A Post/Colonial Lieu de mémoire in India: Commemorative Practices Surrounding Puducherry's French War Memorial

Abstract:This article examines the afterlives of Indo-French colonial connections as they are expressed in postcolonial cultural practices surrounding Puducherry's memorial for World War I and subsequent French wars. Tracing the shifting web of memory and meanings woven around the monument across different contexts of local, national and transnational post/colonial memoryscapes, it demonstrates how this colonial heritage and the associated commemorative practices are used to negotiate and reconfigure postcolonial relations. It argues that this ambiguous site of remembrance gives rise to a multidirectionality of memory, which in many ways both resists and spans the dichotomy between the colonial and the postcolonial.