The colour of fraternity : citizenship, race and domicile in French India

![CDATA[Travelling through Pondicherry in the 1840s, Albert Hervey, a British army officer, remarked at being particularly impressed with the wide, straight boulevards of this French settlement, noting the white-washed colonial buildings and the cultural ambience of a place that was reminiscent of any coastal town on the Côte d’Azur. Of particular note in his observations, however, was his telling insight concerning the European population of la ville blanche or the ‘white town’ which seemed to cause so much anxiety to the British gaze. Describing Pondicherry’s European population as comprising of “tawny-faced Frenchmen and their families,”2 Hervey’s observation was that physical skin colour or racial difference could not be deployed in any meaningful way to differentiate Frenchmen (or, indeed Frenchwomen) from the majority Tamil population. To be sure, those who claimed European status and who were treated, for all intents and purposes, as French subjects were not necessarily ‘white’. Equipped with the lexicon and vocabulary of racial difference drawn from the colonial space of British India, British observers such as Hervey often found both the political and racial complexion of French life in India both intriguing and perplexing, for reasons some of which I hope to convey in this paper from the earlier period of the late eighteenth century.]]