India in the French Imagination: Peripheral Voices, 1754–1815 (Empires in Perspective)

Description

This book examines metropolitan French-language representations of India from the period between the recall of Dupleix to France, which effectively curtailed French expansionist policies in India, to the Second Treaty of Paris, which confirmed the territorial settlement of 1763 and France's subordinate position to Britain. Marsh explores what a European power, territorially peripheral in India, thought of both India and the administrative rule there of its rival, Britain. For the French, the image of India had a polyvalent nature, functioning both as a trope of exoticism and as a site that was inescapably imbued with expansionist failure and the concomitant success of la perfide Albion. Employing a comparative approach, and questioning the colonizer-versus-colonized binary which persists within colonial discourse analysis, Marsh posits a triangular discursive relationship between Britain, France and India. Challenging the grand narrative of the British imperial conquest of India, she explores the consequences for French culture of competing colonialisms on the Indian subcontinent.