AG: In the context of India and the history of colonization, we most hear of British colonization, whereas there is French and Portuguese colonialism, along with some parts having Dutch colonial experience as well. Your work is, of course on the French colonization of India— tell us what made you interested in the French history in India?

JN:    Broadly speaking, I am interested in peripheries and border areas, the geographic spaces and people who live outside what many consider to be the center. The history of these spaces and the people who inhabit them are interesting to me because they tell destabilize dominant (and often nationalist) narratives about the linear progress of the nation-state, and in this case, and the unity of the Indian people leading up to independence in 1947.  The five comptoirs or colonial holdings of France in India – Pondicherry, Karikal, Mahé, Yanam, and Chandernagore – were always peripheral to the areas surrounding them. As a minor colonizer in India (though of course, not globally), France also holds a peripheral position within South Asia. The actions of France in India were different than how they treated colonies and colonial subjects in Indochina and throughout Africa in the 19th and 20th century, and I think it is important to ask questions about why so we can learn more about how teleological understandings of historical narrative are misguided and often wrong. People who live in border zones and on the periphery often understand the instability of borders better than anyone else, and I wanted to research and spend time with their experiences and stories as a way to understand how decolonization functioned (or failed to function) in 20th century India.

AG: This is related to the first question, but can you elaborate on the larger historical narrative, how 1947 then does not become the “independence” of India, since French India and its parts in Pondicherry, West Bengal and other areas would not be technically independent for another twenty years? How does this change the idea of the independent nation-state post 1947? 

JN: I would not say that 1947 is not the independence of India – it very much is in that the British leave and an independent and sovereign government is established. However, I think it is important to understand that there were many areas within the geographic space of what was declared India on August 15, 1947 that remained under foreign control (the five French colonies along with Goa, Diu, and Daman which remained under Portuguese governance until 1961) as well as many of the 526 Princely States. One of the arguments in the book is that a singular focus on anti-colonial Indian nationalism as the foundation for the making of modern India is much more fractured than has been portrayed. In other words, the territorial unity of the Indian nation-state was not a given on August 15, 1947, even as the partition lines were drawn and the Indian flag was raised throughout the subcontinent. Some in French India were eager to join the Indian Union as soon as possible, while others valued their association with France, especially since many held French citizenship, sometimes for generations dating back to the late 19th century (which is of course a substantial contrast to those in British India who were never citizens, simply subjects of the crown). Others wondered if they might be better off retaining French citizen in India rather than, for example, being a low-caste or Dalit in independent India. My book looks closely at the debates about what it meant to be French-Indian and how people in these territories thought about their own relationships to the emerging Indian state.

AG: For our readers, who are widely spread out in various parts of the world: Tell us about the title of your book. You mention in the introduction, about a “utopic vision of positive decolonization”. You also refer to the idea of Auroville, but why utopia in the first place in the context of decolonization or lack thereof, in which things were hardly utopian. Secondly, How do you unsettle this utopia?

JN: There are two utopias I discuss in the book. The first is the utopian idea of France as a colorblind republic, a vision that had been developing in France since the time of the French Revolution. Because the vast majority of those living in French India did not have the ability to travel to France until the First World War, the idea that France was a space of universal belonging was a strong narrative throughout French India. Because France was a minor colonizer in India, they put on a pretense of being the “good” colonizer in contrast to the mass atrocities that many in India experienced under the British. The second utopia I address in the second half of the book the creation of Auroville as an extension of the Aurobindo Ashram which was established in 1926 in Pondicherry by Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, himself an exile from British India, and Mirra Alfassa, better known as the Mother, a French woman who came to Pondicherry with her husband, Paul Richard, a French colonial officer, in 1914. Auroville was founded in 1968 on the periphery of former French India, although it had deep ties to the territory since in the early years the organizers all emerged from the Ashram, which remains at the heart of Pondicherry’s ville blanche (white town).

I am not certain what you mean by “why utopia,” so I will say that I did not call these projects utopian but am drawing on historical material in which the narratives and people involved with utopias term them utopias. Auroville has explicitly called itself a utopia since its founding. I bring in the term “unsettling” to draw on work in histories of settler colonialism. To unsettle the utopia of Auroville is to do the work to understand that Auroville operates along the lines of a settler colonial project in which settlers from elsewhere arrive on the land, declare it terra nullius, than acquire the land and immediately employ local (racialized) labor to do the work of constructing a utopia for people from elsewhere.

AG: I was struck by your chapter on Auroville—a legacy or continuation of colonization. There is this brilliant line in your book that I want to discuss here. You mention, “Decolonization may have come to French India in the 1950s, but colonialism continues into the present day in the form of spiritual settlement”—Can you elaborate on that and how Auroville that ironically advocates diversity and unity continues to reverberate as a ‘colonial space’— are we talking about a space that reminds of  “Eat, Pray, Love” kind of oriental spirituality?

JN: Certainly, there have been a good number of Aurovilians who have been attracted to the
project based on romanticism of India, and more specifically Hinduism, although of all the guru-led projects and ashrams in India in the 1960s, Auroville deviates from the norm as it claims it is not religious but spiritual. Importantly, the population of Auroville has, since the 1970s, been about half Indian and half non-Indian (with the majority of residents coming from North America and Western Europe, though there are dozens of nationalities present). My argument is that Auroville was created to appeal to both non-local (and by that I mean non-Tamil) Indians and to Westerners with a language and narrative that appears anti-colonial in nature but is based on an idea of India as infused with spirituality but in need of the tools of Western development, which is a deeply colonial discourse. There was an argument that the local people were “too religious” to understand the utopian aspirations of Auroville. Until somewhat recently, the number of Tamil residents have been very limited (and still is, but has improved over time).

There is more to it than that as you can see the book, but it is important to note that I do not think Auroville was unique in these claims. I am currently working on thinking about how what I call settler utopianism has been seen in other contexts, including the founding of Rajneeshpuram in Oregon in the early 1980s, and going back to Gandhi’s Ashrams in South Africa in the beginning of the 20th century.

AG: This last question is about the term decolonization, which has now entered a kind of trendy place in all walks of life. Your book clarifies and discusses the term, its goals and the praxis of decolonization, and you end with an urge to ‘decolonize history’—given the present moment when history itself has become politicized along with its claims to identity, how does one decolonize history to forge unities against borders and boundaries?

JN: We see decolonization being used to describe so many different things today, from beauty care products to contemporary social movements for Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism. While I am not here to litigate or police how people use this term, I do think it’s important for Historians, and those who read history, to understand decolonization as not only a process of removal of formal empire also as a continual struggle to address the hierarchies, institutions, and discourses that emerge from colonial policy and logic. It is tempting to describe decolonization as a historical process that ended with the establishment of sovereign nation-states from former colonies, but rarely has the struggle ended there. A project that examines French India, a space and people that had experiences very different to the dominant narrative of the making of modern India, is one way to show a need for a wider understanding of how, when, and why people have been incorporated (or have chosen to not be incorporated) in the nation-state. I do hope this book contributes to this project in some ways.