Danna Agmon's gripping microhistory is a vivid guide to the "Nayiniyappa Affair" in the French colony of Pondicherry, India. The surprising and shifting fates of Nayiniyappa and his family form the basis of this story of global mobilization, which is replete with merchants, missionaries, local brokers, government administrators, and even the French royal family. Agmon's compelling account draws readers into the social, economic, religious, and political interactions that defined the European colonial experience in India and elsewhere. Her portrayal of imperial sovereignty in France's colonies as it played out in the life of one beleaguered family allows readers to witness interactions between colonial officials and locals. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the subcontinent, Western-led ashrams and utopian communities remained in and around the former French territory of Pondicherry—most notably the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Auroville experimental township, which continue to thrive and draw tourists today. Unsettling Utopia presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Jessica Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires. Namakkal examines the colonial histories of the Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville, arguing that their continued success shows how decolonization paradoxically opened new spaces of settlement, perpetuating imperial power. Challenging conventional markers of the boundaries of the colonial era as well as nationalist narratives, Unsettling Utopia sheds new light on the legacies of colonialism and offers bold thinking on what decolonization might yet mean.

When, on February 22, 1790, a French barge by the name of ‘Bienvenue’ came ashore Pondichéry with the news of the events in Paris around the meeting of the Estates General, the storming of the Bastille and the abolition of feudal rights; it sent out a wave of topsy-turving repercussions amongst both the French and the English colonial administrations in India. Excited with the newly found principles that were inherent in the cries of the Revolution in France, yet, not knowing their precise socio-political extents and implications, each of the five French settlements on the Indian subcontinent came to create their own individual ‘revolutions’ – periods of mostly confusing and sometimes violent socio-political upheaval. Wellesley, on the other hand, fearing the influence of the principles of the French Revolution on the employees of the English East India Company, asked his superiors in London for the establishment of a college in Fort William in order to train men in the service of the Company against such ‘erroneous principles’. How do these revolutions in each of the French settlements in India – in some ways, mirror events of the 1789 Revolution in the metropolis – unfold? Where, exactly, did the universalist values of the Revolution find its boundaries when applied in contemporaneous colonial India? And how were the diametrically opposite values of imperial and republican France sought to be accommodated in such a context? Labernadie’s intricately detailed narrative from 1930 developed out of a privileged access to the French colonial administrative (yet unpublished) archives and correspondences based in Pondichéry, along with the contemporary interventions of Jacques Weber and Hari Shankar Vasudevan ensure a volume that is not only rich in material resources, but also intellectually nourishing; compelling its readers to reflect on questions of transcolonial experiences and mixed modernities in colonial India, as much as the very consequences of a revolution that fundamentally changed the manner in which politics came to be thought of thence.