Sacred memory, creole orientalism and India in the plantationscape of Mauritius

Abstract

This article disentangles the relationship between memory and the sacred through the life and selected writings of Léoville L’Homme (1857–1928), who rose to prominence as poet and journalist in the 19th century as sugar production expanded in the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. A man of colour and a Christian, L’Homme instrumentalised genealogy, cultural memory and the sacred in the vindication of exclusive forms of social justice in what I call the Mauritian plantationscape. His carefully-crafted sacred memory project, heavily modulated by French and British Orientalism, and characterised by tension between memory and the sacred, resulted in the perpetuation of discursive and colonial injustice against India, the homeland of his grandmother, and Indian indentured labourers. After identifying signs of trauma underlying his strained cultural memory landscape and implication, I argue that the organic creolisation present in the colony intervenes to turn the Hindu Goddess Sita, with whom L’Homme sought poetic intimacy, into a symbol of desire for India. This symbol impels an intercultural dialogue where Christianity and Hinduism meet to repair and bestow a reparative vector upon sacred memory. Intercultural dialogue creolises Orientalism, L’Homme’s primary portal into Indian cultural memory, and Creole Orientalism impedes cultural erasure. This sacred and inherently gendered creole cultural memory matrix redresses L’Homme’s relationship with India, his Otherness and Indian cultural memory. It injects an ethical economy in his activism that promises new definitions of a Mauritian collective ahead of decolonisation which remain germane to considerations of identity in the multicultural island’s post-colonial era.