This book analyzes how French dramatists reproduced certain images of India such as the burning widow, the lowly pariah or untouchable, and the exotic 'bayadere' or dancing girl in four plays and one ballet written from the eighteenth century through the twentieth centuries. Addressing questions of Orientalism, the book also argues that it was because the French lost their Indian colonies to the Briish in the eighteenth centuries that India became a part of the French literary imagination.

French cleric and scholar of Sanskrit J. A. DUBOIS (1770-1848) journeyed to and around India as a missionary in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and turned his decades of observation into what was, for many years, the definitive Western work on Indian culture. This revised English-language edition, published in 1905, includes Dubois's notes and thoughts on. . the caste system, its antiquity and origins . etiquette and customs among the Brahmin . dress and ornamentation . the roles and positions of women . Hindu tales and fables . religious feast, temples, and ceremonies . and much more.

Based on an 1815 manuscript by a French missionary, this comprehensive work offers a unique panorama of early-19th-century Indian life. Caste system, ceremonial procedures, rules and etiquette, marriage, fasting, widowhood, funerary rites, literature, religion, much more. Index. 6 Appendices. Black-and-white illustration.