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Translingualism in Francophone Writing from South Asia
Blake Smith
L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 59, Number 4, Winter 2019, pp. 68-80 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2019.0042
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/744079
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Translingualism in Francophone Writing
from South Asia
Blake Smith
F
RENCH HAS BEEN A SOUTH ASIAN language since the seven-
teenth century, when agents of the French East India Company (Com-
pagnie Française des Indes Orientales, founded in 1664) and travelers
like François Bernier (1620–1688) first arrived in the Indian subcontinent. For
the next three centuries, France would maintain a tenuous colonial presence
in the region, centered on the port city of Pondicherry in the present-day
Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Until its cession to the Indian government in
1954, Pondicherry was the center of ‘French India’ (Inde française), a string
of territories along the coast of South Asia. This colonial empire included pop-
ulations speaking many South Asian languages, including Tamil, Malayalam,
and Telugu, but its official language was French. For many inhabitants of the
French colonies in South Asia, French became a second and even a first lan-
guage—and for some, a language of literary expression. A number of South
Asian authors from outside the former French colonies, particularly from
Bengal and the former Portuguese colony of Goa, have also chosen to write
in French alongside other languages. South Asia’s francophone writing,
emerging from multiple and complex sites of linguistic interaction, is thus
translingual in many senses. Drawing on the work of Steven G. Kellman and
Jacqueline Dutton, this article provides an overview of the history and current
state of francophone literature from South Asia, paying special attention to the
translingual practices of two contemporary Pondicherrian writers, K. Mada-
vane and Ari Gautier.
The notion of ‘translingual’ writing, brought to scholarly attention by
Steven G. Kellman in his The Translingual Imagination, has a wide variety of
potential meanings. In its primary sense, for Kellman, it denotes texts by
authors who move ‘between’ languages, either by writing in a number of them
or by writing primarily in one that is not their ‘mother tongue.’ Most of fran-
cophone South Asian authors are straightforwardly ‘translingual’ in this sense:
they are able to write in multiple languages and choose French from a range
of alternatives. “Linguistic medium is a matter of option” for such authors
who “move beyond their native languages.”1
Scholars of francophone literature in the contemporary world such as
Jacqueline Dutton raise concerns with the assumptions that underwrite Kell-
© L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2019), pp. 68–80BLAKE SMITH
man’s notion of translingual writing as movement between languages, as if
these were coherent, separated spaces. Dutton critiques “monolingualism,”
the assumption that individuals normally have access to one distinct language,
and therefore that practices that might be identified as ‘translingual’ are
exceptions to an imagined monolingual norm. Rather than see translingualism
as a choice made by certain exceptional writers, Dutton argues that the
“translingual turn” undermines the notion of the French language as some-
thing “monolithic.”2 She points to the importance of post-colonial sites of lit-
erary production for rethinking the assumption that there exists a singular,
unitary French language with defined borders that could be crossed. Mada-
vane and Gautier both echo Dutton’s concerns. Their texts are marked with
traces of other South Asian languages and with meditations on the uncertain
identity of French in a post-colonial milieu, in which the concept of a ‘trans’-
movement between two or more originally and essentially separate languages
becomes fraught and problematic.
While Dutton’s critiques are invaluable for understanding South Asian
francophone literature, Kellman’s view of translingual writing as a practice
linked to the writers’ exercise of choice, and thus to questions of intended audi-
ence and of self-presentation, is critical for making sense of the range of South
Asian writers who used French. Few scholars have attended to the range of
francophone literary production coming from the subcontinent, although there
has been increased awareness of the importance of South Asian diasporas to
the history and cultures of the francophone world generally.3 The only signifi-
cant work done on this topic to date has been Vijaya Rao’s anthology, Écriture
indienne d’expression française (2008), which includes a short introduction
and biographical notes on the sixteen authors included. Rao observes the
“intercultural” quality of South Asian francophone writing. Most of the texts
included in the anthology include words and phrases from a variety of South
Asian languages—and Rao pointedly notes that the existence of a diversity of
francophone literary texts from a region where French is familiar only to a tiny
minority must raise questions about the imagined audience and intended
effects of such writing. Analyzing the work of Pondicherry-born author K.
Madavane, who sprinkles his French-language stories with Tamil words and
phrases, Rao suggests that Madavane writes as if his audience were composed
“exclusively of Franco-Tamils.”4 Yet this possible audience exists only virtu-
ally—there is no significant Franco-Indian reading public. The apparently
small audience for and limited circulation of francophone texts from South
Asia underscore the element of choice central to Kellner’s understanding of
translingualism. The majority of South Asia’s francophone writers were not
VOL. 59, NO. 4 69L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
native speakers of French, and they adopted French for literary purposes
among a range of options that might seem more attractive in terms of reaching
potential readers.
Bengal
Francophone literary production in South Asia, in fact, began outside the areas
subject to French colonial rule. From the late nineteenth century until at least
the last decades of the twentieth, several prominent authors from Bengal better
known for their writings in English or Bengali also chose to write in French.
One of the most famous of these was Toru Dutt (1856–1877), the daughter of
a Christian family from Calcutta with ties to the colonial bureaucracy, who
seems to have been the first Indian author to write in French. During her short
life, she wrote the romantic novel Le journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers (pub-
lished posthumously in 1879).5 She also published an anthology of French
poetry in English translation.6 Dutt is known today primarily for her original
poetry in English, although there has been some renewed interest in Le journal
de Mademoiselle d’Arvers, translated into English.7
Dutt’s choice of writing in French may have been motivated in part by her
vision of France as the nation of 1789. In her original English-language poetry,
Dutt expressed her admiration for the Revolution and her identification with the
France of that era. A striking poem on this theme, “On the Fly Leaf of Erck-
mann-Chatrian’s novel entitled Madame Thérèse,” performs a number of
translingual practices. A reference to an 1863 novel by Erckmann-Chatrian (the
pseudonym for a team of French authors, Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Cha-
trian), in which the titular heroine fights in the armies of revolutionary France
disguised as a man, the poem contains a number of French words and phrases.
In the climax of the poem, Dutt declares:
I read the story and my heart beats fast!
Well might all Europe quail before thee, France,
Battling against oppression! Years have past,
Yet of that time men speak with moistened glance.
Va-nu-pieds! When rose high your Marseillaise
Man knew his rights to earth’s remotest bound,
And tyrants trembled. Yours alone the praise!8
This passage includes another French phrase, and a (somewhat forced) rhyme
between a French word (Marseillaise) and an English one (praise), but it also
creates a translingual space in which the poem’s narrator, the reader realizes,
has been reading the French novel throughout the poem’s preceding stanzas
70 WINTER 2019BLAKE SMITH
and relaying its content. This form of translingual practice not only displays a
certain multilingual virtuosity on the part of the poet, but, more critically, con-
nects the narrator’s ability to move between French and English, between
reading and speaking, between past and present, to what she announces to be
the universal scope of French revolutionary values. Translingualism here is an
implicitly political strategy, one that brings the French Revolution out of the
past and out of a French-language novel into the present of the English-lan-
guage poem.
Other Bengali authors shared Dutt’s sense of the political resonances of
adopting French as a literary language. Ranajit Sarkar (1932–2011), a scholar
and poet born in what is now Bangladesh, was part of a group of Bengali intel-
lectuals associated with Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), an Indian nationalist
and spiritual leader who moved to Pondicherry in 1910. Ghose’s arrival in the
French colony brought other Bengali intellectuals to the region, and the reli-
gious movement that he led inspired a certain amount of francophone literary
production. Aurobindo himself wrote in French, and his circle included fran-
cophone authors such as Amita Sen and Nolini Kanta Gupta. Ranajit Sarkar,
for his part, completed a PhD in France on Aurobindo’s poetics (Rao 232).
Sarhar’s 1971 collection Pays en guerre includes a notable poem about the
French language and Sarkar’s own translingual practice, “Langue étrangère”:
J’écris en une langue étrangère
peut-être tu ne comprendras pas
mais je n’ai pas d’autre choix
car ma langue est blessée.
Elle ne peut plus que gémir
et pleurer, soupirer, hurler
et parfois maudire
mais elle ne peut pas chanter.
C’est pourquoi je t’écris
en une autre langue
qui a chanté quelques fois
la liberté. (Rao i)
Like Dutt, Sarkar presents French as a language that has an inherent connec-
tion to freedom, and he imagines the adoption of this language as a tool for
personal emancipation.
Goa
While Bengali writers often presented French as a political language linked to
values of liberty and the Revolution in the Portuguese colony of Goa, fran-
VOL. 59, NO. 4 71L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
cophone writers used French to communicate a different set of meanings,
chiefly signifying participation in a cosmopolitan elite oriented towards
Europe. Here, at the center of the Portugal’s empire in Asia, French was famil-
iar to the educated elite of the colony, and it was sometimes used in texts
meant for local consumption.9 Paulino Dias (1874–1919), a poet and medical
doctor, was the editor of a Goan literary magazine Revista de India. A minor-
ity of his works are in French, or in French and Portuguese such as the bilin-
gual Vishmdal, Vishnoulal.10 The lawyer and composer Carlos Eugenia Fer-
reira (1869–1932) composed some lyrics in French, such as the “Ballets du
Concan.” French also offered a means of writing from Goa to Europe, either
for purposes of genuine communication or as a rhetorical device of apostro-
phe. Francisco Luis Gomes (1829–1869), a Goan politican and novelist noted
for his novel Os Bramanes (1866), which contributed to a wave of Orientalist
fantasies about India, wrote an essay on his homeland in the form of a public
“Lettre à Lamartine.” The Goan military officer Fernando Leal (1846–1910),
who notably translated Baudelaire into Portuguese, also wrote original poems
in French, including an idiosyncratic political poem “Que Dieu garde le Tsar!”
addressed to “Sa majesté l’empereur de toutes les Russies” (Rao 46). The poet
Lino Abreu (1914–1975) likewise wrote a set of Lettres à Madame de Pom-
meret commenting wryly on aspects of Goan culture to an imaginary inter-
locutor in France.11
Abreu begins his Lettres à Madame de Pommeret by asking the recipient
of his letters, an elegant French woman curious about Goa, to recall their first
meeting:
“Parlez-vous français, Monsieur?” m’avez-vous demandé. “Comme-ci, comme ça” répon-
dis-je. Vous aurez à me pardonner bien des fautes parce que je ne suis qu’un débutant en
cette langue charmante). (Rao 108)
Here Abreu, in correct and formal French, excuses himself as a provincial
Goanese who has only a smattering of the language, thus underscoring both
his mastery of it and his possession of a gentlemanly humility. While the
actual circulation of this text (one of the few Goanese francophone texts to be
printed) seems to have been minimal even in Goa, let alone in Europe, it
marks Abreu’s belonging to a set of local French-speaking intellectuals. Here
translingual writing in French seems to have been a means of constructing
one’s identity (and the identity of Goa more broadly) as part of a sophisticated
cosmopolitan elite, rather than, as in Bengal, being associated with the partic-
ular set of universalist values linked to the French Revolution.
72 WINTER 2019BLAKE SMITH
Writing from the former French colonies
Whatever their reasons for writing in French, francophone South Asian
authors from Bengal and Goa were translingual authors of the sort conceived
by Kellman; they used French as a language of choice alongside other literary
languages. Authors who grew up in the former French colonial territories have
other sorts of relationships to French and different practices of translingual-
ism. For M. Mukundan (b. 1942), an author from the French colony of Mahé
(Mayyazhi) on the western coast of present-day India, French is one of the
languages that he grew up speaking, along with Malayalam. His modernist
short stories and his historical novel about the end of French rule, By the
Shores of the Mayyazhi (Mayyazhi Puzhayude Theerangalil) (1974), written
in Malayalam, earned him acclaim as one of the premier authors in that lan-
guage. Mukundan does not use French for original literary creation but trans-
lates some of his own Malayalam-language stories into it, at times supplying
footnotes for Malayalam words that he retains in the translated versions (Rao
xv). In contrast, a number of authors from the French territories of
Pondicherry and Karikal, bordering the contemporary Indian state of Tamil
Nadu, such as K. Madavane (b. 1946–) and Ari Gautier, while also familiar
with the local language of Tamil, use French almost exclusively for their lit-
erary work.
It may not be obvious that Madavane and Gautier should be considered as
translingual authors, given that they write in it as a ‘mother tongue’ and write
little in other languages such as English. For Kellner, such writers are less
compelling examples of translingual literary practice than Samuel Beckett,
Eugene Ionesco, and Vladimir Nabokov, who changed language as well as
location. But Gautier and Madavane’s work is marked by translingual memo-
ries, mediations, and meditations. They consider what it means to speak and
write in French from sites in contemporary South Asia, and they show how
French is in dialogue with other languages such as Tamil and Pondicherrian
Creole. Their use of French is not perhaps “a matter of option” as Kellner
imagines it; nor do they quite “move beyond” French (Kellner 51, 16). Yet if
they do not meet these criteria for being translingual authors, their work nev-
ertheless has undeniable translingual aspects. Indeed, as Dutton suggests, it
shows that the French of post-colonial South Asia is not a narrow essence
from which an author would have to move ‘beyond’ or opt out of in order to
be translingual. Rather, French is already entangled with other tongues.
Born in 1946 in the French colony of Pondicherry (during the last decade
of French rule before the cession of the colony to India in 1954), Madavane
is a theater director by profession, and the author of plays, short stories, and
VOL. 59, NO. 4 73L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
essays in French. His writings include the dramas La malédiction des étoiles,
ou le Mahabharata des femmes (1998) and Le véritier, ou le mensonge des
dieux (2010) and Mourir à Bénarès, a collection of short stories (2004).12 In
many of these works Madavane not only incorporates words and phrases from
many languages, but also explicitly thematizes the challenges and possibilities
of his linguistic horizons as a francophone author from Pondicherry living and
working in New Delhi, a non-francophone city.
The most straightforward examples of translingual practice in Madavane’s
writings are perhaps those in which he incorporates words and phrases from
other languages into his French texts, as he does in a number of stories from
his collection Mourir à Bénarès. The short story “Ton royaume pour un men-
songe” is a grim retelling of the Indian myth of Harishchandra, a king who is
tested by the gods with various misfortunes. Set in an ancient kingdom and
involving many elements of Hindu practice and belief, the story uses many
words of Sanskrit origin, such as mantras (chants), yagna (sacrifice), dharma
(duty), vidya (illusion), and chandala (guardian of a cemetery). All of these
are set off from the rest of the text in italics, and often, when the terms first
appear, they are followed by a brief explanation in French. In the recent Eng-
lish translation of Mourir à Bénarès published in India, most of these expla-
nations disappear and all of these words are taken out of italics.13
This differential treatment of Sanskrit terms in the French and English ver-
sions of the text follows the pattern Madavane described in his 2002 essay,
“Thinking in the Mother’s Language, Writing in the Father’s Language.” Here
Madavane explains that his play La malédiction des étoiles, ou le Mahab-
harata des femmes was originally conceived for a non-Indian francophone
audience, as a kind of “écriture interculturelle.”14 He claims that the play was
self-consciously written in a “langue étrangère” and so includes references and
aids for making presumably unfamiliar Indian words and names comprehensi-
ble to viewers and readers (“Penser dans la langue” 510). For example, the
names of Hindu deities in the play are often followed by short epithets explain-
ing who these gods are or what they do. Madavane eliminated such epithets
from the English-language version, conceived as a specifically Indian play.
In other stories from the collection Mourir à Bénarès, Madavane’s narra-
tors thematize the issue of such “intercultural” movements among different
languages. The story “Un canot de papier sur le Gange” begins as the narrator
meditates on the names of his schoolmates during his childhood in the last
years of colonial rule in Pondicherry. He lists them: “Arago, Babylone,
Magry, Marius, Romulus, Tirouvanziam, Verone, Lionel, Simonel, Gonzalez,
Delacroix, Forbin, Delamanche, Divanon, Décosta, Burgues, Labiche,
74 WINTER 2019BLAKE SMITH
Ladouceur, etc.” As he considers the multiple linguistic and cultural origins of
these names, the narrator notes that “à cette époque nous n’avons jamais
pensé que ça sonnait étrange. La métissage d’esprit allait de pair avec l’inter-
culturalité linguistique.”15 “Inter-cultural” is a key word of Madavane’s writ-
ing. Hardly ever does Madavane discuss “trans-cultural,” “trans-lingual” or
other forms of “trans-ness,” which seem to suggest a passage from one fixed
essence to another. Rather, in both his fiction and non-fiction writing, Mada-
vane prefers “inter-,” with its suggestions of mixing and mingling.
Another connection between Madavane’s essayistic writing and his fiction
can be found in his habit of playing with references to the notion, captured in
phrases such as “nos ancêtres les Gaulois,” according to which children in
French school, even in colonies far from the metropole, would learn that they
were the descendants of Gallic ancestors.16 For Madavane, this colonial-era
myth of national origin seems inseparable from the French language itself,
and particularly from what it means for an Indian to learn it, or not learn it. In
his short story “Une vache sacrée à Varanasi,” a Pondicherry-born narrator
living in the northern Indian city of Varanasi (Benares) has been prevailed
upon to give a tour of the local attractions to the visiting wife of a French
diplomat. The narrator finds her vain and condescending, and when she com-
pliments his French he replies, “Je n’ai aucun mérite, Madame. Je suis un des
produits de vos anciennes colonies. Je viens de Pondichéry. Mes ancetres
aussi étaient des Gaulois aux cheveux blonds.” In a similar vein, Madavane’s
2002 essay, “Thinking in the Mother’s Language, Writing in the Father’s Lan-
guage,” reproduces pages from a diary entry written in the 1970s, shortly after
his departure from Pondicherry to Delhi. In this passage, Madavane discusses
how each of his parents related differently to French, the language of state
power in the Pondicherry of his youth. His mother never understood French
very well and spoke to Madavane in Tamil: “Pauvre maman! Elle ignorait que
ses ancêtres aussi étaient des Gaulois aux cheveux blonds” (“Penser dans la
langue” 507).
It might be tempting to read both of the cases cited above as ironic humor
by which Madavane exposes cultural assumptions that were encoded in the
process of linguistic acquisition during his colonial education. In the diary
entry just cited, Madavane goes on to underline the disparity between the
world that seems to be evoked by French as he learned it in childhood, and the
everyday world of his Indian experience. French, he says,
m’a enseigné que il y avait quatre saisons... En décembre, j’ai toujours voulu voir et toucher
les flocons de neige à travers les fenêtres de ma maison. Quelle a été ma déception de ne voir
tomber, saison après saison, que des cordes de pluie. (“Penser dans la langue” 507)
VOL. 59, NO. 4 75L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
Madavane observes, however, that the discrepancy between the cultural (and
climatological) understandings embedded in the French language and his own
experience became, with time, a source of literary inspiration in addition to
disappointment or sarcastic comment. As he states in his 2002 essay cited
above, when he wrote his 1998 drama, La malédiction des étoiles, ou le
Mahabharata des femmes, a retelling of the ancient Sanskrit epic, Madavane
deliberately mixed images from “cultures différentes... images européennes
avec des images indiennes. Ou même parfois les images propres à l’Inde du
Sud avec celles du Nord.” He demonstrates how this mixing of images from
different cultures operates by drawing attention to a passage in which charac-
ters simultaneously evoke desert winds, sea breezes, and autumn leaves, put-
ting natural phenomena from diverse environments together in a manner that
may appear incoherent or paradoxical. Madavane, however, argues that such
mixed metaphors make perfect sense: “Pourquoi pas? Cette situation a long-
temps existé dans l’imagination d’un enfant de huit ans” (“Penser dans la
langue” 511). That is to say, Madavane’s childhood confusion and disappoint-
ment of expecting ‘French’ December in southern India now can be reread as
a site of translingual practice, in which different cultural understandings
embedded in different ways of speaking about ‘winter’ can be activated
together, enriching rather than disproving or disappointing each other.
Madavane presents languages as systems of cultural meanings that can be
combined and manipulated. He argues, moreover, that this condition of lin-
guistic and culture mixture is the normal state of life in South Asia. Both
Pondicherry, his childhood home, and Delhi, where he currently lives, are,
Madavane writes, sites of “interculturalité inevitable.” The movement
between Tamil and French, which appeared as the “la langue de l’autre” in his
colonial-era boyhood, appears in retrospect as one of the many movements
among languages and cultures that constitutes the plurality of South Asia, “ma
propre civilisation” (“Penser dans la langue” 509).
Madavane insists on the connection between language and culture, and on
the inevitability of connections among different languages and cultures in a
South Asian context. For him, translingualism appears not as an exceptional
aspect of his biography as a writer but as the everyday condition of inhabitants
of the subcontinent. Ari Gautier, a Pondicherrian writer born in post-colonial
Pondicherry, is also concerned to explore the connections between French and
South Asian languages and cultures, but his work interrogates the very possi-
bility of there being such a thing as a clearly defined ‘French’ that could be in
conversation with other tongues. This is evident in Gautier’s novel Le Thinnai
(2018), a vision of childhood in a working-class neighborhood in Pondicherry
76 WINTER 2019BLAKE SMITH
during the 1960s. Both in its historical setting (a decade after the end of the
French colonial presence) and in its geographical one (a neighborhood with
few French speakers), the novel undercuts the hegemony of French language
and French culture in this former center of French India.
Most of the novel’s characters are Tamil speakers, and both their words and
the language of the narrator are regularly interspersed with untranslated Tamil
words and phrases. These elements are sometimes marked off in italics, some-
times not. At times the meaning of such words and phrases is made clear through
context, as in the following exchange at the beginning of the novel, when the nar-
rator, now an adult, returns to his childhood home and is spotted by his former
friends. One of them approaches him saying, “Qu’est-ce que tu as changé! Tu es
devenu blanc comme un Vellakaran! Tu sens bon; tu sens la France!”17 Here the
meaning of the Tamil word Vellakaran, or European, is clear.
While Tamil words and phrases appear on nearly every page of the novel,
their meaning is only rarely explained. One case occurs in the course of a dis-
cussion of the character Lourdes, the servant of the narrator’s family. Lourdes
belongs to a community of Pondicherrian Creoles, a population understood to
be the descendants of relationships between European men and Tamil women
generations ago. More specifically, Lourdes is one of the “bas créoles,” as
opposed to the “hauts créoles.” While the latter were “descendants des colons,
et parlant parfaitement français,” the “bas créoles” were despised “pour leur
filiation portugaise, anglaise, danoise, écossaise et hollandaise... relégués en
dehors des boulevards, dans les villages des pêcheurs ou dans les bas-fonds
des hors-castes.” Lourdes and other “bas créoles” are victims of what the nar-
rator calls a “un double racisme,” perceived neither as properly Indian nor as
properly white (Gautier 77). Towards the end of a long passage on Lourdes
and her family history, the narrator recalls that “les Tamouls avaient l’habi-
tude de l’appeler par des noms injurieux comme Naatakavaii (jupe sale) ou
Piitasattaykarichi (semblant de blanc)” (Gautier 77, 87). This is one of the
only instances in which the novel explains the meaning of the Tamil words it
so frequently deploys, a move that underscores the role of language in Lour-
des’ social exclusion.
This unusual effort to specify the meaning of Tamil words is part of a
larger pattern of attention in the novel to Lourdes’ complex social and linguis-
tic situation. Indeed, as the narrator observes, she is a “double” victim,
excluded not only from Tamil society and through the Tamil language, but
also from and within French. She is the only character in the novel presented
as speaking Pondicherrian Creole, a language that has received almost no
scholarly attention or literary documentation outside of Gautier’s novel.
VOL. 59, NO. 4 77L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
According to the narrator, “c’est le language qu’elle parlait.” And yet, for
Lourdes, there is no such thing as Creole, “because for her it was French “car
pour elle c’était du français.” Finding her Creole/French too linguistically
impure to be spoken around his francophone children, the narrator’s father
forbids his servant Lourdes from speaking her language in his house. He
forces her instead to speak “dans une langue qu’elle ne maîtrisait pas qui était
le tamoul” (Gautier 76–77).
The father’s contempt for Creoles and their language is shared by other
characters. One of them, for example, mocks Lourdes by imitating her accent:
“Kisamoilà? Koisadonc?” (Gautier 91). The narrator’s own attitude towards
Lourdes’ language is inconsistent. On the one hand, he seems to endorse his
father’s decision “car le créole pondichérien est un français corrompu avec
des mots tamouls auquel on ajoute quelques mots portugais.” He insists that
Lourdes is often difficult to understand, and that her speech is full of expres-
sions “dont seuls les créoles connaissent le sens.” At the same time, the nar-
rator wonders if her language, a “mélange de francais et de tamoul,” wouldn’t
be the ideal “lingua franca” for his family, whose members speak to each
other in one or the other of these two tongues (Gautier 77).
Lourdes resists her employer’s linguistic impositions as best she can, and
she speaks to the narrator and his younger brother in her language whenever
the father is not present. She refuses, moreover, to characterize this language
as anything other than French. When her direct speech appears in the text, it
is marked by a set of typical phrases and structures that the narrator identifies
as Creole, such as “quoi don... rasoir don” (Gautier 77). In one of her longest
passages of direct speech, Lourdes angrily objects when she overhears her
employer discussing how he intends to find her a husband: “Quoi Monsieur,
vous voulez me mariager? Pourquoi même don? Vous savez quel caressement
j’ai pour vos enfants. Je ne me mariagerais pas avec un paya de trottevoir!
D’abord, mon cousin a appelé pour moi en France. Je vais partir dans le avion
et je vivrais avec un blanc Monsieur. Quel toupet don!” (Gautier 86). The pas-
sage is characteristic of Lourdes’ patterns of speech elsewhere in the novel.
Although marked by some non-standard spellings and word choice, it seems
by no means indecipherable. Within Le Thinnai, Lourdes’ Creole is an
ambiguously translingual presence, one that appears to some characters (and
sometimes to the narrator) as an independent language marking its speaker’s
social exclusion, at other times as a degenerate and corrupted French, yet also
as a potentially hopeful example of métissage. Lourdes herself, however,
denies that she is speaking anything other than French—a French that not only
is capacious enough to include the particular expressions of her community,
78 WINTER 2019BLAKE SMITH
but indeed is synonymous with just her own way of speaking. While scholars
such as Kellner valorize voluntary movements from one language to another,
and writers explore the possibilities of dialogue among languages within a
single text, Lourdes refuses to consider herself as being in any kind of linguis-
tic transit or dialogue at all. This refusal recalls Jacqueline Dutton’s insistence
that the translingual turn will take scholars beyond obvious cases of linguistic
passage and interface into questions about the identities of languages, ques-
tions that will require us to undo our monolingual assumptions. Francophone
writing from South Asia offers an ideal site for this questioning.
Conclusion
It is not obvious why francophone literature from Pondicherry not only con-
tinues to survive into the twenty-first century, but has become, within the fic-
tion of Madavane and Gautier, increasingly attentive to questions of identity
and language in a post-colonial context. Throughout the colonial era, from the
nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, Pondicherry was not a site of fran-
cophone literary production on the scale of Bengal or Goa. Nor did texts from
any of these sites explicitly thematize issues of translingualism, which never-
theless formed critical elements of their social and linguistic contexts. Making
sense of this recent shift is beyond the scope of the present article; future work
on contemporary francophone writing from South Asian will need to address
its relationship to post-colonial literary trends from the francophone world
and from other literary traditions in South Asia. What is clear, however, is the
importance of different forms of translingual writing to South Asian francoph-
one authors over the last two hundred years.
The diversity of translingual practices in South Asia illustrates the need
for greater clarity and precision in scholars’ use of the concept of translingual-
ism. The choice to write in a second language, as Kellner defines translingual-
ism, needs to be understood in the context of the values and meanings that are
imagined to adhere to the chosen language, and the possibilities for producing
or affirming individual and collective identities that this language seems to
offer. In Bengal, English- and Bengali-speaking intellectuals chose to write in
French to express their political sympathies with the French Revolution. In
Goa, intellectuals likewise used French as a second language to perform their
identities and values, but the content of what they were performing was
entirely different. French appeared as a language of elite refinement and Euro-
pean identity rather than revolution. More radically, following Dutton, the
recent fiction of Madavane and Gautier suggests that scholars cannot assume
writers are or imagine themselves to be moving ‘between’ different languages
VOL. 59, NO. 4 79L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
in trajectories that conform to a monolingual vision of a world divided into
discrete linguistic territories. Rather, translingualism may need to be consid-
ered as the set of practices in which the very identities of languages, from
Lourdes’ Creole to standard French, are called into question.
University of Chicago Society of Fellows
Notes
1. Steven G. Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000), 51,
16.
2. Jacqueline Dutton, “État Présent: World Literature in French, Littérature-Monde, and the
Translingual Turn,” French Studies, 70:3 (July 2016): 414.
3. “Indianités Francophones / Indian Ethnoscapes in French Literature,” Renée Larrier and
Brinda J. Mehta, eds., L’Esprit Créateur, 50:2 (2010).
4. Vijaya Rao, “Ecriture indienne d’expression française (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008) xvi.
5. Toru Dutt, Le journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers: Nouvelle écrite en français (Paris: Didier,
1879).
6. Toru Dutt, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (Bhowanipore: B. M. Bhose, 1878).
7. Toru Dutt, The Diary of Mademoiselle d’Arvers, N. Kamala, trans. (New Delhi: Penguin,
2005).
8. Toru Dutt, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindostan (London: Kegan, Paul and Trench,
1882), 134.
9. See Pia de Menezes Rodrigues, “Emergence of a Goan Elite of Intellectuals,” in Goa and
Portugal: History and Development, Charles J. Borges, Oscar G. Pereira, and Hannes
Stubbe, eds. (New Delhi: Ashok Kumar Mittal, 2000) 197–215.
10. Paulino Dias, Vishmdal; Vishnoulal. Poème hindou. Double texte portugais-français (Goa:
Rau and Irmaos, 1919).
11. Lino Abreu, Lettres à Madame Pommeret (Goa: Imprensa Gonçalves, 1947).
12. K. Madavane, La malédiction des étoiles, ou le Mahabharata des femmes (Pondicherry:
Samhita Publications, 1998); Le véritier, ou le mensonge des dieux (Etang-Salé-les-Bains
[la Réunion]: Éditions le Germe, 2010); Mourir à Bénarès (Sainte-Marie [la Réunion]: Édi-
tions Azalée, 2004).
13. K. Madavane, To Die in Benares, Blake Smith, trans. (New Delhi: Picador, 2018).
14. K. Madavane, “Penser dans la langue de la mère, écrire dans la langue du père, vivre le
mythe comme un agent interculturel,” in Écrire en langue étrangère: Interférences de
langues et de cultures dans le monde francophone, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and János Riesz,
eds. (Cap-Saint-Ignace: Nota Bene, 2002), 506.
15. Madavane, Mourir à Bénarès, 24.
16. Janice Gross, “Revisiting ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’: Scripting and Postscripting Franco-
phone Identity,” French Review 78:5 (April 2005): 948–59.
17. Ari Gautier, Le Thinnai (Cork: Pimento Digital Publishing, 2018), 13.
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