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How the unremembered legacy of the French Empire connects India and Vietnam

25 March 2025

Arts & Culture

Professor Ananya Jahanara Kabir FBA, Professor of English Literature and former Fellow of the Global Cultures Institute, explores how gaps in remembering the creolization process can mean we lose sight of how a culture came to be, even when we reminisce on celebrity lives.

Creolization refers to when two or more cultures originating from different parts of the world blend to produce a new culture. Professor Kabir’s ongoing research on creolization argues that, in the Atlantic as well as Indian Ocean world, this process not only involves the biological mixing of communities but also unexpected encounters that lead to innovation and collaboration. This merging of cultures can be voluntarily or involuntarily, with power imbalances, rivalries and linguistic incomprehension all at play.

Yet not all places borne out of creolization define themselves in such terms. Through her research into the literature and culture of the Indian Ocean world, Professor Kabir continuously came across correlations between the south Indian city of Pondicherry and Vietnam – as well as with other sites in peninsular India and the Indian Ocean region – that seemed to be unspoken or forgotten.

Tombstone of Franco-Pondicherrian employed in Indochina, Uppalam Cemetery. (Ananya Kabir) — Tombstone of a Franco-Pondicherrian employed in Indochina, taken in Uppalam Cemetery. (Image: Ananya Kabir)

With a shared history of French colonialism, many people from Pondicherry moved to French-Indochina (primarily Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) from the late 19th century onwards, where they shaped the port-town’s identity through cuisine, the arts, and architecture, to name a few.

The French Empire’s toehold on slivers of Asia during the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries: the enclaves of Pondicherry and Karaikal on India’s Coromandel Coast and the Southeast Asian colony of Indochina. An ensuing chain of human interactions birthed new communities, fashioned new subjectivities, and generated new cultural possibilities – but yielded neither popular nor analytical frames for their wider memorialization.– Professor Kabir in ‘Creolizing Archipelagic Intimacies: Remembering India and Vietnam via Pondicherry’

These influences may not appear obvious to Pondicherry’s visitors, because they are never remarked upon overtly in the community’s outward definitions of its history and culture; no public memory of the French Empire’s presence in India or Vietnam remains, yet within the community, foodways, photographs, and family stories continue to acknowledge those connections.

Nems at Paris Restaurant, Pondicherry. (Ananya Kabir) — Nems (Vietnamese spring rolls) served at Paris Restaurant, Pondicherry. (Image: Ananya Kabir)

These gaps encouraged Professor Kabir to interrogate how creolization can be traced through a complex relationship between hidden and accessible memory work, with support from King's Arts & Humanities Research Development Fund. In ‘Creolizing Archipelagic Intimacies: Remembering India and Vietnam via Pondicherry’, published in Verge: Studies in Global Asia, she brings her discoveries to life.

Going to Pondicherry, I have been constantly amazed at the web of connections across the Indian, Atlantic, and even Pacific Oceans that this small sliver of land on India’s coastline is linked into. There are stories here of cosmopolitanism, globalisation, and creolisation that completely change the received narrative of postcolonial India.– Professor Kabir

Thomas Vo Van Tao dancing Mohiniattam. Photograph courtesy Thomas Vo Van Tao

Thomas Vo Van Tao dancing Mohiniattam, a traditional dance from Kerala, India. (Image: Thomas Vo Van Tao)

“Gift of the Saigonese” WWI memorial, Reddiarpalayam. (Ananya Kabir)

“Gift of the Saigonese” World War I memorial in Reddiarpalayam, Pondicherry. (Image: Ananya Kabir)

Books from the Adiceam Bequest at the Ecole Française d’Extrême Orient library, Pondicherry. (Ananya Kabir)

Books from the Adiceam Bequest at the Ecole Française d’Extrême Orient library, Pondicherry. (OImage: Ananya Kabir)

Take for example Julie Quang, a popular Indo-Vietnamese singer in the 1970s. Nowadays, fans seem to erase the ‘Indo’ part of Quang’s origins, recalling her mixed physical features but never explicitly identifying them. This symbolises a break in public recollections of what Quang’s mixed identity means in relation to the history of region she grew up in. The experience is reversed for Bollywood stunt director Peter Hein, whose Vietnamese roots on his mother’s side are left out until a time that suits the narrative around his life and work – the historical reasons behind his mixed identity are unremembered.

Another infamous figure with Indo-Vietnamese heritage is Charles Sobhraj, a French serial killer of backpackers in 1970s Asia and subject of the recent Netflix series The Serpent. Professor Kabir suggests that the evolving postcolonial politics of the region allowed Sobhraj to exploit his connections with different states, languages and cultures to evade detection.

Even though Sobhraj continues to occupy a prominent position within Indian collective memory, there is no wider narrative about French India and its transoceanic reach that explains Sobhraj’s Vietnam connections – largely because in the public imagination, it is Britain that was the colonial power India exited from. With heritage tourism in Pondicherry on the rise, it is important to integrate French India into public memory of India’s colonial legacies through new approaches and concepts.– Professor Kabir

Guesthouse owner’s sari-clad Vietnamese grandmother in Pondicherry — Framed photograph of guesthouse owner’s sari-clad Vietnamese grandmother displayed in the reception room of the Jardin Suffren guesthouse, Pondicherry. (Image: Ananya Kabir)

In exploring Pondicherry’s layered identity, therefore, Professor Kabir finds interlinked ‘Global Asias’ that are unrestricted by borders, languages or religions but connected ‘archipelagically’ through processes of creolisation. She thus lays bare a globalised continent, whose networks spin out into other corners of the world – showing the enduring legacy of Pondicherry and its multiple and multilingual histories.