Roxanne Panchasi  (Simon Fraser University)
An "Open Window" Between Two Nations: French Cultural Exchanges with India, 1947-1989

In 1814, after over a century of European struggles for power over the subcontinent, the Treaty of Paris stabilized French authority over five enclaves scattered along the coasts of an increasingly British-dominated India: Pondichéry, Mahé, Karaikal, Yanam and Chandernagore. By 1947, the year of India's independence, the history of "French India" included struggles over citizenship and political representation, as well as the negotiation of cultural and religious differences between the Indian comptoirs and the French métropole. In 1947, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru expressed his hope that Pondicherry might function "as an open window to France" after the former colony's merger with India, a merger he perceived as inevitable. After an initial joint agreement in 1948, the French ceded their territories in 1954, eventually ratifying their transfer to India in 1962.

Defeated at Diên Biên Phú in Indochina in 1954 and having granted independence to Algeria in 1962, the French government could point to the peaceable transfer of the India comptoirs as an instance of "amicable" decolonization. In the emergent contexts of Cold War politics and rapid technological change, a "North-South" set of connections between France and India also held the possibility for both nations to further multiple and interconnected agendas: modernization, "non-alignment," the development of nuclear power, and economic trade. In the past fifty years, these important goals have been nurtured and achieved in and through a range of cultural, diplomatic, and economic exchanges enabling both nations to enjoy the material and symbolic benefits of their transformed relationship.

Studies of the French colonial past tend to forget about India as they emphasize Indochina, Algeria, Africa and, more recently, the Pacific. Indian historians and theorists of the "subaltern" spend little time on the presence of imperial powers other than Britain and tend to generalize "the West" as if there is no distinction to be made between different colonial policies, practices, and aftermaths. This paper will examine the ties forged between France and India in the second half of the twentieth century as a unique case of the "postcolonial." Speaking to the proposed conference theme of "(post)colonial contexts" most directly, the paper will draw on the archive of this historical case study in order to reflect on the meanings of the terms "postcolonial," "transnational," and "global" in the discipline of history, in French and Francophone studies, and in literary and theoretical engagements with colonial formations and their legacies.