Gentil: Diplomat, Writer, Patron and Collector A Page in the History of Eighteenth-century Indo-French Cultural Relations

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Gentil (1726-1799), a French resident in pre-independent India, is accredited with the largest and most diverse collection on India. The collection consists of illustrated treatises on Indian political history, currency and religion, an illustrated atlas of provinces of India, an album of illustrations for Gentil's memoirs, and albums of paintings on Indian history and culture. To compile them, Gentil engaged with local scholars, artists and depended wholly on first-hand knowledge, a rare practice for European collectors in India.This corpus will allow me to shine a light on overlooked intercultural material that is specifically the result of interactions between the practices of indigenous artists and scholars on the one hand, and European patrons and collectors on the other. By illuminating networks (actors, objects and practices) that underlie the production of this collection and their modes of interaction at the local and regional level, I aim to produce a new framework to study such intercultural creation. It will contribute to the scholarship of Indo-French cultural history, as most of the scholarly attention has previously been paid to the diplomatic, military, and political aspects.This study is urgently needed as existing methodologies are inadequate. Frameworks of Orientalism and Indology are unsuitable to study such material (Lafont, 2000; Pandey, 2019) because such studies regard cultures as homogeneous entities and presume the "purity" of each culture before contact, propagating grand narratives of universal 'global' histories trapped in Eurocentric divides. Since eighteenth-century India precedes colonialism, nation-states, and industrialisation, Homi Bhabha's 'third space' (2004) appears insufficient to explain pre-colonial early modern intercultural creation in India.Through this collection, and Gentil's memoirs, I will study Indo-French cultural history through a different vantage point, using frameworks of cultural transfers (Espagne and Werner, 1985) and connected histories (Subrahmanyam, 1997) as guiding principles at start. Among the questions I will address are the following: Why did Gentil compile his collection on India?What were his indigenous sources (people, texts etc.)? Who were involved in Gentil's Indo-French cultural network (Indian artists, scholars, other French collectors etc.)?What are their roles in the making of the collection?In the corpus, where and what are the traces of the modes of interaction of this network?How did did this collection represent/mediate Indian culture for the French society? How did Gentil succeed in translating/mediating Indian culture to the French?These questions will orient the study to consider different modes of interaction between the actors, objects and their practices, exposing unseen connections at the local level. I will analyse the interplay between text and image in the illustrated treatises and between the paintings and their detailed explanations in the miniature art albums, revealing the practices of collaboration between Gentil and the local artists. I will also look at Gentil's method of engaging with indigenous knowledge, through his interaction with local scholars, and ancient texts. Here, textual analysis of Gentil's writings (memoirs and letters) and the relevant archival documents will provide essential context. I will document the collection from the point of view of patronage, while situating it in the context of the Indo-French cultural network (Gentil, local artists, interpreters, other French collectors, local experts on Indian history etc.)This study will illuminate multifaceted interactions between local networks at the level of the individual and their strategies, thereby transcending political boundaries. In doing so, this corpus will re-assess the established historical "facts" and narratives in the shared history of France and India during the eighteenth century