1. Fall 2014 45
Dr. David Hammerbeck is an assistant professor in the Department of World Languages, Literatures,
and Cultures at Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan). Dr. Hammerbeck earned a Ph.D. from
the UCLASchool of Theatre, Film, and Television, as well as a Master’s Degree from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, and a B.A. from UC Santa Cruz. He has previously taught at Loyola Marymount
University, DePaul University, California State University-Pomona, and Ball State University. He has
published articles for academic journals, including The Journal of Dramatic Criticism and Theory,
Theatre Journal, The Asian Journal of English Studies, and The Journal of European Studies. Dr.
Hammerbeck has published online nonfiction for the journal Pology, and has written several plays, a
novel, and a screenplay. He has presented papers at national and international conferences from Los
Angeles and New York toAmsterdam, Pune, and Oxford. His current areas of research are Orientalism
in eighteenth and nineteenth century French theatre, and culture and contemporary film and performance
in South Asia.
India on My Mind: French Theatre, Enlightenment Orientalism
and The Burning Widow
By David Hammerbeck
Contrary to Edward Said’s monolithic notion of Orientalism, Enlightenment
Orientalism frequently challenged ideology and narrative forms, often defying
easy categorization. Srinivas Aravamudan notes that both French and English
Enlightenment Orientalism provided a temporal and spatial field where literary
creativity opposed the inevitable ascension of the realist, nationalist novel.
According to Aravamudam, the second part of the eighteenth century witnessed
the rise of a “[n]ovelistic culture,” one that “gained in strength and identity by
setting itself off as domestic authenticity against Enlightenment Orientalism.”1
It countered the rise of the nationalist novel by fashioning fables, tales, and
performances that challenged boundaries, an artistic and literary endeavor quite
distinct from the discourse of Orientalism as explicated by Said, who famously
constructed Orientalism as a Western ontological and imperialist agenda, singular in
its cohesiveness and comprehensive nature, ahistorical as a constant sinceAncient
Greece.2
Aravamudan suggests that Orientalist tales—Antoine Galland’s translation
of The Arabian Nights (1704-1717), Giovanni Paolo Marana’s Letters Written by
a Turkish Spy (French 1684; English 1687), and Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes
(1754) are prominent, early examples—provide a locale that transforms cultural,
temporal and spatial demarcations:
Enlightenment Orientalism is the term that I propose for this
nebulous form of transcultural fiction that interrogated settled
assumptions . . . an imaginative Orientalism, circulating images
of the East that were nine parts invented and one part referential,
but it would be anachronistic to deem these images ideological,
as they did not tend principally toward domination of the East
in any single register. These fictions opposed the domestic yoke
brought by novel practitioners, who eventually triumphed . . .3

2. 46 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
Aravamudam’s conflicting, dialogic genres of Orientalist tales and the novel do not
exhaust the possibilities. Theatre forms the ideal genre to explore the representation
of the “Orient,” utilizing text as well as performance. This complex of performance
traditions and innovations on the stage in France served to expand the scope of
eighteenth and nineteenth century theatre and Orientalism.
In this article I examine Antoine Lemierre’s 1770/1780 tragedy La Veuve du
Malabar and two variations on the same theme: La Nouvelle Veuve, ou Madame
Angot au Malabar, Melo-Tragi-Parade en Trois Actes (1803) by JospehAudé, and
La Veuve du Malabar, Vaudeville En Un Acte (1822) by Eugène Scribe. I argue that
these three plays, when considered together as a dialogue on culture and identity,
contest the idea of Orientalism as a singular agenda, one whose complicity with
colonialism and imperialism, according to Said and other critics, only solidified
during the time period covered by the three plays under consideration (1770-1822).4
Said notes, in Culture and Imperialism, that “[b]etween France and Britain in
the late eighteenth century there were two contests: the battle for strategic gains
abroad—in India, the Nile Delta, the Western Hemisphere—and the battle for a
triumphant nationality.”5
While the initial La Veuve du Malabar parallels orthodox
readings of Orientalism as a constituent of colonialist hegemony, Said’s “triumphant
nationality” is displaced in Audé’s and Scribe’s versions, which instead create a
performance space somewhere between the “here” of France, and the “there” of
Malabar. These two shorter works function as transcultural parables, ones which
frequently challenge both nationalist concepts of identity and the identity of the
“other,” instead providing a hybrid cultural space which questions notions of
French superiority abroad. Questions concerning cultural identity and hybridity
are of paramount interest today as globalization and technology proliferate
cultural contacts and contexts in myriad ways. Similar questions about identity
and hybridity arose during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Western
colonists and travelers encountered the many different cultures of SouthAsia. Said
constructs these colonial encounters as invariably one-sided, with one ultimate
outcome: a monolithic West would dominate and subjugate variousAsian countries,
with literature serving as a handmaiden to economic, political, and ontological
subservience for Asian countries, for, as he writes in Culture and Imperialism:
“the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire … and all
kinds of preparations are made for it within the culture.”6
Literature, and more
specifically theatre, serve as rehearsals for power. French theatrical Orientalism,
as represented in these three plays set in India, expresses points of view vis à vis
French and Indian identity which often confute Said’s ideas. All three plays center
upon sati, one of the most powerful and enduring tropes in Orientalism. As such,
sati can serve not only as what various Western observers perceived as a nexus of
Indian cultural values and ideas, but, and perhaps most importantly, what this act
of widow immolation (sati)7
also revealed about the Western observer.

3. Fall 2014 47
Antoine-Marin Lemierre (1723-1793), best known in the French theatre for
his tragedy Guillaume Tell (1766), helped to guide Enlightenment Tragedy toward
French Revolution tragedy, from the “school of morals” toward a “school for
citizens.”8
His tragedy La Veuve du Malabar ou l’empire des coutumes, taking its
subject matter from French colonial involvement in India, still accentuated morals
while creating a plot that reflected ideas on government and human rights that would
come to the forefront in the Revolution.9
The play premiered originally in 1770, and
then was remounted in 1780 to greater success. The 1780 revival inspired versions
in other countries—Mariana Starke’s play of the same name (1790) in London,
as well as an American version in Philadelphia, The Widow of Malabar by David
Humphreys, written in 1788, published in 1790, and performed twice in 1790 by
Lewis Hallam Jr.’s Old American Theatre company, and then three times in 1791
in Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore.10
Both English language versions aimed
at displaying superior British andAmerican attitudes towards women as compared
to their counterparts in India, for which Malabar served as a synecdoche.11
The plot needs some recounting as it serves as the basis for what I perceive as
the sati trope, a trope displayed prominently in all three plays and one that changed
as the Orientalist chronotope modified over time.12
Sati was a funerary practice
for some Hindus, of disputed origins, wherein the widow mounted her husband’s
funeral pyre to burn alive with him. The word also signifies the widow, based on
a tale where Sati, Shiva’s wife, destroys herself:
Daksha, the father of Sati, insulted Shiva by failing to invite
him or Sati to a great sacrifice to which everyone else (including
Sati’s sisters) was invited. Sati, overcome with shame and fury,
committed suicide by generating an internal fire in which she
immolated herself. Enraged, Shiva came to Dakshi’s sacrifice,
destroyed it, and—after Daksha apologized profusely—restored
it.13
Sati achieves rebirth, as well as her goal of life-long devotion to Shiva, in the person
of Parvati, the daughter of the Himalaya, and Shiva’s wife. Sati as a funerary practice
is, in the words of Vidya Dehba, “quite dissimilar to that embarked upon by the
Sati of the Daksha/Shiva legend.”14
Sati’s autonomous act, divorced from the death
of anyone, born of her yogic mastery of tapas, instead is usurped in the name of
domesticating this autonomy: the wife who self-immolates out of anger towards
the disrespect shown towards herself and Shiva becomes the subservient spouse
who follows her husband into the afterlife to tend to him faithfully for eternity.
Lemierre’s tragedy forms a variation on the traditional “boy meets girl”
theme, itself a chronotope stemming from ancient romances or “the adventure
novel of ordeal,” as articulated by Michael Holquist.15
In this instance the girl (we

4. 48 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
later find that her name is Lanassa, but Lemierre refers to her throughout the play
metonymically as la veuve) meets a young French soldier stationed in Malabar.
Lanassa’s parents disapprove of the budding relationship, on cultural and religious
grounds, and the boy ships off home. Some years later Lanassa has married a
Brahmin, much older than her, through arranged marriage. Her husband dies—
the juncture where Lemierre’s plot commences—and due to religious custom, a
draconian Brahmin priest, societal pressure, and a lack of options, la veuve decides
that it would be better to immolate on her husband’s funeral pyre rather than living
as a pariah. Her long-departed paramour, now revealed to be the character General
Montalban, returns with the French navy intent on capturing the town, apparently
a port along the Malabar Coast (perhaps modelled on Mahé in Kerala) unaware
that she is about to burn. He intercedes, saving her from the fire while clapping
the Brahmin priest in chains, reuniting the two separated lovers while instructing
the inhabitants of Malabar and India on Western notions concerning civilization,
humanity, and freedom, along with a strong dose of Enlightenment anticlericalism.
Malabar had stood metonymically for India since the arrival of the Portuguese
in the fifteenth century, and associated with pepper, cardamom, sandalwood, pirates,
lush forests, idyllic tropical coasts, unfamiliar customs, and lethargic voluptuaries
ruled by stern usurious priests, with Hindus referred to as “Gentoos” well into the
eighteenth century—an appellation coined by the Portuguese.16
Geographically
somewhat imprecise, the term encompassed the whole of the coast extending from
the Cape Cormorant to the coast of Maharashtra, and frequently including part of
the Coromandel Coast which extended up the Eastern Ghats towards present-day
Puducherry (Pondicherry) and Chennai (Madras), and in the eighteenth century,
the Madras Presidency under control of the British East India Company.17
Malabar
blended in with other geographical Indias, such as the hot and dusty Punjab, the
palaces of the Mughals in Delhi, Agra and Fatehpur Sikri, the Ganges, Calcutta
(Kolkata), Kashmir, and the various fiefdoms such as Oudh, Mysore, the Marathi
Confederacy or Hyderabad—all forming an unruly, unknowable whole, with
sizable blanks on European maps, and equal gaps in the colonizer’s knowledge
of their targeted lands. Sati served as one example of cultural practices widely
misunderstood by French, British, Portuguese, and other Western visitors.
Europeans viewed sati as a pervasive custom both horizontally across Hindu
India and vertically across caste; an ahistorical practice in a land removed from
European history and Christian salvation. Sati had been first observed by the Greeks
following Alexander’s invasion: “In 316 BC the youngest wife of Keteus, a Hindu
general who died in the battle betweenAnitgonos and Eumenes, immolated herself
on her husband’s funeral pyre. The event was witnessed and recorded by Greek
observers and is the oldest-known historical instance of sati.”18
Andrea Major, in her
survey of Western attitudes towards sati, Pious Flames: European Encounters with
Sati 1500-1830, locates complementary and conflicting narratives within the act of

5. Fall 2014 49
sati, as well as the sati herself as actor. Major quotes pre-Enlightenment accounts
from Marco Polo, Friar Odorico da Pordoenone (1321), François Bernier in the
seventeenth century, as well as later European travelers on witnessing sati.19
For
some European travelers an account of sati in their recitatives became de rigeur,
the opportunity to view the Indian widow as an object in extremis, a macabre tourist
attraction. Often descriptions were plagiarized. Some authors wrote reluctantly,
doing so only in order convey to their audience the sad gravity of the situation, as
expressed by Bernier at the commencement of his description of sati: “What has
been said about women burning themselves will be confirmed by so many travelers
that I suppose people will cease to be skeptical upon this melancholy fact.”20
European travelers and colonizers also viewed sati within a skewed cultural
context, devoid of cultural and literary referents. Not until the end of the eighteenth
century did Western scholars such as Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron and
Sir William Jones, among others, begin their translations from Sanskrit and Persian
to French and English of the Zend Avesta, the Manusmṛti, the Upanishads, the
Bhagavad Gita, Shakuntala, and other foundational texts of South Asia. Western
viewers of sati in India, up to that point, had little understanding of the cultural
context within which the act took place. However in deciphering these texts,
tracing the development of sati required—and still requires today—a reader well
versed in Hinduism (or rather the assorted religious practices today referred to as
Hinduism) and its development, in order to tease out references to sati and how
direct or oblique textual references play out when considered in relation to the
traditions and context of smṛti or sruti literature, as well as within the myriad local
oral and/or folk traditions of Hindu South Asia. Sakuntala Narasimhan, referring
to textual precedents, writes that in sruti literature there “is no reference to sati . . .
up to AD 700. In Vedic texts, although funeral processions are described in detail,
widow immolation does not find a mention.”21
She further cites the example of
the Atharva Veda, compiled not long after the Manusmṛti, or Laws of Manu, the
latter which Jones and other colonial administrators enshrined as the authoritative
Hindu legal text. The Manusmṛti mentions widow remarriage, a difficult proposition
should sati be practiced. In smṛti literature the trail of evidence is equally scant,
according to noted Sanskrit and Indian Studies pundit Wendy Doniger, until the
era of the early Puranas, around 300-750 CE, or perhaps later.22
In other words,
the textual authority for sati in Hinduism appears to have surfaced some 2,000
years after the Rig Veda.23
No real systematic inquiry into the nature or pervasiveness of the practice was
undertaken until the drive to outlaw sati by the British and Indians in the early
nineteenth century, most significantly by Ram Mohan Roy, founder of the Brahmo
Sabha in Bengal.After centuries of reification by Europeans as being ubiquitous to
Hindu South Asia, evidence reinforced what has become generally accepted: that
sati was most widely practiced in Bengal and Rajasthan, was not widely practiced

6. 50 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
elsewhere in India except by Rajastanis and some Brahmin sects, and most probably
never existed in Malabar, as stated by Narasimhan; “relevant in this context is
the fact that the Kerala region of South India, where matrilineal traditions were
followed has recorded no sati incidents at any time.”24
This observation echoes the
observations of the French eighteenth-century missionary Père G.-L. Cœurdoux,
who notes that sati occurred rarely, if ever, in Coromandel and Malabar:
I speak here of this ancient and horrible custom which engaged
widows in dying voluntarily with their husbands. It is abolished
in the Brahmin caste of the Indian peninsula, and I do not know
if one permits today, as in days before, a female Brahmin to
accompany her husband to the pyre. One did so in the village
of Naour in 1773, but her husband and she were strangers from
Gujarat, where this barbarous habit apparently still exists.25
While Cœurdoux spent more time in Coromandel and Tamil Nadu, particularly in
the environs of the French colony at Pondicherry, his observations, as well as those
of Narasimhan and other critics, travelers, observers, and historians past and present
can lead one to conclude that sati rarely occurred in the area of present Kerala,
Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, andAndhra Pradesh, the Malabar of Western imagination.
The moral parameters of sati weighed heavily on the minds of French, British,
and other Westerners, more so than its actual occurrence or questions concerning
its textual authority. In the minds of Christian colonists in and visitors to India,
the act of sati often served as a mere prelude to the everlasting flames of hell for
Hindu pagans—even when attempts to convert them had been undertaken. Kate
Teltscher quotes from the account of the eighteenth-century Jesuit Père Martin
who wrote of one sati:
She had in her service a Christian woman, who spoke to her often of the great
religious truths, and urged her to embrace Christianity: she tasted these truths, but
did not have the courage to renounce her idols: she had however conceived a respect
for the Christians, and she stepped forward as their protector on all occasions; the
sight of the flames ready to consume her, reminded her without doubt of all that
this good Christian had told her of the torments of hell.26
The act foretold not only of eternal damnation for those who committed sati:
Christians needed to intervene when present, as witnessed by the example of a
Christian spectator who refused to help:
There was one more timid than her companions, who threw
herself at a Christian soldier and begged him to save her. This
convert was so scared that without thinking he roughly pushed
this unfortunate woman away, and made her fall into the pyre.

7. Fall 2014 51
He left immediately, shaking all over; a burning fever followed,
accompanied by a seizure of which he died the following night,
without regaining consciousness.27
The moral imperative could not be clearer: refusing to intervene leads quickly
to the Christian’s death, underling the necessity to intervene, for the white man
or woman, to quote Gayatri Spivak, to “save brown women from brown men.”28
Intervention formed an often risky proposal, creating a larger problem for
colonial authorities by giving the local populous the impression that French
authorities were attempting to stifle or mediate religious practice. Another factor
complicating foreign intervention was desire for the female other. The otherness
of the Hindu female to European viewers, referring not solely to cultural practices
such as sati but also purdah and other forms of gender segregation within Hinduism,
different customs depending on caste, locale, and specific pujas or religious days,
all served to firmly distance the female Hindu other, who unlike South Asian men,
could rarely be approached through commerce, trade, politics, or other quotidian
activities. Additionally, Hinduism’s Tantric practices—the Kamasutra, the erotic
carvings of Kajuharo and other temples, artwork—eroticized Hindu women while
Muslim women, despite the existence of the harem, were more commonly veiled
and covered, cloistered away. The Muslim female other hid the secrets of the
Orient, while the Hindu female other exhibited to the Western (primarily male)
gaze her erotic potential.29
The colonizers formulated an ontology that formulated
a binary between “the effeminate sensuality of Asiatic subjects, their inertia, their
irrationality” and the Westerners’ “open dynamism and self-mastered rationality
in colonial culture.”30
Indian women—Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Parsi, Jain, or
otherwise—were thus subjugated twice: first as Indians or Asiatics, second as
women.
Burning widows formed a counterpoint to eroticism in a public act of suffering,
not at all strange to French, English, Portuguese, or other Europeans. The female
body was reduced to ashes in the name of religion, just as other bodies in Europe
had been publicly tortured or burned, as detailed by Michel Foucault in Discipline
and Punish.31
Sati must have summoned up associations for Europeans at that time
with the witch burnings of the seventeenth century.Yet at the same time, the widow
could be constructed as a paragon of wifely virtue, almost superhuman compared
to Christian wives who would never perform such an act. Andrea Major notes that
European viewers often found themselves divided in their reactions:
This duality of response suggests that Western reactions to
sati were about more than just the othering of Hindu society.
They were the product of an ambivalent male conception of
the position and status of women. Patriarchal European society

8. 52 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
may have found sati incompatible with chivalric notions about
the protection of the weaker sex, but it did find resonance with
its ideals of feminine virtue, leading to a more complex and
ambivalent reaction to sati than has often been assumed.32
From the earliest account by the Greeks, this mixture of admiration and horror
persisted, and as the French and English colonized South Asia, or in the case of
the former, focused more on trade than political domination, their views on Hindus
and Hinduism became more diverse, if not always in positive ways.
By the time Lemierre staged La Veuve du Malabar in 1780, which had a short
run of five performances at the Comédie Française, a number of texts written
and published in French had appeared which might have informed the writer on
Malabar, sati, the caste system, and other particularities and customs which might
have helped shape the play. The French Orientalist Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-
Duperron’s Législation orientale . . . had appeared in 1778, his Relations abrégée
du voyage . . . a fait dans l’Inde in 1762, Père Cœurdoux’s Mœurs et coutumes
des Indiens had appeared in 1777, among others, including a number of essays and
contes about India and its religions by Voltaire and other authors.33
Yet Lemierre’s
script reveals few if any imprints of the scholarship on India available to him, and
while his Veuve du Malabar would seem to fall into the category of historical drama
or tragedy, the course of events runs counter to historical events. The French had
lost India: Lemierre’s play proposes an alternative vision of what might have been
had the French not lost, an Enlightenment En recherche de l’Inde perdu in five-
act dramatic form, replete with standard characters out of the Orientalist “Hindu”
trope: the greedy scheming Brahmin, passive and indoctrinated followers, a docile
and helpless female, a usurious social hierarchy and strange customs. Lemierre’s
play gives legs to Said’s notion of realist fiction as part of a discourse justifying
colonialism through the construction of action and a narrative wherein a morally
superior France intercedes in Malabar in order to interrupt degraded customs in
order to save lives and inculcate the locales with the superior civilization of France,
all of this performed for the public in the temple of French theatre and identity,
the Comédie Française.
In La veuve du Malabar characters question Hindu customs. The widow,
Lanassa, expresses to her maid and confidante Fatime her resignation to fate:
Honor is my tyrant, he enslaves my soul;
I live scorned, or die in the flames
I have no other choice; it is the law that makes us.34
Fatime, a Persian Muslim, counters with a criticism of sati and Hinduism:

9. Fall 2014 53
[H]ow can one suffer under this murderous law?
What woman, weak enough, would give in right away,
And take place next to her husband,
Join in the pain . . .
The husband drags his faithful wife to her death;
But he, if he lived, would he die for her? . . .
What right gives him the right to live, he who made the laws?
Without pain he imposes on the weaker sex,
Giving himself liberty of this homicidal fire.35
The “Hindu woman” embodies characteristics typical of the Orientalist trope; she
shows great fidelity and weakness, unable to stand up to her orthodox, patriarchal
husband, and her equally patricentric religion, even when her life hangs in the
balance. She prefers death to living as a pariah, an outcaste who has refused her
spousal duties, and will wander spurned by all.
The supine, feminine Orient in Lanassa, finds its opposite in the oppressive,
authoritarian Grand Brahmin, a priest with decidedly sadistic overtones, as
displayed in an early monologue to his acolyte, le Jeune (the Young) Brahmin.
In articulating the necessity of sati, the Grand Brahmin parallels it with other
acts of religious devotion that seek to obviate the self by annihilating the body,
indulging in Orientalist typology by citing the example of fakirs, yogis with their
voluntary suffering, bodies twisted, suspended in the air over fires to purify their
souls. Others served as their own executioners, shredding their bodies into pieces,
or living in sterile deserts. This included Brahmins on mountain tops in prayer,
abbreviating their lives and suffering without a sound, braving pain and subjugating
their attachment to the senses.36
Lemierre here recycles the French and European
stereotype of the fakir or yogi, seeking moksha, insensitive to life, echoing accounts
such as that of M. Makintosh in the 1786 French translation of his travels, Voyages
en Europe, Asie et Afrique: “The great goal of their life has been the acquisition of
wisdom, by which they mean moral wisdom or virtue. In practice they are insensible
to pain or pleasure, life or death.”37
The Orientalist trope of mysticism becomes
distorted into one of not just self-abnegation, but of cruelty to others as well.
The Grand Brahmin revels in his misogynist beliefs in buttressing his authority.
Lecturing the Young Brahmin again, he admonishes his junior for succumbing to
ideas foisted upon him by mleccha—a derogatory term for foreigners:
What useless language! What foolishness dominates you?
Are you not in your heart neither Indian nor Brahmin?
Women were born for men—and by some foolishness
You want that they should have rights from the womb?
Are you sympathizing with profane nations?38

10. 54 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
Lanassa must mount the pyre with her deceased husband to display her zeal,
knowing “the price she must give to these grand devotions.”39
Thus, a dialectic is
set up between the inhuman orthodoxy of the Grand Brahmin, and the humanity of
theYoung Brahmin, an argument which excludes Lanassa herself, who is relegated
to oscillating between hope and despair, the latter ultimately triumphing. This moral
opposition plays out in a metatheatrical struggle where ontological boundaries—
those of Hindu cosmogony and praxis, and those of French Enlightenment
Republicanism—are engaged in conflict, playing out on the body of the widow.40
Her body a battleground for conflicting discourses, Lanassa desires to escape,
to have the identity of one who cannot enact her own will:
In all other countries, alas! If I was born,
I would cease to be a slave, to be unfortunate:
That which constrains to his arms,
Would free me by his death.41
In the Romance tradition of separated siblings, the Young Brahmin and Lanassa
discover that they are long-separated brother and sister. But even his suppliant
entreaties cannot sway her; the Young Brahmin’s final appeal is for escape abroad,
to change her destiny by changing her home, by fleeing India. Lanassa sees no way
out—until Fatima enters to announce that the final attack by the French has started:
that her lover is at the helm remains unknown to Lanassa. Montalban’s reappearance
saves Lanassa from death, and puts the final imprimatur on the melodramatic
tragedy’s identity as those of the French notions of pre-Republican liberty and
equality, erasing the draconian religious values espoused by the Grand Brahmin:
You, people, you may breathe easily now.
My king gives his blessings and promises
The extinction of this inhuman practice.
Louis, to abolish this, is served by my hand,
Showing his sensibility in that he was born just.
The splendor of his reign has become ever more august,
Abroad where the oppressed live under cruelty,
Pride, and violence, he will give them humanity.42
History is rewritten. Sati, as a synecdoche for the enfeebled status of all women
in India is exterminated, and freedom instituted in an imaginary India where
previously there was none. The boundaries of Lemierre’s theatrical France have
expanded where, just a decade earlier, the scope and scale of French political
involvement in the subcontinent diminished drastically. India as imagined in the
hands of Lemierre has little of the imaginative or fantastic qualities of Orientalist

11. Fall 2014 55
novels like Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes or Diderot’s Les bijoux indescrets: the
ontological world rests in the battle between the normative, positive qualities of the
French subject, and the alterity of Brahmanical India, with the inhabitants of this
fictive Malabar unable to affect change, and rid themselves of their long lineage
of repressive and barbaric customs, without colonialist intervention: in short, an
Orientalist tragedy.
Joseph Audé’s Madame Angot au Malabar, ou la nouvelle veuve offers a
different perspective on an equally imaginary Malabar. Presented at the Théâtre
de la Porte Saint-Martin in 1803, a théâtre du boulevard known for vaudevilles,
melodrama, and satire, the pièce revolved around the eccentricities and comic
potential of the title character. Madame Angot was a staple of French fiction in
the years following the Revolution, an eponymous parvenu, a former “poissarde”
(fishwife) who in her ascendency to the bourgeoisie of Paris frequents the theatre,
salons, hosts guests. . . in short is seen everywhere and knows everyone, a literary
and theatrical precursor to Proust’s Madame Verdurin in En recherche du temps
perdu: friend to many, ridiculed by most, a socially maladroit parvenu, ineluctable
due to her fortitude and imperviousness to slights and oblivious to her own missteps.
Audé, sensing the comic potential of this character when placed in a foreign setting,
had preceded Madame Angot au Malabar with Madame Angot au serial, performed
at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu on the Boulevard du Temple from May 20 to June 4,
1800.43
Additionally, Audé’s mélo-tragi-parade issued from the tradition of the
théâtres de la foire, a variety of genres of theatre which frequently parodied current
theatre, theatre traditions, public figures, and common morality. These fairground
theatres embodied Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, a heteroglossic mingling of bodies and
voices that challenged the status quo.
In the play, Madame Angot is kidnapped and forced to marry an Indian
merchant, with the oddly French name Melissard, in Constantinople. Heading back
to India, their ship wrecks upon the coast during a storm, coincidentally enough
on the Gulf of Mahé in Malabar near Mahé, her husband’s place of residence. All
survive: MadameAngot, her son, her daughter, and a servant. However, her husband
has been reported as being grievously injured in the shipwreck, and then purported
to die, although this is all a ruse fabricated by Malabarians in order to swindle
Madame Angot out of her inheritance. She must follow custom and commit sati,
because she has married into the city. Madame Angot blunders her way through
the play, never comprehending events or her whereabouts, until near the end of the
three-act satire, when she agrees to sati upon the promise of rebirth. Earlier on in
the proceedings, a bogus Malabarian emissary burnishes the act of sati in glowing
terms, swaying her with promises of glory, immortality, and a home in the stars,
to which she replies: “What? A home? My goodness . . . I already have a house
on the rue de la Cossonnerie—all my furniture is there.”44
For the funerary ritual
she must purify herself frequently in a nearby river. Repelling this suggestion with

12. 56 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
indignation, she proudly states “I only bathe three times in the month of January.”45
Just before her supposed immolation, after bathing, she is told that she will now
be led to the fire. Madame Angot assumes that this is so that she may dry herself
and her clothes in front of the blaze.
Madame Angot consistently mishandles language, à la Mrs. Malaprop in
Sheridan’s The Rivals, foregrounding the foibles of the French bourgeoisie
abroad. She refers to the residents of Malabar as Moroccans, Turks, and Barbaric
Chinese; she calls the head Brahmin an “Indian Stork” (marabou), and refers to
purifying herself (for the ritual of sati) as “putrefying myself” among other verbal
missteps.46
Her manservant Nicolas, dimwitted, besotted, and prone to violence, in
the vein of Trivelin in Marivaux’s La Fausse Suivant and other Frencheighteenth-
century characters styled on commedia dell’arte zanni characters, likewise blurs
Orientalisms. He wonders if Malabar is a nation in Arabia, and refers to the
inhabitants of Malabar as Iroquis. He confuses the temple with the Boulevard du
Temple in Paris, while also asking if a rue Phillipeaux or St. Martin Market can
be found. Boundaries mixed, the locus of the play becomes an imagined India
that blurs home and away, the subject and the other. While the French characters
use Orientalist stereotypes from almost every region of the world, excoriating
the inhabitants of this fictitious Malabar, the Indian characters, while often
devious, show a good deal more civility and knowledge of the French Other. In
concordance with satirical fairground theatre, the termination of proceedings can
only end in derision, not tragedy.As the Brahmin leadsAngot to the pyre, under her
protestations, he calmly assures her that she will come out of the fire, and that “the
governor is an honest man; he left nothing to risk. Let the sacrifice consume you,
the fire will do nothing: you will emerge like a sun,” to which Nicholas responds
“Maybe there’s an unguent for that?”47
In the end her husband arises from his coffin
before burning, and agrees toAngot’s demand for an immediate divorce and a quick
passage home for herself, her son, daughter, and their manservant.
In Madame Angot au Malabar, sati has been manipulated to become, while
still a reprehensible foreign cultural practice, a commedia inspired ruse with the
ultimate design of swindling rubes. The confusion of the French characters—even
the straight characters Ninon and François display little understanding of their
whereabouts or local customs—and their utter inadequacy in a foreign setting
undermines any pretensions towards a colonialist discourse seeking to impose
itself on an inferior Malabar. The nonrealism of the play exhibits a theatrical
version of nonallochronic time: while existing simultaneously on the same stage,
French and Indians inhabit different ontological worlds, different spatiotemporal
domains.48
The cyclical Hindu world of births, rebirths, pujas, and sati, in the hands
of Melissard and the faux Brahmin and Emissary, among other actors, becomes a
facsimile of its referents, manipulated in order to deceive the foreigners. For the
French characters—products of a linear, progressive Enlightenment framework of
time—their concept of India, as part of an Orient of many parts (Arabia, Malabar,

13. Fall 2014 57
Iroquis, Turkey, and others), barbarous and otherwise, removed from history, is
shattered when Melissard awakes from death, and calls the sati off. The multifaceted
Orient of Malabar impels Angot to leave in haste.
Audé skewers the patriotic and nationalistic pretensions of Lemierre’s work
with his anarchic Malabar, one clearly without any strong adherence to scholarly
referents.49
Comedy frames the actions of both foreigners and the locals; their
common ground formed by the bourgeois interests of commerce, property, and
inheritance, but in Audé’s hands the play clearly aims at depicting the French
abroad as bumblers with little to no cultural comprehension of Malabar, as well
a dysfunctional sense of geography. Nicolas early on in the comedy states that
his bourgeois mother is rich since Constantinople, and even more so since her
marriage to Mellisard. 50
These wealthy French exist as playthings for Corezzi and
the Emissary, who shortly after Nicolas’s statement roll on the ground with laughter
after revealing to Angot and her family the steps of the ritual that lead to sati:
CORREZZI: The victory is ours. The illustrious Angot, wife of
Mellissard, her daughter, son and domestic, all will serve for
our amusement. They believed it all; they were persuaded that
the marriage is real, that Mellisard was fatally wounded and that
his last hour is here.]
EMISSARY: When the supposed death of her presumed husband
was announced; when his widow, MadameAngot, comprehended
the customs of Malabar; that she will be devoured by the pyre . . .51
Audé’s MadameAngot additionally embodies the double meaning of maya—illusion
and love. Madame Angot’s and Mellissard’s love (their wedding) is an illusion;
all the rituals, the nautch girls, the Brahmin priest, and sati itself appear only to
be revealed as artifices as well, serving Mellisard’s greed, which melts away on
the funeral pyre. Sati still remains the centerpiece of an Enlightenment Orientalist
play; however the cultural imperative to correct a lesser culture’s “primitive”
practices in order to instill egalitarian values dissipates, to be replaced by parody
of these same practices. Cultural practices overlap, with the residents of Malabar
showing more savvy and largesse, while the French in this fictive agglomeration
of jumbled boundaries limp away back to their homeland. The French family
stumbles on, while the inhabitants of Malabar presumably bide their time until
another opportunity arises.
Eugène Scribe’s one act vaudeville La Veuve du Malabar, premiered at another
vaudeville Boulevard theatre, the Théâtre du Gymnase on August 19, 1822. This
short work orients the onlooker toward a different India, and a different sati. Set in
a nameless village on the coast of Malabar, the play contains only five characters:
Dupré, a French merchant in Malabar; his wife Madame Dupré; Surville, a young

14. 58 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
Frenchman in service to the Compagnie des Indes; Ali-Brull-Pha-Gos, a courtier
de commerce; and Zéila, a young Indian widow. The action of this play combines
those of the previous two: a young Indian widow must be saved from sati, as in
Lemierre’s tragedy; and sati will serve to enable a ruse, as in Audé’s version, a
ruse that will gain Dupré 20,000 piastres. Surville is in love with Zeila, and wishes
to steal her away from the funeral pyre (as in the original Veuve du Malabar, her
husband by arranged marriage has passed away). Dupré, at the beginning of the
play, has hired a European servant as his Indian domestic has been found lacking:
“These Indian domestics are a curse! In France, such a difference. I remember when
I was a lackey I had so much more spirit than my masters!”52
The superior moral
characteristics of the French clearly established, moments later Dupré realizes
that this new domestic is none other than his wife, the two now reunited after five
years separation. She curses him for disappearing, but changes her plaint upon
discovering that he has become wealthy through commerce. However, no sooner
are they reunited, than they begin to argue. Dupré curses “our European quarrels
that have begun again,” highlighting another trope, the passivity of the Oriental,
in this case Hindu women.53
The object of criticism, too passive when present or
absent when needed, the Hindu female can never attain the status of the subject. She
will always remain peripheral in Western ontological status: such is the dilemma
of the subaltern in the worldview of Scribe’s Veuve du Malabar.
The rest of this one-act vaudeville follows Dupré’s machinations to substitute
his wife for Zeila, profit in the process, arrange for his valuables to be packed up
in secret, so that he, Surville (Zeila’s paramour) and Zeila can escape to France
while Madame Dupré burns in her stead. Early on Dupré informs his wife that
he has become “naturalized” to the country; he is treated like an inhabitant of
Malabar, with all due cultural obligations, as occurred with MadameAngot. Dupré
incessantly enters and exits in arranging matters with Surville, leaving his wife
in the company of Ali Brull-Pha-Gos, who has become wealthy by supplying the
wood, incense, fruits, priests, and all necessary accoutrements for the sati ritual.
He says it is good business, underscoring a common trope in all three plays, the
greed of Brahmins and their endless, expensive rituals. Sati again figures as much
as a business venture as an inhuman religious practice, one that in this play benefits
two Frenchmen, one Indian woman, and one Indian merchant of unclear religious
background. Sati, as a ritual, provides the linking thread; yet it is almost devoid of
any specific meaning. No deities save Brahma are mentioned in any of the plays,
nor religious texts save “A Book of Laws” in Audé’s Veuve.54
Scribe, of course, gained celebrity as the creator of the pièce bien fait, the
well-made-play: overly intricate plots which upheld bourgeois morality after
overcoming contrived, melodramatic challenges. Vaudeville, the successor to
Enlightenment comedies, the genre in which Scribe first created his fame, unlike the
well-made-play, melodrama, Romantic tragedy, or even “le théâtre du boulevard,”

15. Fall 2014 59
has been disparaged as a bourgeois form of popular theatre, antithetical to the
egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, the idealism of the Enlightenment
and Romanticism, or the anti-authoritarian Theatre of the Boulevards (the former
théâtre de la foire). As critic Jennifer Terni writes:
Because it was commercial, vaudeville could not readily be
equated with . . . an authentic culture du people (which, in French,
carries distinct class connotations, linking “the people” with the
working class). Vaudeville’s association with commercial—
and especially bourgeois—culture has only legitimated the
assumptions that led to its dismissal on aesthetic grounds in the
first place . . . In other words, the bourgeoisie turns out to be the
phantasmic Other against which the values of French politics
and culture have consistently been articulated.55
In Scribe’s Veuve the Oriental other intertwines with this bourgeois other of the
home culture France. In the process, national differences between Madame Dupré
and Zeila, and between Ali and the two Frenchmen are, if not leveled, than at least
greatly reduced.
In Scribe’s Veuve that author displays his dramaturgical skill at building plot:
Surville and Zeila have agreed to Dupré’s plan, though they do not know who will
mount the pyre in her stead—Dupré simply says that you can always find someone
for money. Ali breaks down when he finds that Zeila has disappeared from the
cave (with his diamonds) where she has been sequestered before burning. Dupré
disappears after ordering the house to be packed up, only to suddenly die, leaving
Ali in the dark as to what is happening.Ali must also console the widow. The Indian
merchant’s hands are tied: now that Madame Dupré’s naturalized husband has
passed away; now that Zeila has disappeared; and now that the locals are waiting
for the ritual—another common thread in the three plays, sati as public ritual,
wrapped in glory and sanctity, but also underlining European notions of Brahmin
inhumanity—he must concoct a new subplot. Madame Dupré will take Zeila’s place.
However, this cannot happen, as audience expectations of a happy ending would
have been thwarted. Dupré returns to find his wife alive, not burned, and decides
to save her. Ali, modelled on the Orientalist trope of the cunning merchant, having
accepted money for Zeila’s salvation, produces a mannequin to place on the pyre,
and the two couples leave as the pyre ignites.
Boundaries between French culture and that of Malabar, to a certain extent,
are leveled in Scribe’s Veuve. The same patriarchy rules in Europe as in India,
according to Madame Dupré: “Husbands everywhere are the same. The country
matters not . . . In France, in England as well as in Malabar, they are always . . .
husbands, and since here I am again chained to mine . . . ”56
Just as commerce rules

16. 60 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
their lives—both Dupré andAli Brull-Pha-Gos have a bottom line to be concerned
with, sati becomes a transnational concern—French women in Malabar are just
as likely to be burned as their Indian sisters. Sati in Scribe’s play is stripped of
any religious signification, reduced instead to a simple commercial transaction, as
Ali articulates briefly when Madame Dupré objects to this custom “which has no
common sense”: “I’m not saying no, but it is very productive, for us businessmen.
Listen, live and let live . . .Today, for example, will be a really big affair.”57
Dupré’s
thoughts on commerce echo those of Ali, valuing pecuniary interests over human
life when first considering Surville’s plot to save Zeila, weighing the consequences
against the benefits: “A Frenchman . . . a compatriot . . . on the other side, this
poor Zeila . . . the pity . . . the humanity . . . and the 20,000 piasters that have been
promised to me.”58
All human concerns trumped by those concerning capital, the
conflicting boundaries of Bourbon Restoration France and “the empire of customs,”
or the rigid orthodoxy of Brahmanical India dissipate: now instead the theatrical
representatives of two cultures find reciprocity in each other’s economic gain.
Their interests addressed form, as Aijaz Ahmad posits, a progressive, if positivist
“role of capitalism in comparison with what had gone before, with Europe as much
as outside of it.”59
India, as well as France, had a rapidly growing merchant class
throughout the eighteenth century and the time period leading up to (and beyond)
Scribe’s play in the nineteenth century. This merchant class forged commercial
ties with France, even under the trade dominance of England. Even though the
French lost any real colonial interest in India following the Treaty of Paris in
1763, the Compagnie Perpetuelle des Indes prospered almost until 1795.60
Scribe’s
Veuve formulates a fictitious world bourgeoisie, linked by common interests, even
while French influence on the Malabar Coast disappeared more than two decades
previously.As a theatrical fantasy, Scribe’s La Veuve du Malabar while displaying
nationalist idealizations of French character—Dupré’s inventiveness and courage,
for example—the Indian characters do not come from a rogue’s gallery of Orientalist
types as they did in Lemierre’s play.
But what of sati in the three plays? Can anything conclusive be determined?
The two comedies forego the serious moral discussion of sati of Lemierre’s piece,
nor do they display any understanding of the ritual. However, Audé’s and Scribe’s
comedies perhaps are not the most suitable vehicles for such a discussion. Popular
theatre served as a counterpoint to novels, travel accounts, ethnographies, and
philosophy, one that can be viewed more accurately perhaps as the voice of the le
peuple, though with Scribe this segment of the population has shifted decidedly
towards the burgeoning bourgeoisie of early nineteenth-century Paris and France.
Lemierre’s tragedy fills the need for a nationalist rewriting of history, an imaginative
will to conquer or invest India with superior French values. But in the other two
plays, the final outcome is ambiguous, one where sati is merely business, where
Indian men and French men can find a common ground, and where fantasy and

17. Fall 2014 61
happenstance confound common sense. However in all three the voice of the
sati herself, the woman who commits the act, remains that of the object, without
agency, utterly dependent on men, whether she is French or Indian. That sati was,
and remains, a powerful synecdoche for gender inequality and the oppression of
women in India, is a legacy that to this day still reverberates with considerable force.
Notes
1. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012) 8.
2. As has been pointed out, Said’s reification of an “Orientalism” as a singular ontological entity
is as troubling and problematic as his idea of “the West.”
3. Aravamudan 17.
4. Said traces the rise of European colonialism, in tandem with the birth of Orientalism as an
academic discourse, to this time period with the wars in India between Britain and France in 1744,
1748, 1753-1763, 1769, and the pioneering Orientalist works byAbraham-HyacintheAnquetil-Duperron
starting in 1759, and the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in Calcutta (Kolkatta) in 1784.
Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) 76-78.
5. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 87.
6. 11.
7. The reference is to sati, a ritualized funerary tradition.
8. “Lemierre infléchit à son tour la tragédie des Lumières vers la tragédie révolutionnaire. Après
avoir été école des mœurs, la scène devient école des citoyens.” France Marchal-Ninosque, France, “Le
Théâtre d’Antoine-Marin Lemierre, une école des citoyens,” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France,
103.1 (2003) 49-62; 51. All the translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.
9. “Énergique exemple d’une utlisation militante de la scène, avec les tirades contre le fanatisme
religieux d’Idoménée et de La Veuve du Malabar, le théàtre de Lemierre reflète aussi une conviction
vivante de la société française, bien avant les élans révolutionnaires.” Marchal-Ninosque 62.
10. Jeffrey H. Richards “Sati in Philadelphia: The Widow(s) of Malabar,” American Literature,
(80.4:2008) 647-675; 649. According to Richards and other sources a German version, entitled Lanassa,
appeared in Berlin in 1782. Carlo Gozzi also penned a version—La Vedova del Malabar—in the 1790s.
11. Mariana Starke, The Widow of Malabar. A tragedy in three acts (adaptation from La Veuve
de Malabar by Lemierre; produced in London in 1790).
12. “We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness
of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. We understand the
chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature. In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial
and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole.” Mikhail Bakhtin, The
Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist
and Caryl Emerson, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982) 84. Bakhtin’s definition is notoriously
complex and nebulous. What is pertinent to this article is that the melding of time and space in Orien-
talist theatre, in fact Indian-Orientalist French theatre, is specific to that context only. Orientalist India
consists of different time and space than does Orientalist China, and both are different than the various
modalities of home, i.e. France.
13. Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History, (New York: Penguin, 2009) 392.
14. Vidhya Dehba, “Comment: A Broader Landscape,” Sati, The Blessing And The Curse: The
Burning of Wives in India, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 49-53.
15. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World, (London: Routledge, 1990) 105.
16. Sushil Srivavasta, “Constructing the Hindu Identity: European Moral and Intellectual Ad-
venturism in 18th-Century India,” Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 33, No. 22, (May 16-22, 1988)
1181-1189.
17. Legoux de Flaix (A.), Essai historique, géographique et politique sur l’Indoustan, (Paris.
1807) 205-208. Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Zend-Avesta, ouvrage de Zoroastre, t.I,
“Discours Préliminaire,” (Paris, 1771) 43. Jean-Baptiste Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Hindoustan ou Empire
mogul, (Paris, 1822) 91.
18. Andrea Major, Pious Flames: European Encounters with Sati 1500-1830, (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2006) 3.
19. I use the term traveler here in the interest of brevity, as clearly many of these individuals were

18. 62 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
not only travelers, but were also merchants, diplomats, in military service, Jesuits or other representa-
tives of Christianity in South Asia, and others. But to a certain extent they were all travelers; not until
the latter part of the eighteen century did Europeans born and raised in India become more frequent.
20. Major 27.
21. Sakuntala Narasihman, Sati: A Study of Widow Burning in India, (Delhi: Viking, 1990) 14.
22. Doniger, The Hindus 392. In parsing the original Sati myth, where Sati is the wife of the god
Shiva, who cannot die and therefore the act of sati becomes impossible, Doniger writes that “Sati is
not a sati (a woman who commits suttee). Her husband is not dead . . . But she dies, usually by fire,
and those two textual facts are sometimes taken up as the basis for suttee in later Hindu practice. The
compound sati-dharma thus has several layers of meaning: it can mean the way that any Good Woman
(which is what sati means in Sanskrit), particularly a woman true to her husband, should behave, or
it can mean the way that this one woman named Sati behaved. Only much later does it come to mean
the act of a woman who commits the religious act of suttee, the immolation of a woman on her dead
husband’s pyre . . .” 392-393.
23. Definitive answers as to the origin, and age of sati seem almost impossible to determine. Take
for example the differences between two noted historians, Romila Thapar and Abraham Eraly. Thapar
places the inception of the practice around A.D. 510, while Eraly puts it in the Vedic Age – around
1300 to 1700 years earlier than Thapar. Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300,
(Berkeley: UC Press, 2004) 304; andAbraham Eraly, Gem in the Lotus, (NewYork: Penguin, 2000) 135.
24. Narasihman 54.
25. “Je ne parlerai point ici de cet antique et funeste usage qui engage les femmes à mourir
volontairement avec leurs maris. Il est aboli dans la Caste des BRAHMES de la péninsule de l’Inde,
et je ne sais si on permettroit aujourd’hui, comme autrefois à une BRAHMADI d’accompagner son
époux au bucher. Une le fit pourtant en 1773 à Naour, ville de la côte de Coromandel: mais elle et son
mari étoient étrangers et du pays du Guzurate, où ce barbare usage Subsiste apparemment encore.”
Cœurdoux, Père G.-L. Moeurs et Coutumes des Indiens (1777). L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et
Voltaire – I. Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient. 1987, 91.
26. Teltscher, Kate. India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800. Delhi:
Oxford UP. 1995, 103. Translation by Teltscher.
27. Teltscher 104.
28. “Can the subaltern speak? and Can the subaltern (as woman) speak? Our efforts to give the
subaltern a voice in history will be doubly open to the dangers run by Freud’s discourse. As a product
of these considerations, I have put together the sentence ‘White men are saving brown women from
brown men’in a spirit not unlike the one to be encountered in Freud’s investigations of the sentence ‘A
child is being beaten.’” Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture, Nelson and Grossberg, eds. (Basingstoke, U.K.: MacMillan Education, 1988) 271-313; 297.
29. Teltscher 38-41. She discusses the different images of Muslim and Hindu women presented
in the travel narratives, Les Voyages, by François de la Boullaye le Gouz, in 1657: “le Gouz writes that
he would seem to disparage Mughal women by describing the sweet-smelling oils with which they
anoint themselves after bathing. By mentioning the massage at all, le Gouz is of course suggesting
something of the sensuality he affects to dismiss: but this gives only the slightest glimpse of Muslim
sexuality. A few pages on an illustration reveals a naked Hindu woman bathing and anointing herself
with oil, in exactly the pose that le Gouz censured out of respect for Muslim women. The Hindu woman
is obviously being defined in contrast to the Muslim: she is represented as sexually available.” 39.
30. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East,”
(New York: Routledge, 1999) 112.
31. I refer here to the first chapter of Discipline and Punish with its memorable description of the
excruciating torture and slow death of the regicide Damiens in the Place de Grève in Paris on 2 March,
1757. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage, 1995 3-6.
32. Major 17.
33. These are contained in Voltaire’s Dialogues et entretiens philosophiques, vi: Dialogue entre
un brachmane et un jésuite sur la nécessté et l’enchaînement des choses, La livre d’airain, histoire
indienne and Histoire d’un bon bramin.
34. “. . . l’honneur est mon tyran, il asservit mon ame;/ ou vivre dans la honte, ou mourir dans
la flame,/ je n’ai point d’autre choix; c’est la loi qu’on nous fit.” Lemierre, Antoine Marin, La Veuve
du Malabar, (Éditions Virtuelles Indes Réunionnaises, 2009) 10. <http://www.indereunion.net /IREV/
La%20Veuve%20du%20Malabar.pdf > (accessed 10 October 2012)
35. “Comment a-t-on souffert cette loi meurtrière?/ Quelle femme assez foible y céda la première,/
et prit sur le bûcher de son barbare époux,/ ce parti de douleur, embrassé jusqu’à vous?/ L’époux traîne
à la mort son épouse fidèle;/ mais lui, lorsqu’il survit, s’immole-t-il pour elle?/ Au-delà du tombeau lui

19. Fall 2014 63
garde-t-il sa foi?/ Quel droit de vivre a-t-il, que d’avoir fait la loi?/ Sans peine il l’imposa sur un sexe
timide,/ tandis qu’il s’affranchit de ce joug homicide.” Lemierre 10-11.
36. “Eh! Vois nos solitaires,/ des fakirs, des joghis les tourmens volontaires./ Vois chacun d’eux
dans l’Inde à souffrir assidu,/ l’un, le corps renversé, dans les airs suspendu,/ sur les feux d’un brasier
pour épurer son ame,/ l’attiser de ses bras balances dans la flame;/ les autres se servant eux-mêmes de
bourreaux,/ se plaire à déchirer tout leur corps par lambeaux;/ l’autre habiter un antre ou des deserts
stériles;/ sous un soleil brûlant plusieurs vivre immobiles;/ celui-ci sur sa tête entretenir les feux/ qui
calcinent son front en l’honneur de nos dieux.” Lemierre 6.
37. Makintosh, M. Voyages en Europe, en Asie et en Afrique, Tome Premiére, (Paris: Chex
Regnaut, 1786) 260. <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k104382q> (accessed 26 September 2013).
38. “Quelle language inoui! Quelle erreur te domine!/ N’es-tu donc dans le coeur indien, ni
bramine?/ La femme naît pour nous; et par un fol égard,/ tu veux que dans l’hymen elle ait ses droits
à part!/ Prends-tu les préjugés des nations profanes?” Lemierre 5.
39. “Elle-même a senti dans ses attachmens/ le prix qu’elle doit mettre à ces grands dévoumens.”
Lemierre 5.
40. In the opening pages of the play, the Grand Brahmin states that the invading Europeans, with
numerous vessels invading the coast, have brought war and its furies, making their coast a theatre of hor-
rors: “Les européens, accourus vers nos ports,/ de leurs vaisseux nombreux investissent ces bords;/…/ et
c’est peu qu’aujourd’hui la guerre et ses fureurs/ fassent de ce ravage un théâtre d’horreurs.” Lemierre 3.
41. “Dans tout autre pays, hélas! Si j’étois née,/ je cessois d’être esclave, et d’être infortune:/ celui
qui m’eût constraint àpasser dans ses bras,/ m’auroit laissée au moins libre par son trépas.” Lemierre 12.
42. Lemierre 33.
43. JospehAudé, Madame Angot au serial de Constantinople; drame, tragédie, farce, pantomime
en trois actes. Représentée pour la première fois, sur le théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique, (Paris, 1801) 5,
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k84955b (accessed 15 November 2012).
44. Audé 20.
45. Audé 12.
46. “Il m’ont fait prendre un bain de cinq heures, pour me putrifier . . .” Audé 12.
47. Le Brahmin: “On venait des cendres. Le gouverneur est un honnête homme: il m’a dit qu’il
n’y avait rien à risquer. Laisse consumer le sacrifice: va, la brûlure n’y fait rien: on ressort comme un
soleil.” François: “Ils ont peut-ête un onguent pour ca?” Audé 33.
48. Aravamudan 63.
49. Aravamudan 157. Here he refers to Voltaire’s Zadig.
50. “Ma bourgeoise est riche depuis Constantinople et surtout depuis son marriage.” Audé 5.
51. Audé 10.
52. “Ces domestiques indiens sont d’une maladresse!. . . En France, quelle difference! Je me rap-
pelle que quand j’étais laquais j’avais toujours plus d’esprit que mes maîtres,” Eugène Scribe, “La Veuve
du Malabar,” Œuvres Complètes de Eugène Scribe:Comédies et Vaudevilles, (Paris: E. Dentu. 1876),
311. <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/ 12148/bpt6k58322447.r=Eugene+Scribe+ La+Veuve+du+Malabar.
langEN> (accessed 2 December 2012).
53. This now represents a cultural positive, whereas just a few pages earlier it indicated a lack
of initiative.
54. Presumably Audé refers to the Manusmṛti. The faux Brahmin opens to Chapter 15 and reads
briefly. The Manusmṛti has only twelve chapters.
55. Jennifer Terni, “AGenre for Early Mass Culture: French Vaudeville and the City, 1830-1848,”
Theatre Journal 58.2 (2006) 221-248; 226. <http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25069821?uid=37
38016&uid =2&uid=4&sid=21104226772557> (accessed 21 November 2013).
56. “Les maris sont partout les mêmes. Le pays n’y fait rien . . . En France, en Angletere, ainsi
qu’au Malabar, ce sont toujours des . . . des maris, et puisque me voilà de nouveau enchaînée auprès
du mien . . .” Scribe 318.
57. Madame Dupré: “Mais voilà une coutume qui n’a pas le sens commun! Brull_pha-Gos: Je
ne dis pas non, mais elle est très productive, pour nous autres courtiers. Écoutex donc, il faut que tout
le monde vive . . . Ajourd’hui, par exemple, c’est une fort belle affaire . . . .” Scribe 320.
58. “. . . un Français . . . un compatriot . . . d’une autre côté, cette pauvre Zeïla . . . la pitié . . .
l’humanité . . . et les vingt mille piastres qu’on m’a promises. . .” Scribe 324-325.
59. Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, (London: Verso, 1994) 225-226.
60. Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India (The New Cambridge
History of India: II, 5) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 256-60; 307-309.