Reclaiming Agency from the Colonial Writers: The Case of Maridas Pillai

The 18th century in Europe was characterised by the Enlightenment movement that opened up new spaces of interrogation with respect to geography, natural sciences and religion. It was marked by a profusion of writings enhancing knowledge production about the new countries, cultures, fauna and flora encountered by the European travellers, leading to the creation of new discursive formations about foreign cultures. Most books were encyclopaedic in nature, published under the name of a single European author, but later revealed to have been the result of the collaboration of native scholars. For example, the dubashes in India acted as translators and go-betweens mediating the foreign and local cultures. They played a major role in this knowledge dissemination and actively participated in the construction of colonial knowledge prior to the 19th century leading to the formation of India as a product of European imagination. In this paper, I will present the case of Maridas Poullé or Pillai, whose work as the first translator of the Bhagavata Purana into French was appropriated by several French travellers, but who subsequently reclaimed his own agency, subverting the narratives of colonial power, authorship and originality.