Abstract/Summary

This chapter explores how colonial India is represented in Marguerite Duras’s ‘Indian Cycle’ of novels and films from the 1960s and 1970s – a period which witnessed the dramatic and violent loss of France’s empire – and how this contemporaneous context inflects the author’s retrospective representations. By resituating Duras’s supposedly ‘false and musical’ Asian place-names within their real-life geographic and historic contexts, the chapter investigates whether her literary and filmic representations of ‘les Indes’ reflect a nostalgic continuation of her creative engagement with past French imperialism – so confirming Kate Marsh’s assertion that ‘perceptions of territorial loss sustained continuities which informed subsequent manifestations of French imperialism and are evident today in metropolitan representations and memories of empire’ - or whether instead the violent loss of empire at the time of writing effects a radical, stylistic and ideological rupture. This rereading contests dominant scholarly claims that Duras’s ‘Indian’ works are divorced from the historical, geographic realities of French colonisation and anti-colonial violence. It also demonstrates how the work of one author and film-maker can revealingly reflect often-silenced continuities, ambiguities and ruptures in broader French society’s retrospective relationship with its lost empire.