When we think of colonialism on the Indian subcontinent, it is first and foremost the excesses of the British East India Company and the pomp of the Raj that come to mind. The legacies of Vasco da Gama and the Estado da India might be added as an afterthought. Outside the small circle of specialists, the mentioning of France in this context will almost certainly draw a blank. In this engaging and insightful account, Robert Ivermee shows that there is much to be gained from studying the “glorious failure” of the short-lived, but consequential French attempt to establish a vast territorial empire in Southern India.
The first French vessels dispatched by the Compagnie des Indes to the Coromandel Coast encountered a familiar enemy. La perfide Albion, this time represented by agents of the East India Company at Madras, had been lured East to snatch a share of the highly profitable trade in spices and textiles. By the 18th century, the often-fierce competition between European trading interests in the Indian Ocean transformed, in South Asia, into a territorial conflict as the French and British East India companies vied to fill the power vacuum created by the disintegrating Mughal Empire. As Ivermee reveals, the outcome of this rivalry was anything but foretold and the French had the upper hand in the mid-eighteenth century.
Anyone harbouring illusions that the French presence in India was benign or inconsequential would do well to read Glorious Failure.
After several failed attempts to establish a permanent foothold in Surat and various trading centers hugging the South Indian coastline, the Compagnie des Indes secured five comptoirs that, barring moments of occupation by British or allied forces, remained French until the early 1950s. Mahé, the only lasting French settlement on the Malabar Coast, was located just north of the pepper emporium of Calicut. Two smaller settlements were based along the Coromandel Coast: Karikal, located north of the Chola-era port of Nagapattinam in the Kavari river delta, and Yanaon, a small coastal settlement with links to the Nizam of Hyderabad. A more substantial French town, Chandernagore, emerged on the Hooghly river, downstream from the British Fort William (Calcutta) and in the vicinity of Dutch Chinsurah. However, the most significant colony was founded at Pondicherry, a site that hardly seemed promising as a base for French activities in the region:
Like many sites on the flat and marshy Coromandel Coast, it possessed no natural port; large ships were forced to anchor out at sea, their cargoes and passengers unloaded onto smaller vessels to be taken ashore. The countryside around the village was notoriously infertile, with foodstuffs imported from elsewhere in India. Extreme rainfall in August and September forced the pausing of all commercial activity for 5–6 weeks each year, while in other seasons water was in acutely short supply.
Pondicherry was, however, located at a safe distance from other European trading settlements (including British Madras), and the surrounding villages produced high-quality muslins, a crucial commodity in the profitable intra-Asian trade that kept the European trading companies solvent. By 1735, the town, dominated by Fort Louis, was divided in “white” and “black” quarters with a total population of 100.000 residents. Apart from a large Tamil community, Pondicherry was also home to a significant number of Indo-Portuguese (topas) and the offspring of French fathers and local women (métis). Slaves, predominantly from India and Burma, but also shipped in from Madagascar and Africa, formed at least half the population of Pondicherry’s ville blanche. The possession and trafficking of slaves soon became one of the key pillars of French imperialism in India, a reality that, as Ivermee points out, has been mostly glossed over and sits uneasily with a long-established trope in both Francophone historiography and public consciousness that the French presence in India was benign or inconsequential.
Anyone harbouring such illusions would do well to read Glorious Failure. The swift ascent of France as a major imperial actor and regional powerbroker on the Indian subcontinent was driven by greed and the megalomaniac ambitions of company agents such as Joseph François Dupleix, whose governorship (1742-54) marked the peak of French influence and territorial gain. Furthermore, the establishment of French rule over large swathes of South India was unapologetically violent; it relied on superior military expertise and, like the East India Company, thought nothing of turning thousands of Indian sepoys into cannon-fodder to steal a march on competitors and conquer new taxable land.
Glorious Failure reads as a compendium of missed opportunities, unpredictable reversals and strategic mistakes.
Perhaps inevitably, the bulk of the book is concerned with military history and the steady rhythm of sieges, pitched land battles and naval skirmishes. Ivermee skillfully brings out the ever-shifting local matrix of power, determined by the relative strength of, and the alliances between, the key players in the Carnatic: the East India Company, France, Hyderabad, Mysore and the Maratha Confederacy. The book’s main protagonists are the French civil and military representatives residing in Chandernagore and Pondicherry and a coterie of French mercenaries. The latter were coveted by Indian rulers for their military expertise and local power brokers in their own right that were recruited for the French cause when opportunity arose. We also encounter a breathless succession of Maharajas, Nawabs and Nizams who either joined or opposed French imperialism to bolster their own position in the chaotic, post-Mughal order, and crucial Indian middlemen, such as the wealthy Tamil resident of Pondicherry, Ananda Ranga Pillai. Pillai’s journal, kept for a period of 25 years, sheds an interesting light on the rise and eventual disgrace of Dupleix.
The French governor embodied the greed and pomp of 18th-century company officials. Obsessed with the external trappings of power, he renamed a little hamlet north of Pondicherry “Dupleixpettai” and threatened “fines for anyone caught using the old name”. Dupleix (and his British counterpart Robert Clive) thrived in the information vacuum caused by the long delay in communications with Europe. Often acting on own initiative and in direct defiance of orders, Dupleix became obsessed with outflanking Britain and acquiring territory at any cost.
However, news about domestic upheavals or war in Europe, often halted or reversed the hard-fought gains of Dupleix’ expansionism. For example, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) stipulated the return of newly conquered Madras to the British, a move that fatally undermined French initiative in the Carnatic and sowed the seeds of glorious failure. By 1754, Dupleix was recalled and nine years later Pondicherry was thoroughly razed by British troops and the French presence in India reduced to the five principal comptoirs.
French ambitions were, as Ivermee shows, slow to adjust to the new realities on the ground. The heady years following the Revolution and the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte witnessed various schemes that presented French imperialism as a benign alternative to English tyranny. But French manoeuvers in India had long shown that avowed concerns for Indian liberty were merely rhetorical and trumped by realpolitik and revanche.
A final golden opportunity presented itself in 1788 when Tipu Sultan, ruler of the powerful South Indian kingdom of Mysore, dispatched three ambassadors to Versailles to conclude an alliance against Britain. Eight years earlier, at the Battle of Pollilur, Tipu’s French-drilled troops had inflicted one of the most devastating defeats suffered by troops of the East India Company. But the French court remained non-committal and a year later France was swept by the revolutionary tide following the storming of the Bastille.
A later plot that involved Napoleon marching from Egypt to India to relieve Mysore came to nothing and Tipu’s fate was sealed at the Battle of Seringapatam (1799). Following Napoleon’s defeat, the Treaty of Paris (1814) signaled the final crushing blow to any French ambitions to recover l’Inde perdue: in exchange for keeping its small comptoirs, France recognized the territorial gains of the East India Company and was prohibited from sending troops to the Indian subcontinent.
The legacies of French imperialism in India were often mobilized to promote other colonizing schemes, most notably in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Glorious Failure reads as a compendium of missed opportunities, unpredictable reversals and strategic mistakes that goes some way to explain the failure of French imperialism in South Asia. But there was no premeditated plan to conquer India in the first place; initiative lay with a small elite of French actors on the ground who, lured by greed and fired by opportunism and hubris, pursued their own interests. As Ivermee reminds us, despite Dupleix’s efforts to mobilize support for his expansionist policy, India was never a prime concern in Versailles. Even so, one gets the impression that with a little more financial and military support and diplomatic foresight, the pendulum might well have swayed in favour of France.
The book ends on a note of reflection and examines, in a few condensed pages, the many afterlives of French imperialism, both in the comptoirs and in the realm of ideas. Although Ivermee raises many fascinating points, these merit more extensive treatment. As Ivermee points out, the legacies of French imperialism in India were often mobilized to promote other colonizing schemes, most notably in Africa and Southeast Asia. The idea of L’Inde perdue played an especially prominent role in the French colonial imagination on Indochina, a process that peaked in the early 20th century when French archaeologists and Indologists began the systematic study of Angkor’s “Indic” Hindu-Buddhist templescapes. Glorious Failure is bound to raise renewed interest in these and other legacies, and offers a well-grafted and accessible work of synthesis that removes the romantic gloss and challenges the misplaced nostalgia that has obscured the history of French India.
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