French Chivalry in India: The Archival Effect of the Honnête Homme

This essay takes up an eventful moment that occurred in 1740 in the port city of Pondichéry, located on the southeast coast of India. In a battle between the Arcot kingdom and the Marathas, when the Nawab of Arcot was killed, the latter’s wife fled to Pondichéry seeking protection from the allied French governor, Benoît Dumas. Studying an eye-witness account alongside other reports on, or references to, this incident and its context written contemporaneously and in later centuries, this essay shows how historians through the ages have distorted France’s position in eighteenth-century India. By presenting Governor Dumas implicitly as the quintessential French honnête homme , a prominent European trope from the seventeenth century prolonged in French nationalistic discourse since that time, many accounts conflate French and British positions in India, overstate France’s footing in pre-colonial India, and/or elide the strong, syncretic Indo-Persian culture that linked India to a non-European world. Such factors can exert what I want to call an ‘archival effect’ on scholarly use of materials documenting French presence in India, which, paradoxically, haunt versions of Indian nationalism today.