“Still French, Still Home”: Colonial Citizenship, Family Memory, and Intergenerational Belonging in Franco-India, 1721–1954

Mahé (Mayyazhi), a French enclave on India’s Malabar coast, remained under French administration from 1721 to 1954, and its French-Indian families have carried the legal and cultural consequences of that rule across generations ever since. This study examines how colonial-era intimacy was configured within the broader structures of colonial governance in a small, decentralised enclave largely absent from mainstream accounts of empire. Combining a structured literary analysis of M. Mukundan’s novel On the Banks of the Mayyazhi with ethnographic fieldwork among Mahé’s French-Indian families, the study applies a four-phase Historiographic Narrative Analysis Framework (HNAF) to trace how face-to-face contact, bilingual schooling, and household ritual mediated colonial authority and shaped patterns of loyalty, mimicry, and inherited identity across generations. Fiction and lived testimony reveal overlapping but non-identical traces of an affectively saturated, person-to-person contact zone whose effects outlasted formal decolonisation by decades and continue to shape Franco-Indian family memory and commemorative practice today. The findings suggest that genealogical continuity, rather than political rupture alone, offers a productive lens for understanding how colonial subjecthood is inherited, reworked, and lived within families long after an empire’s formal end. These findings carry implications for the study of other small, materially thin colonial enclaves and for broader methodological debates about using literary sources genealogically. The study also speaks to SDG 10, particularly its emphasis on social, economic, and political inclusion and on reducing inequalities rooted in origin and status, by showing how colonial hierarchies can persist through citizenship, family memory, and inherited forms of belonging.