry’s Goonda Raj” in the journal Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Dr. Namakkal is currently working on two projects, one that focuses on decolonizing cults and another related to a history of sexuality, race-mixing, and colonialism in the twentieth century.
So, after the author has had the chance to introduce the book to all of us, we’ll have comments and questions from our three panelists, beginning with Sana Aiyar.
Dr. Aiyar is an Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research focuses on the regional and transnational histories of South Asia and South Asian diasporas in the Indian Ocean basin. Her publications include Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora, which was published with Harvard University Press in 2015 and articles and book chapters, including “Revolutionaries, Maulvis, and Monks: Burma’s Khilafat Moment,” which was published in the volume Oceanic Islam: Muslim Universalism and European Imperialism, as well as “Empire, Race, and the Indians in Colonial Kenya’s Contested Public Political Sphere, 1919–1923,” which was published in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. Her current projects examine encounters of African soldiers and South Asian civilians in the Second World War and migration, religious and ethnic politics, nationalism, and anticolonial activism across India and Myanmar during the 1930s.
Our second discussant Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature in the Department of English at King’s College in London. In 2018, she was the winner of India’s Infosys Prize for the Humanities, and in 2019, won the Humboldt Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. Dr. Kabir’s work focuses on creolization as a historical process and cultural theory. She is the author of Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir, which was published in 2009 and Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia, published in 2013. In May 2020, Dr. Kabir and the Franco-Tamil Ari Gautier co-founded the cultural platform Le Thinnai Kreyolk, which, through which they promote their vision of a multilingual, plural and creolized India. For the next academic year, 2022-23, Dr. Kabir will hold a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship to focus on writing her monograph ‘Alegropolitics: Creolizing Connection on the Afromodern Dance Floor.’
Our final discussant will be Jayita Sarkar, who is currently Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University and will very soon be an Associate Professor of Economic & Social History at the University of Glasgow beginning in July 2022. Her book Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, which is forthcoming with Cornell University Press later this year, examines India’s nuclear and space programs through the prisms of technopolitics and territoriality while focusing on their consequences for democratic accountability. Her new book-length project, Partition Machine, investigates the travel itineraries of the idea and practice of territorial divisions from the borderlands of South Asia to the world.
So after each of the panelists has made their remarks, we will then open the floor to questions from the audience and invite you to use the Q&A feature in Zoom to submit your questions. And with that, I’ll pass it off to you Jessica.
>> Namakkal: Thank you so much, and thanks to Elizabeth for organizing this and all of the talks, many of which I’ve attended and have learned so much from. So, thank you for that and to all of our panelists, who have taken the time to engage and taken time out of their day to be here with us. Thank you so much to everyone. So I’m going to keep this brief to about ten minutes, as directed.
To just talk about the, the sort of the scope of the project and share a few maps, because, as I learned while researching and doing this, maps are sort of fundamental to understanding really what, what is French India. So let’s start there actually and let me share my screen with you.
Okay.
Okay, so what is French India? There’s no subtitles. Okay, so what is French India? French India was a lot of things throughout time, and that’s one of the points of the book is to really think about what French India was in relation to the scope of the making of what we know is India today. And so, just to briefly give you a sense of time and space, the French arrived in India in the 17th century around the same time everybody else was arriving as a, as a trade company, the French East India Company. And, you know, they went to, to trade and to set up ports. There are lots of interesting books about this, and the majority of work that sort of happens on the French territories in India are focused on this earlier period, although there aren’t a lot of them.
And, and, and so there’s, there’s a moment for the French in the, in the 17th-18th centuries, where you, they are considering expanding their presence in South Asia, right. And, and, for, you know, in French historiography, French India is something of a, of a nostalgic failure, it, an imperial failure in that they, they sort of have this memory of we could have, we could have been the British in India, right. So, it stands out, and so it was, this is really important to the 20th century, which I’m working on here, because one of the reasons these five small territories of French India are really important to the French is that they hold cultural meaning to them, right, that they have a presence in this huge cultural, political, economic space that has been dominated by their, by their foes the British, right. So that really sets the stage for what I do in this book, which thinks about what made French India and how does that help us sort of reflect on what happened in the rest of India during this period of what I call decolonization but I’ll get into that in a second.
So the territories and you see a map here. This map was made by a photographer named Tim Stallman, just to give him credit. And, and what you see here is these five areas, now the thing to know about, your, you see four of them and then a line up to the fifth, which is Chandannagar, which is a suburb of Calcutta today and, and was at the time too. So if you know the geography of South Asia, which many of you probably do here, you’ll notice they’re very spread out from each other.
Pondicherry is the headquarters. It was the head, it was the headquarters for the entirety of the French presence in India. It’s about 100 kilometers south of Chennai or Madras, and that’s important because in early, you know, in the 17th-18th centuries, the British and the French are sort of battling between these, these two areas.
Again, you know not to get into the weeds here because I have ten minutes, but this is really important, when we think about the historiography of India and think about how much of this is focused in the north, right, or areas north of South India, all over the place, and to think that there’s so much happening in South India that hasn’t been part of the story of the making of modern India, right. So that’s one of the, one of the goals of the project here. So, there’s five territories. Pondicherry. Karaikal is just south of Pondicherry. Yanam is up in Andhra Pradesh. Mahe is in Kerala. So you know people are speaking different languages, right, and, of course, we have Chandannagar by Calcutta, which becomes a really important point in, in the beginning of anticolonial organizing in the early 20th century, because, of course, Calcutta is really the center of a lot of the anticolonialism that’s happening.
So that’s the first map. The second map I want to show you is of Pondicherry itself. So the one on my left, the territory of Pondicherry, which you see there is actually how Pondicherry was divided up between British and French territory. So all of the black, that’s not water. The gray is water. The black is British territory, and the white areas are the French parts of Pondicherry. And this is just Pondicherry that you can sort of see on the cover of the book behind Elizabeth there, that there’s a rock border through a lot of these areas where there isn’t a water border separating the British and the French areas. So, you know, we have these situations where there are rocks down the middle of villages separating British and French India. After 1947 when the, when the British leave, French India remains India, remains, remains French, and British India becomes India, and those borders don’t change, right. So, that’s something really important to know too.
The last thing, the last map, I want to show you there is of the central area of Pondicherry. So that’s right on the ocean there, and it’s just, can you even see my pointer right here, it’s this area within here. And I want to show you this to show you that the area below this canal on this yellow, this blue line is racially segregated. And in practice that didn’t always work, but it translates into a privileged area that was called the “white town” and above it is “black town,” Ville Noire and Ville Blanche. And they remain economically segregated today. There was never a much, enough of a European presence to have a pure sort of racial segregation happening, but there were all kinds of spatial segregating practices that were happening, and those have continued today.
So these borders are not widely discussed. It’s interesting they’re actually still there today, so in this Pondicherry one, Pondicherry today, and if I go back here for a moment, Pondicherry today is ruled as a, is governed as an union territory, except for Chandannagar, which voted to join the Indian Union in 1949. The other four territories remain an administrative unit, so they’ve, they’ve retained their separate identities from their surrounding states, and that was part of the negotiation that happened.
And if you look at Pondicherry here, those borders still exist. They’re not, they’re not securitized in the same way that they were during this period. But if you are going to Pondicherry, if you’ve been there, you will know there’s a lot of traffic stanchions that will say you’re now leaving the Union Territory of Pondicherry and entering Tamil Nadu. So, you can still sort of see their presence and I, you know, I’m not an ethnographer, so I didn’t do this but I’ve heard it conversationally from people that, you know, there is still some sense of policing around them, especially because of the import of alcohol and the taxes differing, but you know any, any borders and excuse for the police to be, be monitoring people right.
So the last picture I want to show you and then I’ll just speak for a moment about the larger themes of the book is that, you know, these, these borders are not widely discussed. There’s really no scholarship on them, and this is a picture at one of those borders in 1952. And what you see is a line of French policemen on the French India-India border, so this is after independence, so India, French India. And they’re holding back a huge crowd of people who are protesting the continued rule of the French in India. So in 1947, after the British left, in French India, there’s a law that’s passed immediately that says you can’t have protests in French India, right. They don’t want anyone sort of calling for independence. They, and in fact, both governments, both the Indian Government, the French Government sort of felt this way because they wanted to do this as a diplomatic process, right. They didn’t really want the activity on the ground, yet, you know, you can’t, you can’t put down the people like that. And, and so you’ve got these huge crowds, and the police become the border here. And it’s a, it’s a visual example of how borders are, can, can be porous, how they also can become less so right just even with with the use of bodies to put them there.
So there’s all of these things happening, happening around the borders. This is not an isolated incident, as I show in the book. There’s a lot of activity. And somehow this isn’t part of the story of twentieth-century India, right. So one of my questions was why, why don’t we talk about this, right. Why isn’t this important to understanding, I’ll stop that there, the, the making of twentieth-century India, especially when you know, the question of who is, who is a citizen, who is an Indian is really at the basis of a lot of what happens in twentieth-century India?
So, so just to give a few points, I mean that’s a little bit, there’s a lot of other things going on the book which we’ll hear about, but to give, to give a broader sense very quickly, I went into this project thinking about the question of what is decolonization and especially in India, a place that wasn’t fighting for decolonization but was fighting for independence, right. They were fighting for sovereignty. The arguments were about anticolonialism, and it wasn’t so much a project partly just fit, you know, in terms of the theory of decolonization being sort of a different thing in the 1940s, then it became after Frantz Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth in 1961 or after it was published.
So my sort of thinking about this, what does it mean for the people of French India to be thinking about liberation, to thinking about sovereignty. What is sovereignty to them? And my goal in the book was really to center French Indians, right, and to ask the question what is a French Indian. Is it the same thing as an Indian? Is it the same thing as a French person legally, culturally, socially, all the sort of ways that we can do this? And think about what is what, what, what did it mean to them to live in this independent India and to think about what their futures may be.
A key point to this is understanding that in French India, the French allowed people, and you know this didn’t always work but, to become citizens of France. Nobody in the British Empire was a citizen, right. People were subjects of the Crown, so you really have people living a different existence, to some extent, in the French areas than in the British areas. So, so that was one of my big questions here.
I also wanted to push back against a tendency in political and some cultural histories to naturalize state sponsored decolonization. So, I argue in the book that decolonization should also be understood, not just as a moment, but as a movement, and one that does not have a linear or upwards trajectory, right. So to think what are the different forms of decolonization, right, and, and then the overarching argument is that sometimes writing histories of something has tended to, to freeze them in time. and I wanted to think methodologically about a way that we can understand these movements as dynamic and even if we write about them as a historical moment, how do we understand them as continuing on.
So the way I do this in the book, and this will be my last point, is to look at the continuation of a colonial presence in French India. Of course, independence in French India is very different from British India because there’s no partition. There was no, you know years of traumatic violence and migration and the way that comes with partition and state making, right. But something else is happening. And so my suggestion here, right, is that, where we have this space where we don’t have these huge state processes, the colonial institutions are venerated and live on in a way that isn’t really acknowledged.
So, I turned to really cultural and spiritualism to understand how those two are political processes and how those continue on in today’s French India. So I do this by looking at two institutions. One is the Aurobindo Ashram, which is in Pondicherry and the intentional community of Auroville, which is just outside, although their territory overlaps a little bit.
Auroville has been in the news recently, so perhaps people know about them a little more than before, and I’m happy in Q&A to, to talk about it more. But they were a project. The ashram was established in 1926. The center of that ashram is Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, who was a Bengali freedom fighter, who took refuge in French India to flee British, British persecution. His right hand woman was a woman named Mirra Alfassa, who became known as The Mother, who is a woman from France. And they ran this ashram till his death in 1950. It’s still, it’s still very popular. It’s successful. It continues today.
And in 1968, The Mother started this project called Auroville that was meant to, to take up the project of the ashram and build this universal city. So today there’s about 3,000, between three and 4,000 people that live there, and people from all over the world live there.
And ultimately, what I do is I look at just like my, my consideration of what is a French Indian, what is there, what are their projects, what are their dreams, what are they fighting for. I also thought about this, this territory that had been under French rule, that had been nearby and how, what it means for the people of this area to then have this intentional community built on land that was bought from them very cheaply and which they now provide the labor for, right. So I use this term I call settler utopianism to, to, to really think through and look at the stories and the reasoning that the people who came from Europe and from Australia and from North America brought to the building of Auroville to sort of, to justify them building it there, and to continuing a project of colonial land extraction and labor, and labor, and labor extraction, right, that they’re, they’re sort of employing the same things.
And because it’s in postcolonial India, I use the language and the theories of settler colonialism. I’m not calling it a settler colony, but I’m suggesting that the people there are employing these tactics that are important to settler colonialism, to think about. And that’s how I look at what sort of, what happens after the French have left India.
Okay, I will stop there. Thank you everyone, and I’m really looking forward to your comments.
>> Aiyar: Thanks very much, Jessica, for that. I was actually a little nervous I might be going over some material that you’ve already spoken about, but I think that you’ve really set us up well to dive into what I, you know, we thought were the most interesting aspects of this.
And I thought that I would, you know, organized my comments as sort of talking a little bit about the methodological approach that you use, then speaking a little bit about your historiographical intervention and then sort of ending with what I think are your main analytical contributions and then I have three questions that are related to each of those.
Um, so in the introduction of this book, Jessica talks about her approach as being an approach of minor history, to try and sort of disrupt what she calls major history and to look at minor histories as site of resistance. And, as is sort of obvious from the comments that she opened with, you know, the major history for British is British India, the project of colonialism, led by the British. And, in some ways sort of the French colonial project in India is the, is the sort of benign aspect, right, in the major sort of strands of historiography and also nationalist thinking. Now, in sort of centering French colonialism and putting sort of Pondicherry as the site of this resistance of, you know, sort of the, sort of minor history, I think that there are few things that really come through in those early chapters that felt quite distinctively French and different in some ways to the British.
One is this idea of French citizenship that you alluded to in your opening comments where from as early as 1881, you know, the colonial French subject could opt voluntarily, but all in quotes, for full French citizenship. And, in some ways, once you became a French citizen living in Pondicherry, it was more democratic because then you could have universal suffrage. In fact, that was introduced also from quite early on.
So as much as the sort is, this is something that the French take pride on across their empire, but it is, in fact, a far more insidious form of colonialism, because, in order to qualify for French citizenship, you had to, in fact, give up all that was, quote on quote, native, and this went to language, you know, religion, etc., conversion to Catholicism. And you know, as I was reading this, I was thinking of Gregory Mann’ work in French West Africa and also Frederick Cooper’s work on the French Union scene, you know, in the post-war context, you know how does sort of the French, how do the French sort of think about decolonization.
The French Union becomes this way of it, and this is really, you know, in a way, we see reminiscences of this in the French idea of assimilation to the diversity plural issue versus the British approach of multiculturalism, both of which put their colonial subjects and postcolonial citizens in a waiting room, so they are sort of distinct in some ways. But ultimately sort of plays out in this very interesting way in Pondicherry, in Auroville as the site of disruption, and I thought that that was really wonderful how you brought that to the forefront.
But more than that, and I think more interestingly, another way in which they show up as a site of resistance is, you know, in sort of drawing attention on the revolutionaries, both in Chandannagar and in Pondicherry were French India does become a site of refuge, and so it’s a different kind of resistance for sort of revolutionaries for whom violence, you know, in violent protest becomes idea, either in terms of ideas or actual application, the form in which their anticolonial nationalism plays out.
And, here again, your work, you know it reminded me of Tim Harper’s, you know, massive volume on Underground Asia where he’s really sort of mapping the itineraries of these refugees in exile, and it is a sort of insurgent Asia, and I think that this fits into that as well. My own work on a Buddhist monk from Burma, U Ottama, who spends a lot of time in, well initially in France and then Chandannagar, you know, there are many different sites in the Maharaja of Baroda where Aurobindo Ghosh first goes. [inaudible] is also part of that. And I think it’s really important to disrupt the nationalist sort of, you know, nonviolent nationalism historiography with some of this.
And so as I said, you know revolution here becomes, you know, it’s violent, in contrast to the Gandhi and non-violence satyagraha. But it’s also anticolonial and distinctly religious in some ways, and I want to take up these two in the next two comments that I have.
So in South Asia historiographical intervention, you know, this is really focused on what you sort of said that you know, towards the end, you know, of this moment of independence, which is really sort of just the starting point, really, and we have to think about decolonization as, in fact, the unfinished business of independence. And here I think you really sort of are focusing on the politics of anticolonial nationalism, where the story of Pondicherry, you know as it comes, you know begins really in the book with the arrival of Aurobindo Ghosh, who, you know, seeks refuge in the French territory.
But he sort of imagines Pondicherry as a part of his revolutionary imaginary of India. And you have a very interesting discussion of the homeland and what it means for Aurobindo Ghosh, a Bengali revolutionary to settle in Pondicherry in French India and talk about his homeland. But here really I was thinking about other revolutionaries, Subramania Bharati, who, again, you sort of talk about, who during his stay in Pondicherry actually commissions a sort of sculpture, statue of India where Bharat Mata is shown to, in fact, include Burma, and you know the pallu of Bharat Mata’s sari includes Burma. And again it’s a very Hindu idea of India.
But as you were, as you sort of are distinguishing between the French India, British India and talking about anticolonialism and the politics of anticolonial nationalism, the French are also imagining their territory as Indian, right. So, it’s not sort of the French territory of Pondicherry as a this, as distinct from India. It’s still French India. So, this idea of an Indian homeland is one that I think different historical players sort of, you know, it’s an imagined homeland, which, where there’s no agreement on in terms of the politics and who constitutes it or even the borders, but the idea of India sort of exists in a both political and apolitical way.
Now you also very sort of wonderfully show how the renunciation of this revolutionary politics takes place in the ashram with Aurobindo Ghosh and the arrival of The Mother. And you use, Jessica uses the term anticolonial colonialism to describe the both Aurobindo Ghosh’s, you know, Pondicherry stay and you know his sort of turn to complete spiritual, a sort of non-political spiritualism and sort of The Mother’s sort of visibility that, you know, rises, right, through the 30s and 40s in Pondicherry.
And Jessica makes the argument that, you know, this is anticolonial colonialism, because it’s anticolonial as far as the British are concerned. But you know The Mother and sort of the institution of the ashram, you know, Auroville eventually, have very close ties with the French colonial state. And, here again, what you do is that you then sort of turn to other, so, to, the politics of anticolonialism, then it’s not located in the ashram but, in fact, with some other players in Pondicherry. Two in particular that the book talks about other [inaudible] Subha, the communist workers, and then one convert, Catholic convert to French citizen, who have their own versions of politics, which again are placed, so this is again where that site of Pondicherry is disrupting sort of dominant narratives of nationalism.
And then, in the moment of arrival, two things happen. The French offer a referendum in terms of what happens to their colonies, you know to French India. And although Chandannagar votes overwhelmingly for integration with India, there is no referendum that is held in Pondicherry at all. And then the other, the second sort of way in which that moment of arrival plays out is that The Mother starts asking for dual citizenship here in terms of how individuals will relate to the State.
And here, you know, there were reference, the sort of resonances of, you know, different scholarship, which I’m sure that Jayita will get into, on citizenship and the long making and unmaking of citizens that plays out in very interesting ways. But also sort of reached very rich regional histories of Kashmir, the princely states, Goa, I’m sure that Ananya will be talking about, and I think this sort of book really is an interesting intervention in this.
Now in terms of analyzing this unfinished business of independence, you know, Auroville emerges, and, you know, the last chapter, which really is the, you know, high point, I think, of this book as settler utopianism. And Pondicherry is, you know, there’s a long line of Pondicherry being imagined as a site of utopia for the revolutionaries as refuge, which is very distinct from the Auroville sort of project of spiritual settlement. But I was thinking, I know Jessica makes the argument that we have to understand this in terms of neocolonialism, right. So it’s not settler colonialism of the sort that we see in the historiography, but they are these sort of reminiscences, you know, they are sort of, it only exists because it was French India.
But I was thinking of the idea of utopia as a cosmopolitan, spiritual community that was settled on a land that of which the settlers were not indigenous. It made me actually think about Gandhi’s phoenix farms in South Africa, which again was about something new. It’s a very cosmopolitan space. And Gandhi’s phoenix farms and then Sabarmati Ashram is a space of, you know, decolonization or independence or anticolonialism, not as a political project. Gandhi’s political project occurs in different sites. But it is a project of the non-political swaraj, and I wondered if, you know, perhaps Aurobindo Ghosh’s turn away from politics could be understood in terms of that kind of Gandhian swaraj rather than only the proximity to The Mother’s, you know, sort of project of settler, of the sort of utopianism.
I’m going to end quickly with three questions. I know that we have lots, lots more to say. One is the question on minor history and the site of resistance. Who is resisting what? So, is it the historian resisting the historiography? Or, you know, are we actually able to get to, and this is sort of the second question, more of a regional history where, you know, Pondicherry is placed within the more regional history of Tamil Nadu today or Tamil history? And, you know, Bhavani Raman’s work is the one that I think of in terms of this Tamil history. But you know I really wondered why Chandannagar is the point of departure and gets integrated into Bengal. You know, there’s sort of larger regional histories of Bengal and, you know, what is it about Pondicherry that doesn’t, or does it, right? The sources, the narrative, the perspective is sort of the colonial archive to an extent, and you’re critical of that. So you know what, what of the Tamil sort of voice beyond the two communist and sort of you know [inaudible] that we hear off?
In fact, finally, sort of in terms of spiritual settlement, you raise the point that the French exceptionalism, right, the idea of French exceptionalism in terms of equality and fraternity comes through in Auroville. But what of French secularism? You know, it was very, I kept thinking about how do these ideals of the French Revolution that come through of, you know, equality, fraternity, yes, that’s how we get Auroville as a cosmopolitan sort of space where everyone can be equal. But it is inherently spiritual and how does this square away with French ideas of secularism, which are very different from the British, you know, ideal of non-interference with religious matters which, in fact, creates a kind of Indian secularism, where the state is absolutely, intimately sort of linked with projects of spiritual, religious settlement, etc.?
And, you know, in a way, I was thinking of Auroville in terms of other huge settlements like the Radha Soami Satsang or Osho’s Ashram where it is built on the land where others, where you don’t belong, built on the labor of local labor. And that really is, in a way, and, and it claims to be non-political but very close to local sort of political heads. So, you know, does this so, although I started with saying there’s this distinction between the French and British colonial project, given the spiritualism and secularism connection, in fact, do we see in Pondicherry that the French India on this issue of religion and spirituality was in fact closer to the British colonial project than perhaps we started off with?
And I will end there. It’s been, it was a really wonderful book, and thank you very much for writing it, and I’m looking forward to our discussion!
>> Jahanara Kabir: So I think it’s my turn to take up the baton and indeed it’s, this is a landmark book in, in my opinion. I’m going to, I’m going to actually read out from the final lines, which I think are very strong, and justifiably so, in the claims that you’re making, Jessica, for this work. And I quote the pages of this book are meant as a disruption of ideas, spaces and temporalities. Of the commonly told narratives of colonial and postcolonial history, shedding light on uncommon relationships that also disrupt postcolonial national disreliance on the boundedness of race and nation. I offer this disruption in an effort to further the larger project of decolonizing history.
And you already spoke to the kind of centrality of decolonization and what it means as a theme and a kind of effort of your work and, and Sana spoke, picked up the idea of the minor, you know, the minor history in that which is, which is forming the disruptive kind of, you know, sort of disrupt vector I would say.
But I am, I wanted to take, take up a few more issues which I think for me arise from this, this claim that you make, which is, as I said, justifiably made. The book really sort of like, what can I say, enters into a sort of reified space of what we think are the cutting edge and and even accepted approaches to South Asia, and it certainly filled a huge vacuum, for me, when I was trying to build a new kind of like a space for myself, clearer space myself my own research. I’m not a historian. I’m a literary critic and cultural critic and historian. And I like to go off in wild directions throughout my career, you know, and in that, if you want to do that, you need people who are doing a really important, a close work in other disciplines, notably history. You need people to open the archive for the literary critic to step in because we don’t, we, our archives, we, of course, use the notion of archives, but it’s somewhat different, and we need that other archival opening, clearing of the space, and setting up certain counter arguments to receive norms in order for us to feel confident in what we are stepping forward to do.
And so I also liked very much the spirit in which you open the book where you said, the number of people doing work on French India is small but powerful. And you know this, the sense of a small band of people who have worked together to give us a few but important books, for example, I’ve got some of them here. You mentioned some of them. We’ve got Jyoti’s, you know, Jyoti Mohan’s book Claiming India. We have Diana Agmon’s book of A Colonial Affair. We even have tomes, very difficult for non-historians to go through, but diligently, we must, such as Aniruddha Ray’s work. And all these books, you know, are very important so that someone like me can understand the context, you know. I’m working, for example, as you know, on on our common friend and colleague Ari Gautier’s book, books. He’s a, he’s a historical novelist of French India. Where do I go to understand what he’s writing about, you know? And it’s through him that I encountered your work and, indeed, the work of all the other people that I’ve just picked up and, and, and bought in the pandemic period and that was my education.
But of all these books, yours is different because it takes us, as Sana also said, and, into the kind of like, into the moment where things changed, so the moment that kind of abuts onto the contemporary and the moment, therefore, that is also the moment of questions arising for someone like me, who is a literary critic interested in thinking about postcoloniality and how the afterlife or continuing life of French India, you know, helps us complicate again some, some pretty settled notions of what is the postcolonial in South Asia.
So for sure, I think, the small and powerful band that you’ve talked about is to be, you know, we have to, we have to reckon with this, with this work as a composite but within that because you have done something slightly different you’ve engaged with a moment that perhaps goes beyond the bounds of what is historical, and it’s really moving to the contemporary. And that’s, that’s why your book gives us another angle into, into the shared set of concerns around how do we understand French India.
And what you’ve done is, here again, which is very interesting, is you’ve used these, as you said, these three narratives, different, intertwined narratives, which the documentary that you talk, that you start with talking about the documentary about French India made by French people two years, barely two years, after Pondicherry has become absorbed into India. There are three worlds, and you show how those three words, particularly the third world, which is the world of ashram and Auroville, are very deeply intimately intertwined with those other words, which are of kind of French, French India and Tamil French India.
And so what’s really important is, again as Sana pointed out, that final chapter which pushes all those detailed stuff you’re doing to tell us about how French, French India and Tamil French India came into being, including those milestones of you know, French, the French State inviting Indians to renounce aspects of their traditional, you know, culture and become French and all those milestones you talked about.
But the point is that you’re pushing forward and bringing us into the ‘60s, which is when most of us think of nation building in India happening in a completely different way, and you are really shining a spotlight to stuff that’s happening pretty centrally because Pondicherry is situated bang in the middle of the Deccan, and it’s not, you know, while we can, we can say you know, we can say similar stories can be said about say the Lakshadweep or Andamans, it’s kind of in the heart of the peninsula and on the coastline. And, therefore, you know, it can’t be invisibilized. We can’t not talk about, we can’t not want to know what’s going on there, but we don’t know how to know. We don’t know anything. We don’t know where to go. We don’t know the language. We don’t know where the archives are. You do a fantastic job of showing us the scattered archives, which isn’t, you know, all over, you know where do we even begin stitching the archives together.
And so, you know, that scattering which characterizes French India, you make a bonus point out of that, you know. You actually say scattered and fragmented and disjointed the whole thing, maybe, but actually let’s start from there, because that is the meaning of your wanting to talk about minor histories, minor methods, minor, the margins, which are as, as you say constructed, as the center.
So for me, this was really um, I think this was one of the key methodological advances of your book that you’re not frustrated by the scattered nature of the material dealing with, including the territories itself, which, as you showed in the maps, even Pondicherry itself is an enclave of enclaves, you know. It’s a fragment of fragments. So, you know you, you actually say, well that’s the way it is. What do we make of that experience? What does it do to people who live in those spaces when their villages are divided by rock boundaries? So, you know, you’ve managed really to, to say well that’s the state of play. How do we write the history that deals with these fragments and put them straight into, you know, how we rethink centrality?
So the minor is not just useful because it remains minor. The minor is like a lever to take us to another like perspective, all together, on what we thought was central, and so we reassess the whole system. And actually that’s pretty much also I think what I found was important, when you say India is not a settler colony, but imperial settlements were common throughout South Asia. And from there, you actually take Auroville itself as a, you know, a latter day settlement of this kind.
Now what you do there is then make us rethink settler colonialism itself. So we don’t have to say, this is another kind of thing going on in India. We actually go back to the theoretical understanding of settler colonialism as a phenomenon, and we have to rethink it because you’ve written this great book, which has all the evidence, you know, to help us do that. So I think these are the methodological moves that you make that are actually really key to thinking about the utility of the world for the rest of us.
I really like that part when you are going empirically into thinking about the fences that were constructed around the enclaves by the British. And then, people are saying, but are these fences like demarcating the British from the French or the French from the British. I mean that kind of, you know, that sort of, you know, this is a sort of realization of the disruption of certainties. This is why your book is disrupting everything because even though that granular level you’re showing how these very strong statements made by these imperial powers were totally like ambivalent because you don’t know, actually, what is the, what is demarcating what from what.
So um I think I’ve, I’m surely coming up to my ten minutes, and we want so many, we have Jayita to also say her part. So, I think what I want to say is I’ll just leave us with a few questions, which of course, we are all, we were all asked to talk about questions and bring questions. One of my questions have already been stolen by Sana because, of course, I too wanted to have a bit broader sense of what is this outlier Chandannagar. You know, how do we like, how do we reckon with the decisions that were maken, made by Chandannagar, by the people of Chandannagar, which was so kind of like, you know, like off pace in a way from the rest of French India? Is it because of Bengal, or you know, whatever? So your views on that would be interesting, of course.
But then I thought, maybe also what I want to ask is then thinking, thinking about Pondicherry then in its sort of Southern space and how it would connect up with the, yeah absolutely, the history of Portuguese India, because, as you show, even the early phase of creating a French kind of person in India was so linked with the people, the Métis, you know, women who are already the product of Portuguese and Indian, you know, kind of interactions. So there’s a kind of very early, a foundational kind of input of the Portuguese in India.
And Ari, Ari, the work that Ari and I have done on the Le Thinnai Kreyolk, we go back to that a lot, even in the language. When you, you know, when Ari’s book talks about the creoles of Pondicherry, you can see that even that the surnames they hold, they’re Portuguese. They’re Iberian surnames. So there’s a lot of like this, the lived understanding that somewhere Portuguese-ness is part of this picture.
And then, of course, there’s a temporality because Portugal cedes Goa around the same time, officially, as India, as, as India absorbs, you know, French India, French enclaves. So there’s something there, which I think would make for a very interesting story, maybe. I know you’re working on other things now, but this would be another great follow up book.
And finally, of course, I must ask you to tell us a little bit about how you are rethinking or maybe you’ve returned to the notion of creolization, which, in your book you kind of closed off a little bit because, at a certain point, you did say that the situation is quite different. I think I’ve earmarked the page. And you’ve said, can’t find it now. But, you know, you know, exactly where, you know, you, you, you, you say that what’s going on in, with creolization in the rest of French India doesn’t quite hold in India. And so, you know, not, and you kind of leave it there, though we talk, you talk a lot about the creole groups and creolized groups. So I don’t know whether hanging out together with all of us these past two years, we’ve had so many, you know, we’ve learnt a lot together, I don’t know whether you would be thinking differently or opening that question again of how you felt there could be a place for thinking about Creole Indians through Pondicherry.
So, I’ll stop there. Thanks again for this brilliant book and, and looking forward to, to, to the, to the rest of the discussion. Thanks.
>> Sarkar: Frankly, I just want to listen to Jessica’s responses instead of sharing my thoughts, but I will keep my comments quite short, so we can hear what you think about all the things that Sana and Ananya has raised.
So thank you Jessica, once again, for, for writing Unsettling Utopia. It was a gripping read about the ongoing processes of decolonization in South Asia. And it was really interesting and exciting to see how you’re challenging the conventional narratives of what imperial exits, exits in plural, mean and the emergence of the postcolonial Indian nation state, what it meant to the people, pardon me, their identities, legal statuses, and for their mobility.
And, as you know, I’m a big fan of your work, and I’ve read it when it came out last summer. And I reread sections of it with my students this semester in Global South Asia, and thank you, also once again for joining our class. So I’m going to keep my comments very brief and really three parts.
So I’ll start by discussing what Unsettling Utopia has been doing, speaking to decolonization and decolonial history. Then some themes will come up again, because I think that’s one of your call to action in the book and in your scholarship, generally speaking. Second, how the book fits into the contestations over immigration and colonial legacies in France and the contestations over citizenship in India. And finally, I’d like to hear your thoughts on, you know, the concept of settler utopianism, and I think that is something that all of us have been thinking about. And I think Sana’s comments about thinking comparatively with Gandhi’s ashram Sabarmati and his farms in South Africa, something I didn’t think about. I was thinking about ISKCON, but I think, you know, we’d love to hear more about the application of this, you know remarkable concept beyond Aurobindo Ashram.
So in Unsettling Utopia, Jessica Namakkal bravely paves the path for future scholarship on decolonization and decolonial histories by challenging previously held notions of national identity, citizenship, subjecthood, settlers, migrants, tourists, to name a few. Her call to action is to decolonize history by disentangling decolonization as a phenomenon from conventional understandings of time, space, and scale, right. Non-British territories, the French and the Portuguese, did not witness a transfer of power in August 1947, and we tend to forget that.
And the identities and belongingness of those who’ve lived in this [inaudible] were very different from the presidencies of Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and yet very different from those in the princely states.
Nehru did not want a moth-eaten India, and it did not get one either, right. But that meant that the processes or decolonization in the subcontinent have to be, be an ongoing process of contestations over territory and belonging through legal, editorial, military, and paramilitary means. And Jessica powerfully shows how that played out in the case of the [inaudible] in the Deccan Peninsula after Chandannagar’s overwhelming support to join the Indian Union in June 1949 referendum.
Interestingly, you know, as I was preparing my remarks, I found that even in the Chandannagar referendum, the process was contested, even though the outcome was not. It was presumably easier to find pink chits that said no to join the French Union than it was to find white chits to say yes to join the French Union, right. So this is so interesting and then there is not much discussion of that either.
Second, the book tackles the contestations over citizenship and subjecthood head on, bringing to the fore the hybrid, hyphenated and complex belongingness of the people who lived in [inaudible]. Unsettling Utopia, I think, could not have arrived at a more poignant time
when citizenship has been contested in India through the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act and the very well known discomfort in France with respect to its own colonial legacy, most recently depicted through the 2021 Stora Report in Algeria. So, I think by, by discussing the otherization of French Indians on racial grounds in France, who often find camaraderie with Sri Lankan Tamils in the [inaudible] of Paris, Jessica skillfully brings the anti-immigration politics of twentieth and twenty-first century France in direct conversation with histories of empire and decolonization. I think that’s truly fascinating and really important. The two have different silos, different historiographical world, and even, even in different disciplines. So, history versus sociology, that’s, that’s what’s going on there.
And I think here I’d like to mention this book that just came out last month, Empire on the Seine by Amit Prakash, Policing of North Africans in Paris, and I think that also brings the conversation of anti-immigration politics and the metropole and with histories of empire and decolonization.
And so these entanglements that Jessica talks about, of Frenchness, Indianness, Tamilness, through cosmopolitan mobility on the, on the one hand, and the racialized, boundedness on the other, really makes Unsettling Utopia thought provoking on almost on every page. And I’m not going to start at the beginning or the end. It’s just amazing throughout. Third and finally, and here is probably the only question I have, you know, you have a full plate already, is the concept of settler utopianism, and I think that’s fascinating and powerful, and I do think it has applicability beyond Mother and Aurobindo. So, in some ways of picking up the conversation, where we had left off last time we discussed your book at BU, I have been thinking how to apply this concept of settler utopianism to make sense of transnational white or white normative spirituality networks that also involve large infrastructure projects using local light labor and land with foreign capital and an alien spiritual expertise, right.
Perhaps one way to do that is to foreground histories of capitalism with histories of decolonization, and I’d love to hear what you think of that, and also I’ll make one quick remark. I think you, I’ve heard you speak today, and you know, elsewhere that when you talk about settler colonialism in India, you become defensive and you say, well I’m not saying India is settler colonialism, and we don’t have that. But I think you know, we had a conversation, a few years ago, I think Sana and one of the attendees, maybe Kalyani was part of it, where we were talking about, you know, these categories of settler, migrant refugees. They’re, they are so mobile. They are so dynamic.
And then, if I bring the discussion of Adivasis and indigenous land in it, I think settler colonialism is a useful category to make sense of Indian polity, so I would probably not shy away from that. Anyway, thank you again for your excellent book, and I look forward to your discussion.
>> Namakkal: Thank you everyone. I know we’re short on, short on time. And, so, I would maybe just quickly respond to what I, all three of you mentioned, and then I know Elizabeth just sent a message about extending a little bit.
So thank you everyone. These are amazing comments. Um, you know, I’ll just start exactly where, Jay, you just left off, which is when I, when I say India wasn’t a settler colony, I sort of mean British India. And, in fact, I explicitly don’t mean India, because I think if we talk about Kashmir, I think if we talk about the Northeast, people who aren’t me because I’m not doing that research should certainly make claims about India, you know, India, being the power that is settling. So I do think those rubrics are so important. I also get what you’re saying about defense.
But um but I, I expanded on the settler utopianism idea a little bit in an essay for the LA Review of Books, which I’ll drop in the chat if anyone’s interested. But that is actually what I’m working on. So the next projects, decolonized cults, doesn’t, isn’t really, anyways, this is what it is—ISKCON, Osho, all of these places. And, and I hadn’t thought about Gandhi in South Africa with, that is, thank you, Sana, that’s certainly something to think about in here, right. Because I mean, Jay, you know you mentioned sort of the whiteness of the spiritual practices and, of course, you know the interesting thing about Auroville in a lot of ways is you had, you know, most of the communal projects were being started in, in North America and in Australia, to a certain extent, New Zealand, in places that were already set up a colony. So, it was abnormal for like a European driven commune to be founded in India, right. Like Osho, that, they, they really appealed to Europeans, but Osho, you know, wasn’t, was an Indian.
So you know I also think, for Auroville, like that, an interesting question because people are Indian who live there, and I think, maybe, this will get us to the Aurobindo Ghosh, Bengal question, to a certain extent, which is like, you know, what is, who, what does it mean to be a Indian, right. What is this? And you know I’ve been really thinking about Manan Asif’s book—The Loss of Hindustan—to think about sort of the, the longer narrative here of what this territory is and what it becomes in this, these nation building moments. But you know people in Auroville are Indian, and they’re European, and they’re all these other things, and you know kinda of cosmopolitan, and it’s the utopianism of cosmopolitanism.
But anywhere, this is built on some sort of labor exploitation, right. So I mean the history of capitalism, point is, is much, much needed I think in thinking about that. But that is the next project. That’s what I’m doing. So, I hope to address a lot of the things there.
Should I, should we ask, take questions, Elizabeth? Does that make most sense? Since we’re like . . .
>> Lhost: Yeah, I think it’d be nice. I just sent a message out to everyone saying we’ll extend the conversation about 10 minutes past our scheduled stopping time. So, please do submit your questions that you have for Jessica, for the other panelists using the Q&A feature.
I believe.
>> Namakkal: It.
>> Lhost: Sathvik has one question for you, if you’re ready for it.
>> Namakkal: Yeah, I’m ready.
>> Lhost: It says, prior to the departure of the French from Puducherry, they offered French citizenship to the Tamil natives and around 6,000 took up that offer. Can you, can you say more about the motivations of these natives of French India who were pro-French and maybe somewhat anti-independence?
>> Namakkal: Yeah, so it’s not, I don’t, it’s not that they were anti-independence. It was that, they, they were attached to being French, right. And it, you know, it’s a, you know, you have the, you have the perspective of the French administrators who were discussing what they thought. You know, so they had a, they had a narrative they wanted to present, and it wasn’t just in the French territories. This was throughout their colonies and, you know, Sana mentioned Fred Cooper’s work, Between Empire and Citizenship, something like that is what it’s called, and you know you can read about similar conversations in French West Africa.
So these conversations are happening because what the French do is they present the idea of the French Union as a foundation of the Fourth Republic. It was a way to maintain, much like the British Commonwealth, almost exactly like the British Commonwealth, but with more suffrage, right, maintain the networks that they had created throughout empire, right.
So it’s, it wasn’t, one of the things I try to show in the book is like it wasn’t necessarily anti, it, what, didn’t mean people weren’t anticolonial to want to vote for the French Union, right. Because the question for them, these people living in South India, and we’ll take Chandannagar out of this conversation, but for people living in South India right, the question of do I want to be ruled by a central government in Delhi, I’m right, or do I want to continue to have this relationship to France, who has offered me citizen, my family’s citizenship for a long time.
So you know 6,000, it was, it was about five or six percent. So it’s, you know, it’s pretty small when you think about the population that, that took them up on that. It was poorly advertised.
You had to have a lot of documents, right. So, it was never going to reach the amount of people it would reach today, and there are still active struggles for people to claim this citizenship. And that’s something that’s ongoing.
But you know, some people who had means and really, you know, they spoke French, they went to the Lycée, they did all of the things, they moved, they moved to France. Many had served in the military, in the French military. They often did migrate. And the people that stayed, you know, and a lot of it has to do with caste, right. Do I want again to be ruled by, even if it’s a secular government, government, a Hindu government or do I want to take my chance with France, right. Chance with France, maybe we’ll call it.
And so there were a lot of motivations actually to vote for the French Union, and the Indian Government was doing a bad job of appealing to people in the South. You know, I mean, it was really this argument of you’re, you’re our brothers. We are, we are blood, right. And so, if you are a Dalit, right, maybe that just doesn’t speak to you at all. So there’s a fair amount of people there thinking about what it would mean to retain some sort of French.
You know I think the other reason it was a low number was because, because people didn’t know what would happen. And in the final, so, 1954 is the year France agrees to leave.
They don’t ratify it until they lose Algeria in 1962. So that’s actually, you can see how hard France was trying to retain the empire, right. But people didn’t know and those, you know, ’52 to ’54, India is, you know, they’re employing sanctions on Pondicherry, things, you know people aren’t getting things.
Nobody knew, if you, they would get kicked out, right. If you’re a French citizen, nobody knew what was going to happen with citizenship. There was no dual citizenship. Right, what happens? Can you keep living there? If you don’t have money you know, and you can’t move to France, which takes an enormous amount of resources, right, what are you going to do?
So, I think there’s amount of, a good amount of fear there. So I think it was more popular than then that percentage actually allows to some extent, and so I hope that answered that question.
>> Lhost: Thanks, we have a, we have a question from Lydia Walker, who asks if you might say a bit more about the difference between decolonization and independence, and particularly how those concepts relate to different temporal moments—1947, 1954, 1961—that have very different meanings in South Asia and also thinking about the French empire, more broadly, in relation to Indochina, Algeria, and can you say a bit more about those terms, as they relate both to political and theoretical transformations.
>> Namakkal: Yeah, thank you, Lydia. That’s a wonderful question, one I’ve been thinking about a lot. You know, they don’t, I, you, never see the word decolonization in, in what’s going on, in the archival documents for this period in French India. Nobody talks about decolonization.
You know, thinking about the, the history of the term, thinking about Stewart Lord’s article about the sort of intellectual history of the word decolonization, the way that it, you know, he argues that it’s really a diplomatic term, term until Fanon imbues it with a radical sentiment in The Wretched of the Earth, which seems fairly accurate. It’s a term that actually comes from France and gets picked up. It’s from, actually, the first use of it is in the 1840s about the, the settlement in Algeria, and it gets taken up again as it’s sort of a diplomatic term in British circles in the early nineteenth or the early 1900s.
And for actually, for Pondicherry, for French India, it really gets used in the sense of that original meaning as a diplomatic diplomatic process, right, of bureaucrats talking about the formal end of empire. Who’s going to, you know, where’s the military going to go? What are we going to do with our economic ties, right, all of these questions. So this really, you know, is a question of sovereignty and independence.
But of course we have this, these are French spaces, to a certain extent. They’re unique French spaces, but they are Francophone spaces, and so you actually have, especially in Indochina, and then, of course, Algeria, you have these radical ideas circulating because of Fanon and Cesaire, and these other French intellectuals. So it does enter this sort of the conversation amongst people. There’s quite a few Pondicherrians who live in Indochina. And, you know, they’re not really a radical leftist bunch. The Communists are mostly in Pondicherry. But, but they start, say sort of get these ideas.
The question of Algeria becomes really important and here, not only because the timeline of independence in French India does mirror the, after the French leave Indochina, lose Indochina, they agree to leave French India. And then in 1962, you know, they lose Algeria, they ratify it then. And so it does follow that temporality and we can’t talk about French India without Algeria and Indochina.
But also in the negotiations between the Nehru Government and the French Government, Algeria is a big problem because Nehru, you know, as a leader of the non-aligned movements is in solidarity with Algerians. You know, he, he wants to support them, but he’s, he also wants to create a good postcolonial relationship with France, and Jay can probably tell us more about those relationships. But Algeria becomes a big political problem for him in that sense. Like what are you going to do with the students in Pondicherry that you, there were anticolonial student movements in Pondicherry, who are saying, you know, get rid of the French? How does he support them but also, right, not stepping the boundaries, with what he said he would do with France, right? They want to do something easy in India, because France is dealing with all these other places, right.
So, so, I think that, that is interesting, I mean the last, the last thing I’ll say about this, and I think there’s so much more to think about Lydia is, of course, you know, when we talk about decolonization now we have the sort of Fanonian meeting, and then we have the meaning that’s been talked about a lot by indigenous, global indigenous movements, who call for land back, who are calling, you know, for, for territorial sovereignty, who talk about decolonization not being a metaphor, right.
So I did take all of that very seriously in the writing of the book, even though it’s, you know, anachronistic for the character, the archives. But I took it very seriously by centering the land in Auroville and even the land in Pondicherry that the ashram buys, the property that they buy, to think, you know, if I’m doing this work now, which I hope is in acts in solidarity with decolonization, we think about land, and we think about what it means for people who had land, who became dispossessed, right. So I, I hoped that I will get into them, to the method that way.
>> Lhost: Yeah, thanks. I think we have one, time for one last question before we wrap up, even though we’re already over time. But this question asks you to think about the place of Auroville within contemporary debates about cultural appropriation and decolonization within the sort of new age modern yoga, wellness discourses that are circulating today. Can you say a bit more about how your work on Auroville and the ashram fits into some of these debates and where, where you see those debates resonating in your own work?
>> Namakkal: Yeah, thanks Phillip. And that, you know, that might be an answer, I ask you, Phillip.
But, but so Auroville, I mean, I think these questions are really important for Auroville and again, you know, partly because this is people who go to India. And, you know, if people have read Karma Cola, the book from the 1970s, it’s, it’s funny, you know, which is a bit of a parity book, but it like, it gets the language that people use going to India in the 1970s quite well, right. And, you know, I think when you’re in India opposed to being in the maybe the ISKCON spaces or in, you know, Rajneeshpuram in Oregon or something like this, you’re within that you’re, you know, you’re fully within this area. So the, like a dawning of special clothing and all of these things becomes like, it goes head to head a little bit more.
You know, this may be actually, this will get to the question that Ananya had about or maybe Hassan, I mean this is your question about secularism, sorry, too because the mother made it very clear that Auroville was not a religion. There was no religions, over and over again. It is spiritual, right. And this is, actually, the really slippery part for people that live in the area, right, or who wanted, maybe to join, or who are wondering how to like get in on what’s going on there. They have all these resources.
And it’s, it’s a spirituality, that is, you know approved of by, by specific people, right. And so I think that appropriation question is really interesting there because The Mother, you know she’s this figure who, for better or worse, like really holds fast to a lot of you know, I think we could just call them Orientalist ideas, about what India is, right. It’s sort of a land of spirituality. She’s imbued with it by being in the land, right.
She, you know, she brought a lot of European practices, you know, everybody plays tennis. Everybody, everybody does all of these calisthenics. They, you know, they sing the French national anthem. They sing the Indian national anthem, so that you know sort of these traditional ideas in some way, but she thinks that you know that, you, but, you know, she’s using the land, the language of shakti, she’s using the language of the divine and, like all of these ideas that you know Aurobindo was sort of picking and choosing from various traditions. And I’m not an Aurobindo scholar, so people can defend the thought all they want.
But so, you know, I, you know, I don’t know that reads always as appropriation, right. She’s sort of creating a new thing, but what is it you know, is I think a question that we can ask. When I was in Auroville doing research, there were like, I took yoga from a Russian woman. You know, it’s like, it’s, it’s their communal way to do these things.
So I don’t know, I think, I think, maybe in some senses, it disrupts our thinking about appropriation being a one to one sort of relationship and to think about like how complex it is when cultures change and should it matter who’s sort of the engine of change there. But you and I can talk about this later perhaps.
>> Lhost: Yeah, thanks Jessica. So we have a couple of questions that are remaining and those of you who submitted them, I will pass them onto Jessica and the other panelists so that they can follow up with you. I regret that we don’t have, you know, tons of endless time for this conversation to continue, but I would like you to join me in thanking our author and our panelists for coming out for this discussion today.
And if you would like to join us on May 10, we’ll be back for a discussion on Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s book Sovereign Attachments, which just won I believe two prizes from the APSA. So registration is available for that event online and hope to see you there.
>> Namakkal: Thank you.
>> Aiyar: Thank you.
>> Sarkar: Thank you everyone! Take care.
