Creolizing Archipelagic Intimacies: Remembering India and Vietnam via Pondicherry

Abstract: A connection between Vietnam and Pondicherry flourished from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, whereby people from French India lived in Vietnam as bureaucrats, merchants, soldiers, and service providers. With twentieth-century decolonization processes in Vietnam and in French and British India, and dispersal of these Indo-French residents of Vietnam to France as well as Pondicherry, these links faded from postcolonial public memory even while circulating semiprivately through memoirs, cookbooks, and entrepreneurial attempts to incorporate that history into gastronomy, fashion, and heritage tourism. I explain the gaps and overlaps between these textual and material turns to the Pondicherry–Vietnam connection by using theories of creolization, archipelagicity, and intimacy to distinguish recalling from recollecting . In this nuanced memorializing of Global Asias, I argue, lie decolonial alternatives to terracentric cultural nationalisms.