Widows, Pariahs, and Bayaderes : India as Spectacle (review)

Most academic publishers these days have a line in the area of postcolonial studies, including titles about colonialism in South Asia, concentrating on history, politics, gender, and sociology. However, very few of these publishers offer little, if anything, about colonial performance. Bucknell University Press has done the non-normative and published this book, which intersects the fields of postcolonial studies and performance. The book is noteworthy not merely because it conjoins overlapping concerns of postcoloniality and performance, but also because it addresses a cultural encounter between India and Europe seldom paid worthwhile critical attention in either postcolonial or performance studies: the colonial interactions between France and India that did not lead to a French Empire in India; France was effectively jostled out by the British, despite its best imperial designs and efforts.

While following the trajectory of critical discourse generated by Edward Said's Orientalism (thus pursuing the binary opposition he noted between the Occident and the Orient as colonizer and colonized), Mehta also picks up the line of criticism leveled against the main methodological lacuna in Said's argument: namely, his failure to register the heterogeneous quality of the West's discourse about the Orient. In her attempt to address this, Mehta claims to "demonstrate that theater was more than just a metaphor. An India was literally created onstage for the enjoyment of the West" (35). Mehta chooses several plays from extant French drama on the subject ranging over two hundred years, from the late eighteenth through the late twentieth centuries. She consistently demonstrates the presence of both contiguous linkages and subversive discontinuities in the way French discourse on India evolved. She argues that the French presence in India moved from expressly imperialistic designs (rivalry with the British in establishing colonial commerce and empire) to—once imperial intentions had wilted—creating a fantastically fixed Other through which to talk about French nationhood. In fact, Mehta argues "that French playwrights 'invented' India precisely because France lost its colonies in India in the eighteenth century" (32), suggesting that after 1761 French theatrical representations sans effective colonial sway "deal largely with Indian social customs and do not overtly depict French imperialist policies" (42).

After a short first chapter that examines the grand colonial exhibitions and Orientalist spectacles as proof of the European imperial desire to gaze upon the colonial via performance, Mehta turns to specific French plays. Chapter 2 examines Antoine-Marin Lemierre's La Veuve du Malabar (1770) to explore how the French endorsed the pan-European ideology of colonialism as mission civilisatrice. We see a young French general "save" an Indian widow from immolating herself on her husband's funeral pyre, even as two Indian Brahmins (one supporting the practice, known as sati, and the other denouncing it) fight the battle of beliefs.

The third chapter examines Etienne de Jouy's Tippo-Saëb (1813), a history play about Tipu Sultan's tragic fight against the British that emphasizes French involvement in the affair. Critical of the British, Jouy's play supports the French standpoint. Regrettably, "the Indian side of things is not really considered, even though India is the territory contested by the two European powers" (94–95).

Chapter 4 treats Casimir Delavigne's Le Paria (1821), a play about the Indian caste system written in the French classical mode. It depicts a climactic day in the life of the much-admired Idamore, an untouchable (or pariah), in love with Néala, daughter of a Brahmin. Idamore is elevated to hero status when he sacrifices his own life to save his father's. Although ostensibly set in India, Delavigne's play—fitted with a Greek-style chorus "of Brahmins, warriors, and people"—is more about "France's political, social, and religious preoccupations during the Restoration period" (125).

Chapter 5 deals with Sacountala (1858), a ballet by Théophile Gautier, adapted from the tenth-century Indian dramatist Kalidasa's celebrated Abhijnan Shakuntala. In this chapter Mehta, for the first time, devotes extensive attention to...