Indian languages into the schools and thus the ability for Indians to align themselves with their presumed or imagined language of origin, the arrival of teachers qualified to teach these languages from India, and the fact that prior to this Indians constituted a sizable part of the population and they were identified in British records in great detail, all distinguish Indo‐Mauritius from Indo‐Réunionese. Réunion did not have a comparable process of “Indianization” facilitated by the school system. As a result, in Réunionese culture, there is perhaps greater nostalgia in the notion of Indianness with less tangibles relating to India evolving in the culture as opposed to the situation in Mauritius, where the ties with British India were inevitable once it was part of the British Empire. On the other hand, in Mauritius, the notion of Africanness becomes an anomaly because it is not backed up by a corresponding language alliance as is the case for all other recognizable groups, and particularly after Abolition, the movement of peoples from the African continent ceased, to be replaced by the waves from India and to a lesser degree from China. In the late nineteenth century, when sugar prices fell in the global market, Indians began acquiring small parcels of land that plantation owners were forced to sell in order to survive (Allen 1999, 156–158). A cultural renaissance of Indianness also was brought by the Arya Samaj movement in the early twentieth century. While Madagascar provided an important source of African slaves to both islands, Indian slaves, who certainly were brought to the region well before indenture, have relatively less of a presence in the imaginary, Indians in the later colonial period and pre‐independence period (for Mauritius) primarily identifying and being identified with indenture.
The Colonial Novel and Hybridity
Mauritian literature, from the time one can speak of a local literature on the island, has always embraced and celebrated the pluralism of culture from all perspectives. While no known indigenous population precedes the colonial occupation of either island, the region was traversed by different adventurers, traders, and seafarers. The first literary writing in the region is seen in published journals; poetry of a more predictable kind celebrating colonial culture as well as the landscape makes up early French literary creation. Novelistic creation is seen much later. The Mauritian novel L’Etoile et la clef. (The Star and the Key) was published in 1945 by Loys Masson, a white Mauritian author who went to France before World War II, never to return. His situation as a British national (since Mauritius was then a British colony) disqualified him from enlisting in the French army and his presence in France also complicated his enlisting on the British side. Masson was a successful journalist, poet, and novelist, was part of the Résistance, and in fact served as the editor of the strongly left journal Lettres françaises (French letters). He was known to be quite hotheaded: he was expelled from the Communist Party of France, as he had been, early on in Mauritius, expelled from the College de Curepipe for striking a teacher.
Masson’s novel celebrates Mauritius at the height of the colonial enterprise as the star of and key to the Indian Ocean. Its main preoccupation is to legitimize not just the colonial venture in Mauritius but to present the colonials as forging a more hardy and enlightened version of Frenchness than that to be found in France. So whilst the most spurious of colonial hierarchies anchors and cradles the narrative, there is also the simultaneous effort to distinguish the hardiness of the colonial whites (who live amongst other races, who are transplanted from their natural habitat in Europe, and whose lives glorify the Empire) from metropolitans who, for their part, reap the benefits of these adventurous lives without an understanding of their courage. The tension in the colonial novel plays out in the aspirations of the colonial writers to mark their presence within the French tradition and to present themselves as distinct from it.
Les Marrons (The Maroons, 1844), considered the first Réunionese novel and written by Louis‐Timagène Houat, registers an earlier critique of slavery. It recounts a fictional tale between an African slave and a white colonial woman with whom he had grown up. The mulatto author wrote the novel while in Paris, where he took refuge after being expelled from his native island for having taken part in anticolonial activities. Appearing just before Abolition on the island, the novel takes up emblematic themes in Réunionese history of maroons (runaway slaves), of métissage (racial mixing), and of the community of slaves and/or their supporters that took refuge in the mountainous and volcanic regions to survive. The illustrations in the original contain remarkable images that pay homage to the Réunionese landscape and present it as sympathetic to the anticolonial, antislavery cause.
The most substantive body of fictional work is provided in the form of the colonial novel by the Réunionese duo Aimé Merlo and Georges Athéna, prolific writers who were journalists and critics and who co‐wrote under the pseudonym Marius‐Ary Leblond.3 These authors also wrote an authoritative account of the older Leconte de Lisle, whom they presented as anticolonial and progressive and in whose footsteps they wanted to follow. Amongst the many journals they founded or to which they contributed between 1911 and 1941 was La Vie (Life), where the typical prejudices and orientation toward “primitive” peoples, their culture, and art imitate those that we might find in the progressive circles in France and which tinge literary movements such as Symbolism and later Surrealism. The Leblonds, in both their critical and literary work, subscribe to the particular notion of cultural mingling that was prominent in the Indian Ocean intellectual context.4 The fact that different races and cultures lived in close proximity was promoted as something unique and essential to the identity of these new branches of the nation, which the colonies were. While “race,” as used in French in the nineteenth century, also conveyed the sense of culture and civilization, it is clear that the hierarchy of “races” as we understand them today, and which were grounded in colonial phantasms, was well established in and through colonial practice and policy, and particularly through anthropology and medicine. These hierarchies were internalized and completely naturalized through the very mission of colonialism, which sought to civilize and enlighten backward cultures distantly located from Europe while at the same time improving the lot of Europeans. Such improvement for Europe was certainly in the economic sense, but its architects also had a more ambitious aspiration of enrichment and an inevitable and welcome process for Europeans that adventurers, missionaries, sailors, colonial heroes, and subalterns in the army, for example, all believed in and represented. The evolved version of this narrative of improvement of the white race figured in colonial writers such as the Leblonds in Réunion island and Loys Masson in neighboring Mauritius.
Emblematic of these aspirations and their accompanying prejudices in the colonial novel is Marius‐Ary Leblond’s Miracle de la race (Miracle of the Race, 1914) set on Bourbon (as Réunion island was called). The story takes place in the period following economic crises that came from competition in the sugar‐cane industry from foreign sugar and other sources such as beets. At this time, the region was also waning in importance after the opening of the Suez Canal, so it was no longer the first stop for ships that passed the Cape of Good Hope. This Bildungsroman recounts the life of Alexis Balzamet, who is an impoverished white orphan, expelled from the prestigious spaces of whiteness and banished to the school for nonwhites. Alexis’ descent into nonwhiteness, his déclassement (loss of class), and his resistance to these forces make up his Bildung. Frequent collusion of race and class occur, with la classe blanche (the white class) being explicitly named. Mr. Izabel, a pale mulatto, becomes Alexis’ mentor; he himself has entered the colonial administration as a fonctionnaire through the goodwill of some whites. The hierarchy is somewhat imbalanced, with Alexis seeking Izabel’s help, but the order makes sense because Alexis has been declassed due to his status as an orphan. The “miracle” of the (white) race alluded to in the title of the novel is pronounced by another mentor of Alexis, Mr. Vertère. He explains to his ward that the white race will only get to that miraculous stage when it has absorbed all the best qualities and the essence of the original civilizations of the various other races in the colony (Leblond 1914, 301). Gradually, Alexis emerges as the prototype of this fortified white. In this way, the Leblonds were considered progressive for their time: they could imagine that an impoverished, lowly white orphan could represent the best
