Asia specialist Serge Granger invites us to a fascinating exploration of the “connected history” between Quebec and India, from the Conquest of 1760 to Indian independence in 1947, from the University of Sherbrooke. It shows the richness of unsuspected exchanges between two peoples who are separated by everything – geography, religion, demography – but which the colonized state brings together.
European colonization began in the 17the century a surge of commercial globalization. We were already cooking in New France with spices imported from the French trading post in Pondicherry. Everything grew under the British Empire, from the tea trade to that of… opium, a “remedy” which was for a long time on sale over the counter in England and Canada, not without wreaking havoc in Quebec.
What follows, through emulation, is the circulation of ideas — and autonomist demands. Between nationalist elites, the Empire will serve as a communicating vessel. What is interesting about Mr. Granger, who spent years searching archives and period newspapers here and there to write his work, is that he studies history in its horizontality , by the menu, where the “small” facts are the material for the big ones.
Until the First World War, several Indian nationalists, starting with one of the moderate founders of the independence movement, Gopal Krishna Gohkale, outright idealized the Canadian parliamentary system for the autonomy acquired by ” French Canada » in the Confederation. Didn’t Wilfrid Laurier, born colonized in Saint-Lin-Laurentides, become Prime Minister of Canada? Much greater autonomy, in any case, than the subjugation in which the Indians are confined. The rebellion of the patriots and that of Louis Riel found an attentive echo in India. These events interested the Maharaja of Jaipur so much that he purchased theHistoryfrom Canada in four volumes by François-Xavier Garneau. At the end of the 19th centurye century, Henri Bourassa became friends with Lala Lajpat Rai, the more radical hero of the Indian liberation struggle, the two men agreeing perfectly on how to “deconstruct the Empire”.
The admiration was reversed, in a way, after the Great War. It was the turn of the Indian independence struggle to inspire French Canadian nationalists. Lionel Groulx is one of them. André Laurendeau too, who translates Gandhi, whom he admires infinitely. The anticonscriptionism of the first joins the pacifism of the second. Well before the Quiet Revolution, and long before the French Canadian became a Québécois, writes Granger, the Gandhian discourse “contributes to the mutation [de notre] local nationalism” and awakens him to the international dimension of anti-colonial struggles.