SEM Transculturalismes : Ananya Kabir (King’s College, London) “Archipelagic Asias, creolising memory: connecting Pondicherry to Saigon”

The connection between Vietnam and Pondicherry that flourished from the mid-19^th to the mid-20^th century is as yet completely unremarked upon within postcolonial studies and memory studies. During this period, people from French India settled in Vietnam to work as bureaucrats, merchants, soldiers, and service-providers. In course of twentieth-century decolonisation processes in Vietnam and French and British India, and subsequent dispersal of these Indo-French residents of Vietnam to various locations in metropolitan France as well as Pondicherry, these links faded from postcolonial public memory. Nevertheless, local Pondicherrian memories of this connection remain strong, as evidenced particularly in memoirs, cookbooks, as well as entrepreneurial attempts to incorporate that history into gastronomy, fashion, and heritage tourism. What kind of memory work can we observe from the gaps and overlaps between the textual and material turns to the historical connection between Pondicherry and Saigon that were facilitated by the French Empire in the Indian Ocean? Why do those invested in this memory work find it urgent or necessary? Using the paradigms of memory studies, creolisation as a theory of cultural encounter, and archipelagic thought, I will use the Pondicherry-Vietnam connection as a case study for memorialising “archipelagic Asias” as an alternative to terracentric cultural nationalisms.