BORDER ZONES IN COLONIAL SPACES

Abstract

In the early eighteenth century India was still a land of porous frontiers and tremendous opportunities, as it was when the Europeans first discovered it in the sixteenth century. Notwithstanding France's defeat in India after the fall of Pondicherry in 1793, which left the British East India Company free to consolidate and extend its influence in India, there still remained ‘border zones’ in India which offered the French and other Europeans chances to cross cultural frontiers, amass wealth and spend it. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century when the British had established control in India and the Indian Ocean, and the local rulers had been firmly subjugated to British colonial power, such spaces with permeable borders became rare and opportunities for individuals to engage in cultural crossings and financially successful enterprises with locals were greatly reduced. Through a reading of the representations of Pondicherry, Mauritius and Lucknow, this study reviews the presence of such border zones between the imagined spaces of France, Britain and India.