Signs of Confusion: Professional Interpreters and Perverted Signatures in Eighteenth-Century French India

Early in the eighteenth century, colonists in the French-ruled Indian colony of Pondicherry were almost entirely dependent on the linguistic mediation provided by Indian go-betweens. With hardly any Tamil-speaking Frenchmen or French-speaking Tamilians in the new colony, the linguistic work undertaken by a handful of intermediaries was crucial for the French venture’s success. Local intermediaries in Pondicherry – catechists, commercial brokers and dedicated translators employed by the French trading company in its business transactions and in the native court – thus became crucial actors in the French overseas project. French observers found this dependence on linguistic intermediaries disturbing, precisely because of its inevitability, and their inability to conceive of a way out of this dependence.

This paper examines a court case against one of these interpreters, a man named Nanniyappa, who was the chief commercial broker employed by the French. For over a decade Pondicherry was thrust into a state of turmoil, as Nanniyappa was first found guilty of tyranny and sedition, and then posthumously cleared of any wrongdoing by no lesser power than the French king. In the course of the so-called “Nanniyappa affair”, the predicament of interpretation was a central concern. Specifically, signatures and other practices of judicial attestation played an important role in the Nanniyappa affair, as Tamil signatures put to French texts came to be seen as signs of questionable and deceptive authority. I argue that the discussion of practices of signing reflected the more general semiotic cacophony in the colony. In a nascent colony, where there were still few shared sign systems between French authorities and the local population – signs like language, modes of doing business, and rites of religious practice – the manipulation of a signature’s meaning only accentuated the anxiety surrounding translated communication.