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In 1849, Armand Gallois-Montbrun, an amateur Indianist and administrator of the Établissements français de l'Inde, reported the discovery he had made three years earlier in the ancestral home of Dupleix's Indian broker, of Ananda Ranga Pillai's famous diary. According to him, the latter was nothing less than "the confidant" and even "the inspiration" behind the hegemonic policy of the governor of Pondicherry in the mid-18th century.
Historians of the colonial school, such as Edmont Gaudart in the last century, were quick to attribute this judgement to a "quite legitimate enthusiasm for such a sensational discovery". Of course, the thirteen volumes of the Tamil diary, a copy of which was donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale by the Indianist Édouard Ariel, do not tell the whole story. It remains to be seen whether the Indian broker is sometimes silent because he is not kept informed of events, or rather because certain subjects are too sensitive to be written down, even in a diary.
No one, however, thought of diminishing the importance of the document. It begins with the portrait of Ananda, born in 1709 in Madras, son of Tirouvenga Pillai, who came to settle in Pondicherry around 1710, no doubt attracted by the booming trading post. The importance of family and religious networks in making a broker a broker cannot be overstated. From the Pillai merchant caste, Ananda was a relative of the Companie's broker Nanyappa, deposed in 1716 under pressure from the Jesuits, who reproached him for his Hinduism. When the convert Pierre Canagaraya died in 1746, the sad affair of Nanyappa did not prevent Ananda's rise to prominence, despite his professed Hinduism.
This can be explained by the unilateral decision of the then governor of Pondicherry, Joseph François Dupleix, to appoint him. It is true that the choice of a Compagnie des Indes broker was crucial, and even more so in the case of Ananda, who thus became the Indian counterpart of the governor: before being a broker, he was a dubash – one who speaks two languages – which gave him a privileged status. His role naturally extended to trade and finance, meaning that he placed orders, distributed advances and collected returned goods. The title of Mudaliar (the first) and "chief of the blacks" gave him political pre-eminence, overseeing the black city police and the courts. Finally, Ananda is sometimes referred to as a diwan, making him Dupleix's minister and thus the direct representative of his diplomatic policy in the eyes of the Indians.
Gallois-Montbrun's remark is not therefore without meaning. No dubash in the trading posts attained the degree of importance that Ananda did. No intermediary, as far as we know, was so close to a European governor. And when he died in 1761, having witnessed Dupleix's disgrace and the siege of the city, no one before him had written in Tamil for anything other than religious purposes.
Published in september 2024