The notion of human rights builds on our shared humanity. These rights are not derived from the citizenship of any country, or the membership of any nation, but are presumed to be claims or entitlements of every human being. They differ, therefore, from constitutionally created rights guaranteed for specific people.
Amartya Sen, The Idea of justice, 2010

Introduction

3This essay brings this cultural redefinition of Indianité into dialogue with two interconnected theoretical frameworks: cosmopolitanism and creolisation. The term cosmopolitanism, from Greek kosmopolitês (‘citizen of the cosmos’), was first articulated by Diogenes the Cynic and developed by the Stoics, and later revived during the Enlightenment, most notably in Immanuel Kant’s vision of cosmopolitan right and perpetual peace articulated in Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View and Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. Cosmopolitanism has since been mobilised in various fields, including political philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and postcolonial studies, to describe global justice, hybrid idendities, and a plural sense of belonging. However, since the nineteenth century onwards, cosmopolitanism has also been criticised for its Eurocentric universalism and complicity with imperial domination. This critique encouraged the emergence of locally inflected forms of cosmopolitanism such as ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (Appiah 1994; 2005), and ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ (Bhabha 2001) which both resonate with the relational and processual understanding of creolisation at the heart of this article. Creolisation, theorised most influentially by Édouard Glissant in Discours Antillais and Poétique de la Relation, further elaborated by the Créolité movement with a literary and identitarian perspective (Barnabé et al. 1993), designates the dynamic processes of relation, mixing, and invention born of the violent contacts of peoples and cultures wrought by colonialism, including slavery and indenture. Recent critiques, which I draw upon in the present analysis, have highlighted the long-neglected contributions of Asian communities to Caribbean creolising cultures.

4Building on these reflections and on Francophone and Anglophone postcolonial and diasporic studies, I argue that in Il ne fait jamais nuit, Indianité is not only creolised – being both transformed and a transformative force – but that this creolising Indianité also generates an original, creolised cosmopolitanism. Contrary to abstract universalism, this cosmopolitanism is forged at the intersection of multiple inheritances: the Enlightenment and republican humanism of France, the lived philosophies of Indo-Caribbean Hindu traditions, and the everyday solidarities forged through processes of creolisation in the Caribbean. Thus, it is a universal horizon of dignity, freedom and equality that does not erase its various sources, but emerges through the history of slavery, indentureship and emancipation from colonialism. This essay will first explore how the novel creolises Indianness – adapted and reinvented as Indianité – by fictionalising history, filling in archival silences, and linking the Indian subcontinent to the Caribbean Archipelago. It will then examine the linguistic and cultural poetics through which Indianité is decentred from India and metropolitan France, while remaining intimately connected to them. The last section will consider how this creolising Indianité paves the way for a creolised cosmopolitanism, a vision of universal humanism that is neither Western- nor Eastern-centric, but rather the fruit of relation, a sharing of ideals and principles, and the acknowledgment of a ‘shared humanity’, as suggested in the epigraph by Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen (2010, 179).

1. Reimagining Indenture Memory and Indianness: a Creolising Process

5Originally a member of the Guadeloupean Communist Party when he joined the National Assembly in 1981, Moutoussamy created the Guadeloupean Democratic Progressist Party in 1991 when the USSR collapsed. He was the first Guadeloupean politician to invite an Indian ambassador on the island in 1981 to try and develop relations between the archipelago and India. He also supported the 1982 French decentralisation laws which granted more autonomy to French overseas departments and territories, including Guadeloupe, while stressing the need for additional local powers and financial resources adapted to their specific circumstances. His political views explain why humanist values – especially those enshrined in the French republican motto, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity – have been a driving force of his writings, whether it is nonfiction or fiction. He also focuses on restoring meaning and concrete enforcement to such values in his essay Inde-Guadeloupe : Hommage à la mémoire and his novel Marianne: fée de notre République du sang-mêlé (Marianne the Fairy of our Mixed-Blood Republic) which features another version of his Indian protagonist, this time simply named Caloupin. The story follows Caloupin’s evolution, showing how he overcomes various forms of discrimination and rises to the status of plantation overseer, acknowledged and respected by everyone on the Montplaisir plantation, regardless of their ethnic background (Soukaï 2024).

7Fiction’s distinctive quality shines through the opening quotation, as the writer creatively adds the French motto, thus placing the reinvented story of Caroupin under the banner of republican humanist values. In fact, very little is known about Caroupin, and Moutoussamy provides the few retrievable biographical snippets of his life in Inde-Guadeloupe. Caroupin Ramsamy seemingly arrived in Guadeloupe in 1867, aged 14 (2016, 64). His death certificate, which I was able to access and which is mentioned briefly by Moutoussamy (ibid., 65), indicates that he was a shop owner and a single man from India, of unknown parents, who died on January 23, 1921, aged 68. In his novel, Moutoussamy reshuffles the facts and dates, reimagining Caroupin’s biography, and even elaborating on what his life might have been like in India. This narrative expansion is precisely what makes Indianité emerge through multilayered creolisation processes as connected to yet different from subcontinental Indianness. While Indianness has commonly referred to Indian cultural ethos in India and diasporic contexts alike – with scholarship demonstrating continuities and ruptures between the two, in relation to Caribbean indentureship afterlives and also in other diasporic settings such as Fiji (Lal 2000) – the term Indianité signals the reclaiming of Indian cultural identity from within the creolised mix of the French Caribbean. Indianité developed as ‘a cultural expression of East Indian cultural heritage that exists and flourishes’ in the French Caribbean, ‘which in turn inevitably adds to the multiplicity of races and cultures characteristic’ of the region (Mohammed 2017, 97). Using the term Indianité therefore underscores the creolising processes at the heart of Indo-Caribbeanness, dissociating it from subcontinental Indianness that has increasingly been entangled with Hindutva politics and its promotion of identitarian purity in recent years. However, the depiction of Indianness in Il ne fait jamais nuit challenges monolithic and exclusive perspectives.

8The first thirty pages or so focus on Pondicherry and one of its nearby villages, presented as Caroupin’s birthplace, the village of Alacoupam. While these pages occupy less than a tenth of the narrative, they set up the protagonist’s background and connect the growing anti-colonial resistance in Pondicherry with the combat fought against indenture and ongoing colonial exploitation in the French Caribbean. Moutoussamy portrays twenty-five-year-old Caroupin migrating voluntarily to the Caribbean onboard the ship Le Cécile at the end of 1885 to help enlighten and support his indentured fellow Indians. This explains why, in the novel, Caroupin appears to be connected to low-caste underprivileged and marginalised Indians but also to be an educated figure, fluent in written and spoken Tamil, knowledgeable in Vedic texts, and able to understand and speak French. He is imagined to be of the Pally caste, one of the largest castes in Tamil Nadu at that time. Antoine Esquer notes, for example, that in 1856 in the three rural districts of Pondicherry, comprising a population of 77,000 natives (Muslims not included), the Pallys numbered 24,697 (Esquer 1871, 117, note 1). In 1833, there were socio-political debates to establish whether the Pally caste was a low caste, with the Indian Jurisprudence Committee ruling in the affirmative, but the Pondicherry Court finally overturned the ruling (Esquer 1871, 117–118). While the Pally caste is usually identified as a caste of peasants and cultivators, in total the caste includes about thirty subdivisions – or jati – , mainly based on the jobs of their members, except for the uppermost jati, the Vannias, which includes the most educated. In spite of the Pally caste’s traditional affiliation with the Hindu god of fire Agni, Esquer observes that many of them, being simple labourers, had little to no claim to this divine origin. However, Moutoussamy’s narrative insists on the Indian protagonist’s erudition and his association with Agni, therefore tacitly identifying Caroupin with the Vannias. Yet, at the same time, the protagonist is also depicted as the son of impoverished peasants. This intermediary positionality is what makes him the perfect spokesperson for the defence of the low-caste and uneducated in Pondicherry and of oppressed indentured workers in the Caribbean.

9In fact, while seemingly rooting the protagonist within a specific caste that could presumably replicate the hierarchical ancestral caste system and would be in tension with the narrative focus on universal humanist values, Moutoussamy actually creates a protagonist whose educational background conflates, mixes and reshapes social and religious codes and values – even before his contacts and cultural negotiations with the local Guadeloupean populations (Europeans, white Creoles, Africans and their mixed-raced descendants). The scenes portraying colonial Pondicherry invite a reading that begins with cultural hybridity yet, ultimately, prefigures forms of creolisation. Thus, Caroupin is presented as both shaped by colonial education and Indian traditions, well versed in Vedic texts and respectful of Biblical Scriptures, an opponent to colonial assimilation and a fervent admirer of the French republican values:

• 5 ‘Avec sa culture, il faisait le tri de la civilisation occidentale. Nul mépris. Nul rejet absolu. B (...)

With his culture, he was sifting through Western civilisation. No disdain. No absolute rejection. On the contrary, he integrated the contributions honouring the elevation of humanity and the emancipation of peoples […]. Sublime fight of an Indian to defend the number plate of the country of Human Rights. (7)⁵

10The French patriotic motto is compared to a number plate whose promotion could serve to eradicate the exploitation system of indenture which had dehumanised Indian migrants by assigning them numbers – Caroupin himself is given the number 711 on embarking on Le Cécile (35). Hence, the ironic use of terminology suggests that the French motto, like the registration number given to the indentured labourers, might be nothing more than a tool for assimilation and political control, if it is not recuperated and transformed to meet the needs of the local (colonised) populations. Such an adaptation is suggested as Caroupin’s electively sifts through Western civilisation while remaining grounded in Indian culture. His ambivalent positioning recalls the hybrid identity that Stuart Hall associates with diasporic contexts:

The diaspora experience […] is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. (235)

11Cultural hybridity is also evoked in a passage pairing Indian and French cultures dialogically:

• 6 ‘Le martyre imposé par la colonisation, le dépècement de ses entrailles, ses enfants qu’on lui arra (...)

The martyrdom imposed by colonisation, the cutting out of her entrails, her children being torn from her for the sugar islands, tortured her. But her ardent faith, her incandescent legends kept her out of the night […]. The sound of her matalom answered the piano. Her Cavery River defied the Seine. (9)⁶

12Here the narrative connects India and its insular Caribbean counterpart through a personification which portrays Pondicherry’s desolation as a consequence of its landscape and architectural transformations and of the emptying villages drained by the indenture system. French-Indian cultural contacts are articulated through push and pull tensions. While oppression is asserted and fought against through defiance, a conversation is also established through sociocultural clashes. Indian legends and music are not simply opposed to European influence but, by responding to each other, they create something new. This recalls Glissant’s analysis of creolisation, emerging through cultures’ ‘mutual repulsions and nascent symbioses’ (2005, 50) and resulting in the ‘unforeseeable’ and the ‘new’ (Glissant 1997, 34). Hugues Azérad also explains that creolisation involves three interrelated processes:

• 7 Author’s translation.

What emerges from the ‘phenomenon’ of creolisation is the presence, in a colonial and then postcolonial context, of the dynamics of acculturation (progressive dilution of original characteristics into the dominant culture) and of interculturation (progressive exchanges and mixtures of dominant and dominated cultures) and finally of pluricultures (cultures and ethnic groups juxtaposing, interpenetrating, but remaining more or less separate) (Azérad 2020, 6).⁷

13Moutoussamy’s novel also articulates these processes. It deals with French colonial assimilationist policy and the acculturation that it brings about, including by referring to the historical ‘implementation of the decree of 21 September 1881 signed by Jules Grévy and devoted to the policy of renunciation’ (19). The decree enshrined the ruling of 16 January 1852 by which the Court of Cassation opened up the possibility for Indians to renounce their personal status to be subject to the Civil Code, though it met with little success in Pondicherry when it was adopted (Guerlain & Renucci 2021). But the story then shifts to advocating interculturation, prefiguring pluricultures that would be more in line with the evolving, relational and plural cultural ‘creolizations’ that Glissant contrasts with creoleness (1997, 89). In light of this, the Pondicherry scenes may be interpreted as incipient forms of creolisation – beyond hybridity’s negotiated positioning – enacting an open-ended production of new meaning across Tamil and French cultures. While creolisation is not commonly associated with the subcontinent, recent scholarship like Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s ‘Creole Indias, Creolizing Pondicherry’ shows how Pondicherry’s cultural fabric can be productively read through creolisation, as an archipelago of fragments shaped by Indo-French-Creole interactions. In addition, historical and contemporary circulations – including return migrations from the French Caribbean – further support viewing Pondicherry as a site where creolising dynamics continue to occur.

14At stake in the novel are multilayered and multidirectional processes of creolisation that unfold not only in the host territory, the Caribbean, but more importantly in the interrelationship between the plurality of cultures in India and in the Guadeloupean Archipelago. The narrative captures these manifold processes of the creolisation of Indianité through a linguistic and cultural poetics – with religion as a prime illustration since Indian cultural heritage is so closely tied to Hinduism in the diaspora – a poetics that ultimately grounds the humanist values the novel promotes.

2. Creolising Indianité: A Linguistic and Cultural Poetics

15If Moutoussamy’s works often nostalgically track a Hindu India within multicultural Guadeloupe, they also portray the island as a cradle where world cultures, languages and peoples converge, coalesce and might part again. In other words, they depict creolisation processes, as defined by Rex Nettleford: ‘differing elements now coalescing, now separating, now being assimilated, now resisting, now counterresisting in a dynamic contradictory relationship that produce[s] agony but also new life’ (2003, xvi). Echoing the Glissantian conceptualisation of creolisation, this definition can be fruitfully applied to a critical reading of Moutoussamy’s Il ne fait jamais nuit. The novel traces Caroupin’s integration in Guadeloupe through resistance to the colonisers and negotiations and brotherhood with white Creoles, Africans and mixed-raced character, thereby performing cultural clashes, adaptations and negotiations through which Indianité emerges as creolised and creolising, though the term ‘creolisation’ is not directly used. Indianité, was first introduced in the French Caribbean in the journal Soleil indien, launched by Gilbert Francis Ponaman in March 1974, to revalue the identity and cultural contribution of East Indians in the Caribbean landscape (Mohammed 2017, 221), which until then had been Afrocentric.

16Brinda Mehta underlines that Afrocentrism spread across the Caribbean:

Traditional scholarship on and in the Caribbean has tended to locate the region’s specificity within a black/white-dominated historical paradigm that has stressed the primacy of European and African experiences in the Caribbean. This dialectical imbalance has obscured the subtle chiaroscuro of brownness that characterizes the Indo-Caribbean presence by promoting cultural invalidation and illegitimacy. (7)

17Writing on Trinidad, Rodda Reddock also points out how historically the term ‘Creole’ excluded East Indians, being associated with ‘a local European minority who […] controlled the entire economy’, ‘people of African descent’ and ‘the dominant Afro-Trinidadian indigenized culture’ (417). This explains Indo-Trinidadians’ ambivalence towards creolisation – acknowledging the pervasiveness of cultural mixing while fearing a potential dilution of their Indian culture (Khan 2004). In the French Caribbean, Indianité developed as a response to this Afrocentric perspective – enshrined in Négritude, perpetuated in Antillanité, partly in Créolité, and, until recently, in most discursive articulations of Caribbean identity (Mohammed 2017, 96–97). Indianité was first expanded on by scholars like Laurent Farrugia in 1975 and Michel Ponnamah in a July 1985 issue of the journal Antilla (quoted in Sméralda-Amon 2008, 7), but it did not emerge as a structured cultural project until the late 1980s and aerly 1990s with research by Martinican Gilbert Francis Ponaman, Moutoussamy’s book La Guadeloupe et son indianité, and the conference proceedings of the first Festival of Indianité held in Guadeloupe in 1991 (Toumson 1994). Recent scholarship has further demonstrated that Indianness is not a late cultural addition but an integral part of creolisation processes in the Caribbean (Kabir 2020, Phukan 2022, Islam 2023). Moutoussamy’s defence of Indianité directly impacts how he reinvents Indian culture – lifestyle, language, beliefs, etc. – in his writings.

18In Il ne fait jamais nuit, the most unexpected result of the interplay of acculturation and interculturation is how Brahminic purification rites and caste hierarchy are redefined and subsumed within a philosophical Hindu thought porous to other cultural and societal influences, including Western Christianism and a humanist vision running against religious and sociocultural stratification. The novel’s paradoxical take on Hinduism is linked to the multiple ways in which Hindu religion and culture have been creolised in the French Caribbean where the dominant popular Hinduism – originating in Tamil Nadu where about 60 % of Indian indentured labourers came from (Schnakenbourg 2005, 501) – combines with a recently revived Brahmanical form of Hinduism. Tamil Hinduism – often referred to as popular or village Hinduism – ’comes in different currents and describes itself more as a philosophy of life than a religion’ (Jiounandan 2019, 68). It is the Hinduism of disadvantaged social classes, and thus spread in Guadeloupe, as indentured labourers mostly belonged to these classes. It is ‘associated with deities of lower castes or outcastes’, ‘characterised by the worship of local goddesses such as Maldévilin, Maliémin and Kâli’ (Jiounandan 2019, 68) and includes ritual animal sacrifice, contrary to Brahmanical Hinduism. Inherited from northern India, Brahmanical Hinduism ‘is practised by the four upper castes, with the Brahmins performing the rituals at the top. They worship the three major deities of the Hindu pantheon, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva’ (68). While it has gained more traction in Guadeloupe over the last few decades, this form of Hinduism has always existed alongside popular Hinduism, often resulting in cults and rites mixing deities from the Hindu pantheon with Tamil divinities (Nagapin & Sulty 1989).

20This redefinition is tied to the concept of enlightenment and the poetic focus on light in general. While light is often associated with purification rites and the fire of the Hindu god Agni, it quickly takes on the symbolism of universal enlightenment and humanism – an argument I further elaborate on in the following section. As such, the text states that Caroupin ‘rooted’ his Hinduism in ‘his deep humanism’ (7), and elsewhere claims:

• 9 ‘Fasciné par une forte attirance de l’universalisme, il se sentait fils de la planète, citoyen de t (...)

Fascinated by a strong attraction to universalism, he felt himself to be a son of the planet, a citizen of all countries, able to nourish himself from all other sources without denying himself, without alienating himself. Imbued with the spiritual light of India, he was not dazzled by the states of France and England. He had internalised the wisdom of her [India’s] civilisation. (21)⁹

3. Toward a Creolised Cosmopolitanism

26Fifteen years ago, Françoise Lionnet argued that creolisation had often remained restricted to linguistic and anthropological research and, for a while, seemed opposed to cosmopolitanism. Yet thinking of the two together one could ‘hope to elicit a revaluation of the notion of creolisation and of the producers of Creole cultures’ (2011, 26). She offered the example of the Indian Ocean and the Mascarenes to demonstrate the existence of Creole cosmopolitans who were early producers of vast oral, written and print cultures. It is important to note that while the term Creole originally referred to a person born in a given country (from Spanish criollo), the semantic history of the term has not evolved in the same way in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. In the Mascarenes, Creole first designated the descendants of European settlers born locally (Blancs créoles) before being extended to the often-mixed-race descendants of enslaved Africans and Malagasy people. Today it is still associated with an ethnocultural community who often contrasted with the Indo-Mauritian population (Chaudenson 1992), though the term Indo-Creole has been gaining ground in scholarship on the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, in the Caribbean, the term Creole has undergone a broader semantic expansion: it came to encompass both Black and White Creoles, then Creole languages and cultures – including European, African, Indian and Amerindian components – and was theorised by Glissant as part of a global process of creolisation beyond fixed identities (1997). Despite these different trajectories, Lionnet’s theorisation of creolisation as both critical framework and practice (Lionnet & Shih 2011; Lionnet 2011) proves particularly productive for a comparative, transoceanic reading. Bringing these insights into dialogue with the Caribbean allows to rethink the relationship between cosmopolitanism and creolisation, which Moutoussamy’s plurilingual and creolised fiction also brings together. Moreover, Lionnet pointed that since the nineteenth century cosmopolitanism has sometimes been negatively associated to the figure of an unmoored wanderer whose nationless-ness could potentially equate faithlessness, but studies have unpacked the ‘ethos of cosmopolitanism’ (28) to weigh its pros and cons in relation to nationalism, for instance. On the other hand, she observed that creole identity still seemed mainly associated with exploited, displaced, colonised, downtrodden and powerless populations:

The common perception of Creole peoples and languages is still shrouded in ignorance and mired in exotic clichés, in racial mythologies of degeneracy and the deficiencies associated with insularity and slavery, orality, indenture, forcible transplantation, or imposed immobility. (Lionnet 2011, 28)

27Nearly fifteen years later, Creoleness has not fully been distangled from the clichés Lionnet mentioned. However, Moutoussamy's novel offers a different perspective. While his narrative is marked by the traumatic crossings Kala pani and exploitation system of indenture, refers several times to enslavement and the slave trade and, punctually, to the decimation of the Amerindians, the Guadeloupean people the writer portrays are not simply the products of those histories of tragic oppression, they are active producers of cultural transformation and transmission in small acts such as the narration of oral tales and epics, the performance of music, the recitation of sacred texts, all of which are incorporated and adapted to daily life on the island through conflicts, challenges and new solidarities. That is why the text claims that the protagonist is said to feel as ‘a son of the planet, a citizen of all countries’ who is ‘able to draw on all other sources without denying himself, without alienating himself’ (21). Thus, a cosmopolitan view does not exclude creolisation processes. On the contrary, cosmopolitanism may be reasserted, its understanding complexified, through creolisation. The intermingling of cosmopolitanism and creolisation is actually what defines Moutoussamy’s universal vision of man, human dignity and humanist values. Universalism has often negatively been perceived as a denial of specificity, singularity and locality, but in Moutoussamy’s creolised cosmopolitan perspective, universalism is neither the result of assimilating globalisation processes, nor the imposition of Western imperialism, let alone a return to the ‘aesthetics of the universe’ (Glissant 1997, 94) or to ‘the age of classicism (of deepening an internal unity, raised to the dimensions of a universal itself postulated)’ because the latter ‘is past, no doubt, for all cultures’ (Glissant 1997, 90). Rather, humanist universalism is grounded in what could be called, following Anthony Appiah, ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’. As Appiah notes:

Real cosmopolitans – that is, people whose moral concern extends to everyone on our small planet – are rooted cosmopolitans, and because they prize conversations across cultures, they’re no friends of uniformity. […] The focused care and concern we have for those near to us doesn’t clash with having care and concern for the planet and its inhabitants. Every life is a negotiation between the small scale and the large (2019).

29If such a humanist universalism might appear as a utopia when considered on a planetary scale, Moutoussamy’s narrative unveils how ongoing creolisation processes taking place even in the smallest and seemingly most insignificant of places, the insular space of Guadeloupe, the small town of Saint-François, and in its yet smaller covered marketplace, can actually be starting points for imagining and implementing this humanist vision. The narrative opened on the wooden beam offered by Caroupin Ramsamy, a son of India, in 1909, and in a circular fashion, the last pages return to this beam and its inscription. The last three pages reinvent the story of the marketplace and how Caroupin decided to gift it to the town thereby bringing together the local populations. The marketplace becomes ‘the family gazebo. The mixed-blood house. The residence of fraternity. The child of all the population’ (248) and a ‘haven of conviviality’ (249). Even prior to its official opening, the inhabitants picture that sounds of African ka and bamboula drums would commingle with performances of quadrilles while some people would play Chinese domino games. With this climactic interethnic and intercultural gathering in the small Saint-Franciscan covered marketplace, the narrative anchors its cosmopolitan views in localised political, social and cultural realities. This grounding evokes the ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ conceived by Homi Bhaha as a counterpoint to abstract universalist cosmopolitanism, which neglects marginal communities, those that occupy the interstices on the edge of the national community, such as gender and racial minorities, refugees, migrants, etc. By contrast, the paradoxical concept of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ emphasises the construction of identities forged in local praxis and relationality. It strives to bring to light ‘those identities… [that] arise from the fissures of the larger social fabric’ (41). Such ‘fissures’ emerge through Moutoussamy's novel's multiscale shifts. The narrative focus also recalls the articulation of the local and global proposed by Appiah in his reflections on ‘patriotic cosmopolitanism’: ‘It is because humans live best on a smaller scale that we should defend not just the state, but also the country, the town, the street, the business, the craft, the profession…as circles among the many circles narrower than the human horizon, that are the appropriate spheres of moral concern (Appiah 1994; Bhabha 2001, 42). The novel similarly explores cosmopolitanism through marginal, interstitial and small-scale spaces, linking it to the creolisation of Guadeloupean society, with its tensions, challenges and promises.

30While being a circumscribed place with limited size, the marketplace appears to be ideally opened to all and to “agricultural production and craftsmanship from everywhere” (249). Its inauguration is also multiply blessed by local religious and political authorities alike, opening with a puja to Ganesh, followed by a gwo-ka performance and a blessing given by the canon, and, lastly, by a speech by the then mayor Amédée Pauvert (249). Historically, Pauvert was not only the mayor of Saint-François and the head of the town’s most powerful family of the time, but he also owned the sugar factory of Sainte-Marthe where former slaves, free Blacks, mixed-race individuals as well as indentured Indians worked in harrowing conditions. He is infamous for having received a 200-francs fine (about 30 euros) in 1884 for the “involuntary homicide” of an Indian indentured labourer (Schnakenbourg 2005, 815). The narrative does not deny his cruel and oppressive management of his workers, which is mentioned on several occasions, and the text even quotes the popular Creole slur used at the time to mock Indian workers’ subservience to the Pauvert family: they were called ‘Malaba à Povè’ [Pauvert’s Malabar] (72) – the term Malabar being used here as pejoratively, though it literally refers to the Indians’ presumed origin, the Malabar Coast. Neither does the story gloss over the divide between Blacks and Indians (especially when sugar factories boomed in the late nineteenth century) and the one that progressively opposed North Indians to South Indians when Indians migrated from Calcutta after 1873 (73).

31Yet even these conflicts are progressively subsumed in the narrative, in particular when Indian indentured labourers are seen to become plantation owners. For instance, the Dravidian Chinapin, portrayed as one of the rare survivors of the first coolie ship, the L’Aurélie, which landed in 1854, buys the Loyette plantation in 1876 and creates there a space to accommodate Indians from North and South India alike, as well as Congolese indentured workers (74). Here again history is transformed to fit the narrative intent. There was indeed an Indo-Guadeloupean named François Sinapin Ramssamy who bought a parcel of sugarcane plantation of sixty acres which belonged to Monsieur Loyette, but this only happened in 1947 and he was one of the first Indians to own a sugarcane plot while the plantation house still belonged to M. Loyette (Moutoussamy 2016, 139–141). Lastly, the ending scene of the novel encapsulates the author’s views on humanism, as the story concludes with the symbolic engraving of the republican motto. Under Caroupin’s gaze, the motto is carved into the beam, one word at a time, by three second-generation protagonists of European, African and Indian descent.

Conclusion

32While diverging from historical facts, Moutoussamy’s fiction Il ne fait jamais nuit (2013) remains inspired by his research through public and private archives, but also by the testimonies he collected and his memories as a young boy who grew up in Saint-François and saw the former covered market and its animation. What narrative imagination, expansion and creativity thus allow him to do is to suggest the confrontations and alliances that may have occurred and may partly account for the plurilingual, pluricultural, creolised landscape of today’s Guadeloupe. Fiction also provides avenues to think about creolised processes that might have taken place in the Indian subcontinent before the 1923 official end of indenture in the French Caribbean, as it is historically known that indentured migrants sometimes returned to India after their indenture contract even if others stayed behind – very often unwillingly. Thus, it is estimated that 9460 Indians indentured in Guadeloupe had returned to India between 1856 and 1906 (César 1994, 93).

33Moutoussamy’s fiction opens interstices that could prompt scholars to look for and excavate yet untold stories of creolisation in the subcontinent itself. Connecting the Indian mainland to the island is also part of the relational and universalising views he promotes, and one can only properly grasp the universalisation of humanist values his writing gestures to by reading his narrative through the simultaneous prism of creolisation and cosmopolitanism. While Thomas Eriksen describes creolisation as a ‘recipe for conviviality’, my reading of Moutoussamy’s work – through the lenses of creolisation and cosmopolitanism, and in dialogue with Francophone and Anglophone postcolonial and diasporic studies – suggests instead that creolisation can be understood as an ingredient for an ethos grounded in the recognition of shared dignity, a ‘relational ontology’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez), and respect for cultural diversity, as articulated in UNESCO’s 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (Moutoussamy 2016, 31, 165). Such a critical reading is in and of itself also already a performance of creolisation.

34Anglophone fiction has also explored issues close to those portrayed in Moutoussamy’s novel: indentured labour, the creolisation of Indianness, and the pursuit of a cosmopolitan horizon. In his 1996 novel The Counting House, David Dabydeen narrates the story of an Indian couple in British Guiana, depicting the conflictual relationships but also the possible solidarities between Indians, Africans and Creole planters. The novel thus hints at a nascent cosmopolitanism in the way interethnic relations drive a redefinition of Indianness and new forms of coexistence. Published a decade later, Peggy Mohan’s Jahajin (2007) follows the trajectory of Indian women who arrived in Trinidad and emphasises the creolisation of language (Bhojpuri transformed by Creole and English) and cultural practices (recomposed Hindu rituals and popular festivals such as Hosay). In the narrative, Indianness is reinvented through contact with an Afro-Creole environment, which helps shape spaces for intercultural encounters and sketches out a cosmopolitanism rooted in everyday life. While the two Anglophone novels listed so far reflect the diversity and complementarity of Caribbean perspectives, Bengali novelist Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies (2008) shifts the focus to the Indian Ocean. The novel follows the crew and future indentured labourers onboard the Ibis. This transoceanic space, marked by the blurring of languages and affiliations (castes, classes, nationalities), becomes a laboratory of hybridity – akin to the creolisation dynamics that occurred during Kala pani crossings, as shown in the poetics of Coolitude (Torabully & Carter 2002) – where the contours of a subaltern cosmopolitanism emerge. These Anglophone works of fiction thus open fruitful pathways for further investigation into a ‘creolised cosmopolitanism’, inviting a relational and transoceanic perspective that extends beyond the Franco-Caribbean context alone.