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Coloniality and tourism: the fabric of identities and alterities in India

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud
Traduction de Nelson Graburn
Cet article est une traduction de :
Colonialité et tourisme : la fabrique des identités et des altérités en Inde [fr]
Autre(s) traduction(s) de cet article :
Colonialidad y turismo: la fábrica de las identidades y alteridades en India [es]

Résumé

Country crossed by the colonial matrix, India constitutes a relevant example for thinking about tourist situations and showing how institutional (Indian government) and non-institutional actors (companies, domestic tourists, members of the diaspora) mobilize tourist imaginaries for support or redefine collective identities and alterities - even sometimes reinforce them. This contribution seeks, on the one hand, to question the processes by which tourism in India has become a political instrument, facilitating the rewriting the national myth by erasing the stigma of colonization while reifying the West, and on the other hand, to show, from intermediate situations – the Indian diaspora and Indian domestic tourism - how hybridizations are forged in which post- and decolonial paradigms act on identities.

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Introduction: decolonization through domestic tourism

1Increasingly massive tourist movements have continued to spread around the world. Formerly reserved for a few elites, these international mobilities today concern populations that have historically been far from the globalization of tourism. As Keen and Tucker suggest, “the world of tourism is changing as increasing numbers of people from ’non-western’ countries (often former colonized sites) become tourists […] Just as postcolonial theory has been useful in pluralizing modernity, this is clearly raises the need to pluralize the tourist gaze, to reconsider tourists expectations, perceptions and motivations, indeed what is to be a tourist” (Keen and Tucker, 2012, p. 101). It can also be added that, within developing countries, despite its undoubted cultural and economic importance, domestic tourism has been the subject of a tradition of scientific neglect compared to international tourism (Scheyvens, 2007). For Singh, domestic tourism constitutes in the field of research "the largest, and most unaddressed, proportion of the tourism iceberg" (Singh, 2009, p. 3). Nevertheless, this would be forgetting the numerous works of Nelson Graburn (1983, 1999, 2001, 2002 and 2009) and in particular the pioneering role of the journal Annals of Tourism Research (Anthropology of Tourism, 1983), which paved the way for many fruitful questions for studies on domestic tourism.

2In the case of the Indian Union, according to the latest report from the World Travel and Tourism Council, the tourism and leisure sector generated $209 billion, equivalent to 9.6% of GDP, propelling the country to 7th place in absolute value. In addition, this sector created 40.3 million jobs in 2016, which ranks the Indian Union 2nd in the world for the number of jobs created. This sector of activity represents 9.3% of total employment in the country. It also experienced the fastest growth among the G20 countries, with a rate of 8.5% in 2016. Thus, the tourist conquest of the planet is gradually ending - helping to make the Earth and the World coincide (Knafou, 2011) - and each year new categories of populations in so-called “developing” countries gain access to leisure and tourism. This is all the more significant in India where domestic tourism is the main driver of growth in the sector: the foreign currency spent by foreign travelers in 2016 represented only 12% of tourism revenue.

  • 1 Following the work of Peyvel, rather than internal tourism, I prefer to speak of domestic tourism b (...)

3Data from the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) show that the country received only 9 million international arrivals in 2016 (10.2 million for 2017, according to the report of the Ministry of Tourism), which places it 40th among tourist destinations in the world. At the same time, the Indian Union recorded 1.6 billion domestic tourist trips, with Tamil Nadu state at the top of the ranking. These domestic practices1, without calling into question one of the major privileges of the elites, multiple residences, nevertheless highlight the emancipatory virtues of easier access to tourist practices for a greater number. The price, like the multiplication of tourist circuits targeting this Indian clientele, now facilitates the flow of Indian tourists from the middle classes. From this perspective, tourism can no longer be considered either as an exclusively Western practice, or as a practice reserved for the wealthy. More and more Indians are thus more and more mobile and this geographic mobility makes it possible, even partially, to confirm what Stock (2007) calls the "recreational turn", that is to say a generalization and a diversification of practices, places and times of recreation in contemporary societies.

  • 2 "One of the current challenges of tourism research could then consist in renewing the framework of (...)

4Faced with this, and extending Marie Dit Chirot’s (2017) proposal to "rematerialize tourism studies"2, it is appropriate, taking India as a case study, to think about the effects of the remaking of capitalism, of which world tourism represents a major element. This calls into question the categories "third world countries", "tropical", "emerging", but also "of the South" and "developing" which seem for many to be locked in a colonial paradigm. According to Collignon, “we can speak of a colonial paradigm because it is indeed a global form of thought, which goes far beyond the political order linked to the historical period of colonialism. Its foundation is this ordering of the world built in Europe on a binary opposition between "them", the Others, and "us", the Europeans" (Collignon, 2007).

  • 3 Even though the discourse of the orientalists underlined a deep rooting of India in the tradition a (...)

5As Spivak says, “the clearest example of this epistemic violence is the vast project, heterogeneous and orchestrated from a distance, of the constitution of the colonial subject as Other. This project also constitutes in the asymmetrical occultation of the trace of this Other in his precarious subjectivity (Spivak, 2009, p. 37). For Maldonado-Torres, the colonial project is a model of power consubstantial with the idea of ​​modernity and rebirth. According to this author, coloniality is at the heart of modern experience, more than that, “beneath the ’I think’ we can read ’others do not think’, and behind the ’I am’ it is possible to locate the philosophical justification for the idea that ’others are not’ or do not have being. In this way we are led to uncover the complexity of the Cartesian formulation. From ’I think, therefore I am’ we are led to the more complex and both philosophically and historically accurate expression: I think (others do not think, or do not think properly), therefore I am (others are-not, lack being, should not exist or are dispensable)” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 252). Everything is done as if Europe and the Western world had thought of a system for creating distances and proximities from spatiotemporal devices, in particular by locating non-Western societies on an imaginary time scale indicating their respective distance from the present Euro-American-Atlantic (Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 214). In addition, these categories which have often been constructed and issued by non-scientific but political and economic actors (located in former colonial metropolises), oblige researchers to make contortions, to obscure their research object, and to put quotation marks, plurals and "dits" ("from the South", "developing", etc.3). This western-centrism is problematic because our concepts and methodologies are contaminated by a “geopolitics of knowledge” or “body politics of knowledge” (Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 213): our glasses do not allow us to see the specificities of such contexts, but rather to point out what appear to be gaps, sometimes rendering us incapable of grasping, and therefore of understanding, contexts which function at least in part differently from those of the West. As Coronil notes, “Occidentalism is inseparably tied to the constitution of international asymmetries underwritten by global capitalism” (Coronil, 1996, pp. 56-57).

6In this article I will mobilize the concept of coloniality as defined by Maldonado-Torres in order to make visible those who are invisible, in this case the many Indian tourists visiting their country, and to question the mechanisms which produce this invisibility. For Maldonado-Torres, coloniality survives colonialism, “coloniality (…) refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. [Coloniality] is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and everyday” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243). It must be said, as Peyvel notes, that "admitting that the former native can be a tourist in his own country is a transcendence of colonial thought, because this amounts to recognizing that he is subject and actor of his mobility, and not only the object of exotic curiosities” (2017, p. 302).

7In a way, this amounts to decolonizing mobile populations, to challenging the epistemic hegemony of the West, which has emerged as the privileged place of enunciation and production of knowledge. The Western world has been described as an absolute here. It is therefore a question of challenging this solipsism in order to relativize its centrality as well as the hegemonic claim of modern abstract universalism. Authors such as Chambers and Buzinde (2015) have made strong criticisms of current knowledge in tourism research. For these authors, the latter remain essentially colonial and require an epistemological decolonization which would decentralize Western perspectives. But what do these acts of decentralization imply? What should they look like? In tourism studies, postcolonial theory has often been considered a relevant approach for understanding how tourism developed in ‘the South’ and for demonstrating how Western epistemologies and ontologies dominated the understanding of colonial societies and the effects of this domination, this positioning allows to think about the asymmetries of power and in extenso the relations of domination. Many studies on tourism have adopted such a perspective (Echtner & Prasad, 2003; D’Hauteserre, 2011; Hall and Tucker, 2004; Jacobs, 2010; Chambers and Buzinde, 2015; Peyvel, 2016). This research is itself influenced by postcolonial theorists, and in particular by the concept of “third space” developed by Bhabha (2007) which makes it possible to situate the production of culture in spaces of in-between, of hybridity and ambiguity, allowing one to escape binary and dual visions. For Bhabha, "the process of cultural hybridity gives birth to something different, something new, which one cannot recognize, a new field for negotiating meaning and representation" (2006, pp. 99-100) .

  • 4 In 2006, the name officially returned to the pre-colonial denomination, Puducherry. Both internatio (...)

8As a nation caught up in the colonial matrix, India constitutes a relevant example to rethink tourist situations. This contribution is based on ongoing research carried out within the framework of a CNRS delegation to the French Institute of Pondicherry4 which focuses on the effects tourist and recreational mobility practiced by Indians on the processes of urbanization and metropolitanization in South India (particularly in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry). The research is mainly based on qualitative methodology and more specifically on "comprehensive" interviews (in the sense of Kaufmann, 2016) and life stories. This article is based more particularly on initial surveys conducted from December 20 to January 16, 2019, corresponding to the Indian holiday season and the peak of attendance of Puducherry by Indian tourists. During this time interval, I conducted 24 interviews in English with members of the English-speaking middle class (11 were from Bangaluru, 6 from Pune, 3 from Chennai, 2 from Mumbai and 2 others from Kolkatta), and in addition interviews with government representatives (Department of Tourism), heritage protection associations (INTACH, POndyCan) and private tourism stakeholders.

9More specifically, my goal is to show how institutional actors (Indian government in particular) and others (domestic tourists, members of the diaspora) mobilize tourist imaginations to support or redefine collective identities - even sometimes strengthen them. It will also be a question of understanding how these various actors appropriate these representations to understand “to what extent the tourist imagination no longer appears only as a way of "seeing" the world but also a way of "making" the world” (Boukhris, 2012). This redefinition led certain operators to reclaim colonial thought grids producing complex identity hybridizations, tourism becoming “an arena in which relations of power and domination operate at different scales of space and time” (Marie Dit Chirot, 2018, p. 12).

10My remarks are divided into two parts. The first questions the processes by which tourism in India has become a political instrument, making it possible to rewrite the national myth by erasing the stigma of colonization while reifying the West. Several authors have pointed out that during the postcolonial period, domestic tourism in the former colonies served to support accounts of political identity in the postcolonial state which served its own ideological objectives, often emphasizing stories of resistance to the European colonial powers (Bandyopadhyay & Morais, 2005; Patil, 2011b).

11In postcolonial heritage and tourism studies, it has been assumed that there is a fundamental divide between tourists from the former colonial powers and those from the former colonies. For example, Graham et al. assert that “in postcolonial states, the principal dissonance is between new national identities based upon revised and unifying heritage values, and tourism economies, which perpetuate colonial heritage in order to sell them to visitors from former metropolitan countries who recognized their own heritage in them” (Graham et al., 2000, p. 94). Nevertheless, starting from in-between situations – the Indian diaspora and Indian domestic tourism - we aim to show how hybridizations are forged in which post- and decolonial paradigms act on identities. In this second part we will analyze the tourism practices and aspirations of the Indian middle classes. This is how we put the diaspora and domestic tourism on the same level, because in both cases these middle classes represent an increasingly large group of consumers who increasingly integrate and mix more westernized lifestyles with aspects of Indian culture. We could also add, concerning the diaspora, “because their tourist traits (for example, tendency to travel to places that foreign tourists do not go, often in order to visit friends and family and attend important social and cultural events) are more closely related to those of domestic tourists than foreign tourists” (Scheyvens, 2007, p. 309).

I. Orientalism and Westernism: colonial heritage and Hindu nationalism

12The origin of the institutionalization of tourism in independent India dates back to 1949, the year of the creation of a Tourist Traffic Branch under the supervision of the Ministry of Transport, and “the first Indian tourist representation overseas is founded in New York, in 1952” (Bautès, 2004, p. 423). It was not until 1958 that the government created a separate Ministry of Tourism, which until then constituted a simple Department attached to the Ministry of Aviation and was mainly devoted to the promotion of elite domestic tourism. Although tourism was at that time integrated into the various five-year plans, it was only during the Seventh Plan, between 1980 and 1985 that the development of a new tourism policy led to greater decentralization, each State taking the responsibility to promote and develop its own tourism sector (Bhatia, 1978). Faced with the country’s great linguistic, religious and cultural heterogeneity, successive governments have tried to create a feeling of national belonging through tourism, by erasing the stigma of colonization. As Boukhris and Chapuis recall, “thinking about tourism also means thinking about the question of national formation (its characteristics, its historical and collective memories, its future) and of the power of the State (from central government to local administrations)” (2016) Let us analyze the rhetoric and tourist images used by the government and the Indian media to understand to what extent the latter have appropriated Western stereotypes from the East to divert them and maintain a particular form of postcolonial nationalism.

A. Occidentalism and Orientalism

  • 5 All these specialists were and are specifically attached to the study of Sanskrit and Vedic texts e (...)

13India often appears to westerners as the country in the Orient with the greatest extremes of both horror and beauty (Sharma, 2002). These two contradictory images lasted until the Age of Enlightenment, during which the emphasis was placed on the glory of India, thus denying the passage of time, fixing the country in immutability. All this authorized the development of an unsurpassable eastern otherness which mirrored the construction of a European identity and justified its colonial project (Saïd, 1978). It was only in the 19th century, with the discovery of epic and philosophical texts of Indian civilization, that a craze made up of specialists (Indianists, Orientalists and philologists5), breathed new life into literature and the arts. These kaleidoscopic images have founded an archetypal but ambivalent image of India, while reactivating the paradox of a fascinated and distrustful West faced by an elusive India resulting from the entanglement of reality and the imaginary (Weinberger-Thomas 1988). Western conceptions of India mostly tended to accentuate the mysterious, feminine, irrational and religious dimensions of Indian culture as opposed to a civilized, masculine Western culture (not to say virile, because the first colonial texts presented the Indians as effeminate), rational and materially advanced. Even today, for many Westerners, India still seems to be built like a land steeped in ancient wisdom, the mystical / spiritual counterpart to Western rationalism, its inverted image, reinforcing the cliché of Indian thought: neither rational nor scientific, arising from imagination rather than reason (Louiset, 2008).

14Western travelers therefore tend to perceive India as a spiritual refuge (Assayag, 1999), which gained momentum with the Beatnik generation and the hippie phenomenon: travelers see their journey in India as a break (Lagadec, 2003). In short, “the image of India in the minds of nostalgic Westerners in the 1960s, spiritual seekers, gurus worshipers, nonviolent hashishins and gullible psychedelics. For them, all Indians are vegetarians and peaceful. India, a stopover on the path to Kathmandu, is the country of the poppy and the Kama Sutra. Beatles and Gandhi, same combat” (Landy, 1993, p. 93).

  • 6 “Located its own subjectivity in the spiritual domain of culture, where it considered itself superi (...)

15These exaggerated contrasts were reinforced, manipulated and disseminated by the Indians themselves, according to a process sometimes tinged with auto-orientalism or "self-orientalism" (Echtner and Prasad, 2003). It must be said that tourism is sometimes tautological, since tourists - by their displacement - do, in short, only confirm what speeches and various media sold or talked up for them. The promotion of tourism can be seen as a form of imperialism through which the ghostly traces of colonialism continue to be visible. For example, almost all tours offered in India include what is commonly known as the "Golden Triangle", the peaks of which are Delhi, Agra and Jaipur (Landy, 1993, p. 96). The focus is on the past, religion and an ancient and mystical culture. These constructions constitute a form of partial and simplistic reification perpetuating the orientalist equation of India for clients who wish to experience cultures that they consider timeless and immutable. But, this dichotomy was also reinforced by the Indian nationalists themselves who “situated their own subjectivity in the spiritual domain of culture, where it considered itself superior to the West and therefore unrelated to domination and sovereign6 (Chatterjee, 1989, p. 632).

16The demolition of Hampi Bazaar (reported in detail in the local press) is a good example of this rhetoric where the religious elites, and more particularly the ethno-nationalist discourse maintained by certain priests, gave shape to a binary opposition between West and East. This discursive condemnation by the postcolonial elites targets not only Western tourists but also ordinary citizens seeking to earn a living through tourism. In 1986, UNESCO classified (according to criteria I, II, III and IV) the ancient capital of the Vijayanagar empire, in the state of Karnataka (Cf. document 1). If Hampi is a UNESCO classified site, the locality is also an important place of pilgrimage. Apart from the pilgrims who went to the temple of Virupaksha, home of Hampi, and a handful of hippies, the city was not a popular travel destination during the 1980s. Gradually, in the mid-1990s, private bus companies established a second line between Goa and Hampi. This attracted a different crowd, mainly young, “tired” international tourists from the crowded beaches of Goa. Their presence helped to restructure the local tourist offerings: many Indian families not originating from Hampi came to settle there to open inns, offering non-vegetarian cuisine and alcohol: elements which are hardly tolerated in a sacred site. Domestic tourism also intensified during the same decade, making Hampi a place where several categories of tourists juxtapose.

Document 1: Hampi, from the cultural landscape to the classified site

Document 1: Hampi, from the cultural landscape to the classified site

Whilst entire villages are included within the boundaries of the UNESCO World Heritage site, Hampi has never been recognized as constituting a cultural landscape (a constructed landscape associating the monuments left with legacies of granite chaos, rice fields and sugar cane fields) but only as a simple "site", which greatly affected the ability to put in place a conservation policy involving experts and residents. Only Hindu and Jain temples, tombs, mosques and other monuments under the responsibility of the Archeological Survey of India and the State Archeology Department are taken into consideration by this heritage policy.

17In 1999, UNESCO classified Hampi among the World Heritage sites in danger due to the anarchic urbanization, in particular around the Virupaksha temple. In 2002, the Karnataka Legislative Assembly took into account UNESCO’s recommendations and set up the Hampi World Heritage Area Management Authority (HWHAMA). Although an Integrated Management Plan7, developed by Nalini Thakur, has been drafted and approved by the International Committee (ICOMOS), HWHAMA did not adopt it. In 2006, a master plan was adopted for Hampi by this same authority, leading to a process of museumification and the eviction of hundreds of families. At the end of July 2011 (after 5 years of inaction), the deputy commissioner of the district of Bellary (and member of HWHAMA) orally warned the inhabitants that the demolition of their shops and their houses must begin within 24 hours8. Early the next morning, the bulldozers begin their work. More than 320 families lost their homes and livelihoods.

18Out of all these families, who had been settled for more than two decades, only eleven had legal documents, which further complicated their resettlement and the establishment of financial compensation9. What is troubling about these demolition and eviction actions (there were other acts in 2015 and 2017)10 is the rhetoric used to justify it and make it legitimate. Indeed, these were preceded by firm and vehement condemnations of the behavior of international tourists and of the whole economy which revolves around them. It must be said that in recent years, “the seemingly innocent and perfectly secular agenda of promoting tourism has become a channel for pumping taxpayers’ money into promoting temples, ashrams, and pilgrimage spots” (Nanda, 2011, p. 109). Hinduism increasingly dominates the public sphere thanks to neoliberal economic policies which benefit the Hindu gods and Hindu nationalism. An important element in this process is what Nanda calls the "state-temple-corporate complex" in which pilgrimage tourism is an important element in the trivialization of Hindu nationalism (Nanda, 2011, pp. 108-111). As Bloch (2017) shows, the discourse of these priests is imbued with a discursive construction which is the inverted image of Orientalism. This essentialized discourse on the West suggests tourists from these countries are "barbarians" (Bloch, 2017), immoral, hypocritical, decadent, materialistic, alienated and with mores totally incompatible with a pilgrimage site (consumption of meat, alcohol and unbridled sexuality). Westerners pose a threat to the national identity understood here as Hindu11. This discursive condemnation also targets these non-Hampi nationals who came to profit from tourism. By evicting them and destroying their homes, these religious elites create new forms, this time internal, of subalternity (Bloch, 2017).

  • 12 One could say that the vision of Western tourists and the vision of Hindu nationalists are similar (...)

19Thus, if Orientalism remains the basis of the tourist identity of India for many Western travelers, tourism becomes a political instrument for the federal government, allowing the rewriting of the national myth by erasing the stigma of colonization and by reifying the West at the same time as it reifies India.12There is pride in many Indians who are overcome by their status as an ancient colonized people, to see all these white people admire Hindu temples of the 8th century, to pay a sort of homage to a civilization which is thus found to be rehabilitated” (Landy, 1993, p. 100). Hampi illustrates how the power relations enshrined in tourism and nationalism intersect postcolonial societies and produce regimes of citizenship. Indeed, according to Chatterjee, “official nationalism has a performative as well as a pedagogical function. In the performative mode, it must display the unity and singularity of the nation and the equal place within it of all citizens. In the pedagogical mode, however, official nationalism must reckon with the fact that all citizens cannot be treated equally, because all are not yet ‘proper’ citizens; they must be educated into full membership of the ‘true” body of national citizens” (Chatterjee, 2011, p. 155).

B. Colonial heritage and Hindu nationalism: towards a reconstruction of the national narrative through tourism?

20It is in this sense that special attention must also be paid to the offensive tourism campaigns launched by India since 2002, the launch date of the first Incredible !ndia campaign whose objective was to develop a real branding strategy to consolidate the India destination. Several moments can be identified in this campaign. From 2002 to 2003 it was mainly a matter of publicizing the logo and the famous exclamation mark in place of the I of India generating surprise. Once the brand was positioned and known, the campaign then focused (2004 to 2005) on the dissemination of images related to spiritual tourism. From 2006 to 2007, it was mainly a question of deconstructing Orientalism by creating a gap between the image and the few lines of text highlighted. From 2007, the campaigns multiplied and the messages were adapted to the target market. The latest campaign this time features Westerners. Note that from 2004 to 2014, the BJP does not govern but is only in the position of an opposition political party. These campaigns not only embody economic tools designed to increase the balance of payments, but also constitute a privileged platform for defining geopolitical positions and reviving the image of the country as a rising world power (Geary, 2013). The broader ideological meanings that surround this nation branding effort must be taken into consideration (Fan, 2006).

21Bandyopadhyay et al. (2008) have thus analyzed the representations and perceptions of Indian heritage conveyed by the government, which creates dominant national stories, accepted by the tourism industry and then disseminated in the national popular media. There are, however, some notable differences in the use of Indian heritage by the Indian government and by the tourism industry. The first mobilizes nationalist rhetoric13 and emphasizes the atrocities committed by the settlers and the heroic resistance of the people in their representation of the colonial heritage, while the second limits the representations of the colonial heritage to the physical attributes of the architecture of the time and hedonic pleasures, all decontextualized from the stigmata of colonization. More specifically, the government is staging a glorious past which is “in some ways an attempt to assuage the hurt of having been reduced to being a colony” (Thapar, 2003)14. Nationalists are returning to the Golden Age, and therefore invariably to Antiquity, that of the Vedas. Hindu nationalism is part of the total invention of a Hindu "nation" of origins, supposed to restore India to its lost vitality. Thus, nations claim to be ancient (Bhabha, 2007). Hinduism becomes the bedrock of an Indian nation believed to have existed for millennia in South Asia, rejecting the theory of Indo-Aryan migrations from Central Asia and Persia. This vision of history, still invalid according to the entire scientific corpus available in archeology and linguistics, offers the advantage of building an imaginary based on the idea of ​​ethnicity (Meyer, 2007). Promoting Hindutva (Indianness determined by birth in the Indian area, racial bond and registration in a geography of the sacred) amounts to nationalists doing India what it should never have cease to be if it had not been dominated by "strangers". The other, in this context, becomes a Muslim or a Christian, regardless of the age of their family roots.

22More generally, these various promotional campaigns lead us to ask the following questions: who has the authority to speak? What values ​​are disseminated and represented? This question of Hindu nationalism finds a particular echo with the mobilization of the figure of Mother India or Bharat Mata in the Incredible !Ndia campaign, revealing relevant forms of hybridization. In Hindu nationalism, Bharat Mata embodies the personification of India as a deity. This iconography of national identity is generally represented in a saffron-colored sari, the head wearing a crown, with a map of India in the background, and the Indian tricolor is generally placed in a very visible manner on the picture. This allegory of India which symbolizes the union between nationality and divinity, is today included in the last Incredible campaign !Ndia marking with force the links between geopolitics and tourism. According to Geary, “In this final case, ‘Motherland: India’ is not only about destination marketing, but it is also about appropriating the “Other” into its global nationalist vision: a creative device with particular resonance for the Indian diaspora who may wish to return to the motherland as tourists and potential investors” (Geary, 2013, p. 54).

Document 2: Motherland: India (Copyright Incredible !Ndia)

Document 2: Motherland: India (Copyright Incredible !Ndia)

II. Situations between two: hybridization of subjectivities?

  • 15 Note that India's tourism advertising does not explicitly target a European or Western audience. Th (...)

23The various campaigns carried out under the Incredible !Ndia brand, thus testify to a gradual disengagement of India from the binary East / West opposition by integrating these two polarities, thought to be diametrically opposed, in the same impetus. By multiplying the stylistic devices mixing humor and discrepancy, the communication media manage to show a distance between the Indian identity and the subjects presented, demonstrating that India knows how to use Orientalism as a means of communication to its advantage. Thus, India goes beyond the only perspective of "self-orientalism" which would mean that Orientalism is not simply an autonomous creation of the West, but that the East participates in the construction and the reinforcement of the Orientalist images, to offer hybrid forms of communication also aimed at an audience thought of as multiple and diverse15.

Document 3: Incredible !ndia "Not all Indians are polite, hospitable and vegetarians"

Document 3: Incredible !ndia "Not all Indians are polite, hospitable and vegetarians"
  • 16 The Indian government distinguishes between international tourist arrivals (ITA) and foreign touris (...)

24These images make it possible to attract members of the Indian diaspora, a privileged target of successive governments since the mid-1990s. From a theoretical point of view, the mobilities aroused by the diasporas “are particularly interesting, because they usually transcend categories used to capture tourist flows, opposing the international to the domestic: between inside and outside, they necessarily question the host country as the country of departure in the transnational construction project they can carry out” (Peyvel, 2017, p. 306). Social obligations (maintenance of family ties, kinship, obligation to render and receive hospitality), but also to go to see, to soak up, to confront one’s imagination with reality, to find traces of the life before told by a parent, generate significant tourist flows linked to a need to experience physical proximity. These obligations give rise to various tourism practices which are the subject of the institutionalization process of the highly coveted category of Non Resident Indians (NRI). In 2016, 5.77 million NRI arrivals were recorded in India, with a growth rate of 9.7% compared to 2015 (report from the Ministry of Tourism 2017-2018), representing almost 40% of international tourists16.

  • 17 .While the old middle classes were curbed in their consumption by the socialism of Nehru or the ide (...)
  • 18 Marketing slogan popularized by the then ruling Bharatiya Janata (BJP) party for the 2004 Indian ge (...)

25The Indian neoliberal and post-colonial state thus builds varied and contradictory images of what India is and what the inhabitants are, appealing to multiple audiences on changing axes. They themselves engages in the production or reproduction of multiple centers and peripheries. As Coles and Dallen write, tourist accounts explain to diaspora communities "who they are and how they came to be" (2004, p. 13). In this case, as Patil (2011a) suggests, this idea should be applied to the Indian middle classes whose emblem would be embodied by the practices of NRIs. With development, lifestyles are changing and, in particular, access to leisure is emerging. The new middle class or NMC could represent an embodiment of India engaged in its liberal transition (Fernandez, 2006)17. This induces large-scale economic and spatial transformations making extreme poverty and opulence coexist, defining India as an "iceberg country" (Landy and Varrel, 2015, p. 6) marked by multiple large socio-spatial differences. This educated and English-speaking NMC, whose consumption practices are “a sign of the promise of a new national model of development, one with a global outlook that will allow India to catch up with larger processes of economic globalization” (Fernandes, 2000, p. 92), seems encouraged to adopt a new subjectivity. Shining India18 is another term associated with the desire and ability to appreciate and move forward in this new development model made of promises of comfort and prosperity where new professional groups (from the information technology sectors), new consumption spaces and new practices are the most obvious markers. Access to these new practices is also all that makes it possible to maintain the mechanisms of social distinction which combine with the classic lines of cleavage that are caste and kinship, while giving them a new meaning. As Brosius states, “now in the light of India Shining, groups as heterogeneous as the new middle classes make new claims to cosmopolitanism as a way of life. The claim is to belong to "world-class" and still remain "distinctly Indian". […] Cosmopolitanism is not a state but a discursive process through which the new middle classes in India (and overseas) seek to reach and stabilize their ’ideal’ position in the social field. It shapes the ways in which people consume and experience pleasure, or anxiety” (Brosius, 2010, pp. 25 and 28).

26This is how Puducherry tends to become a “hyper-place” (Lussault, 2017), a signature of the world where Western and Indian tourists rub shoulders. This co-presence seems to be reinforced to the extent that many players in tourism seem to play exoticism for profit, by developing products that conform to colonial imaginaries, in furniture, the scenography used, the atmospheres recreated, the distinction staged between the former colonial city, known as “white”, and the Tamil city (formerly called “black” city), the creation of heritage archetypes, etc. This desire to “consume colonial nostalgia” (Peleggi, 2005) drives projects for the redevelopment of the city and the rehabilitation of heritage. Through these development policies, it is more the search for profits sustained by the expansion of tourism than a sensitive and nuanced construction of memory that would avoid causing grievances - whether based on political cleavages or contrasting ideological interests - which is sought after.

Document 4: Flow de tourists to Puducherry (2004-2018)

Document 4: Flow de tourists to Puducherry (2004-2018)
  • 19 One Crore equals 10 million rupies

27The continued growth of domestic tourism in Puducherry is due to a concerted effort by the government and private tourism operators. As Mohamed Mansoor (Minister of Tourism of Puducherry) points out, “our focus is now on the domestic tourism. Because we don’t need to do any campaign of communication to attract the foreigners. Thanks to this international township constituted by Auroville, the foreigners are naturally attracted by Puducherry when they arrive in India. Regarding the Indian tourists, if they come to Tamil Nadu, if they come to Mahabalipuram, we can make them to come here. It is our duty. We don’t have a big promotional program, a big budget like other states. So what we are trying to maximize is the Indian traveler who is now much flusher with money, with a high disposal income, like software workers, probably CEO (chief executive officer) of the company, who can take decisions, to come here as the part of a pleasure and leisure”(interview extract, June 6, 2019). Thus, sustained tourism marketing campaigns carried out by the government have targeted high-end visitors from the major urban centers of the region, such as Chennai (capital of the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, formerly known as Madras) and Bengaluru (the capital of Karnataka, formerly Bangalore). Puducherry stands out among weekend and leisure destinations in India (lower taxes on liquor sales also play an important role). However, the strategy of the tourism department, as it was described to me by Mohamed Mansoor, now aims to make Puducherry a long-stay destination. It is not a question of attracting more tourists, but of lengthening the duration of their stay, "so we were a weekend gateway, now we are positioning ourselves as a long destination. So we have adding seven new beaches, for a total cost of 80 crores19.

28We have to provide more reasons to stay in Puducherry. What we hope to do is to tell them different stories. You have to experience. This is not enough to see. Seeing to feeling. Storytelling is important. Intach is doing this job, but only on the French angle, we go beyond. Colonial legacy is important in our project, but if you are telling stories you should be able to tell all the stories. Nearby Puducherry the Dutch were there as the Portuguese in Porto Novo. This is not well documented, but Indians could be attracted by these stories”.

  • 20 Among them is the creation of a handicraft interpretation center and an interpretation center for A (...)

29To do many heritage rehabilitation projects new constructions20 are underway. For him, strategically it is politically expedient to claim a distinct identity based on French colonial history. The latter having been the sole cause of the creation of Puducherry as a postcolonial political and administrative entity, this heritage is now underlined as a factor conferring a distinct identity on the continued existence of the territory of the Union. It is this distinction that brings Indian tourists. For him, it’s about capitalizing on the latter.
Circuits based on this former French establishment in India are developing for the urban middle classes of Chennai and Bangaluru.

Document 4: A cosmopolitan middle class

Document 4: A cosmopolitan middle class

Like every weekend, the restaurants in the "white town" are experiencing their peak attendance. NMC members flock there to testify in photos of their way of consumption. If alcohol has been a serious health problem since the 19th century (for a long time alcohol was much cheaper in Puducherry because of the border with Tamil Nadu, then rigorist and prohibitionist), the novelty lies in a consumption that is done in another register, that of worldliness. Of course alcohol continues to be a typical strainer for the social weight of the caste system, a sort of fatalistic despair, but it gives rise to new ways of dealing with space. If its consumption remains mostly hidden (a male audience locking themselves up in a hotel room to drink and play), for the NMC, it is a question of staging it, “for many members of the new urban and educated middle classes the consumption of alcohol in public has been socially stigmatized as a westernized and morally weak practice. Hence, to them, the introduction of drinks as a means of socializing is a challenge to some groups” (Brosius, 2010, p. 16).

  • 21 Our contact is one of the trustees of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage Pondi (...)
  • 22 This is what I saw during the heritage visits organized by INTACH or even by Storytrail, during its (...)

30The otherness sought by tourists resides in the illusion of going back in time, of having for a moment the sensation of discovering French India. This is why India invites us to think post-post-colonialism. Of course, we do not omit the existence of old, popular and massive mobility practices like pilgrimages, especially since the Sri Aurobindo Ashram has long polarized considerable flows towards Pondicherry. However, “the young people who live in Bangalore, they want to come to the seaside and then there is the French influence, the French side, and then in the evening the promenade, the seafront” (extract from an interview conducted with one of the members of INTACH21 on 12/20/2018). This generational gap is noticeable in all of the interviews that I was able to conduct. If the colonial past of Pondicherry is never mentioned head-on, cosmopolitanism, the quality of public spaces (the fact that you can get around on foot), architecture (and particularly the doors of houses) are highlighted as triggers for the visit. For Indian tourists, it is the French colonial heritage that constitutes the timeless past to visit. Here as elsewhere, tourist activity requires variety, otherness. Puducherry represents something unusual in India for the members of this NMC. The strange idea that India has had business with France vaguely haunts consciences, or remains to be discovered, often with astonishment, because colonial buildings keep a certain power of evocation and pique the curiosity of individuals22.

31As for the Indians, “India is dying of monotony; the British colonial heritage is the predominant historical context, the heritage of more marginal colonial stories may appear as a factor which gives localities a unique identity from a tourist perspective” (interview with Raphaël M. of September 13, 2019, members INTACH make similar comments). Puducherry therefore arouses an inverted exoticism among its visitors. “The Indians consume a colonial heritage there which they describe as picturesque and charming, they come to find another atmosphere there. In a way, we French people find Pondicherry close enough to us (culturally, even visually perhaps) and yet sufficiently distant, mysterious (since unknown) and strange to be desirable, but for diametrically opposite reasons. All the elements of a myth, an illusion, a mirage are there” (interview with Raphaël M. on September 13, 2019).

  • 23 « A dynamic in which multiple pasts jostle against each other in a heterogenous present ».
  • 24 Tourism stakeholders: INTACH, the Ministry of Tourism and Smart city mission (to name only the most (...)

32All this testifies to a dynamic in which several pasts collide in a heterogeneous present (Rothberg, 2013, p. 372)23. The Ministry of Tourism of this city with such a special status as the various players in tourism play on these imaginations. This is particularly noticeable through the city logo ‘Peaceful Pondicherry. Give time a break’, operations to rehabilitate heritage and rehabilitate old industrial spaces into places of culture (like the project to transform the old distillery). More generally, this city branding, where the white city (White Town) becomes an element of the story of urban marketing, is embedded in the smart-city project in which tourism is an essential element of the production of the neoliberal city24.

Document 5: A server observing the "beach road", when the term "white town" becomes a selling point

Document 5: A server observing the "beach road", when the term "white town" becomes a selling point

This slogan “Come, eat, drink, relax we are in white town” displayed on the back of all the shirts of the waiters at this waterfront restaurant perfectly illustrates the fact that hybridization is inseparably political, since it modifies the common space between them. According to Bhabha, "third space, although unrepresentable in itself, constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation which attest that cultural meaning and symbols have no primordial unity or fixity, and that the same signs can be appropriate, translated, rehistoricized and reinterpreted” (Bhabha, 2007, p. 82).

33Most of the tourists who travel to Puducherry come from the new urban bourgeoisie and are employed in the growing ICT (information and communication technology) sector. They mainly come from Bangaluru, Chennai and Pune. The Puducherry landscape is changing to satisfy this new economic activity. In the epicenter of the festive and recreational sociability of "White Town" (south-eastern part of the city in the process of becoming heritage), small shops have disappeared just like street vendors, rejected beyond this perimeter, giving way to financial investors coming from Mumbai or belonging to the Franco-Pondicherry diaspora. Within this perimeter, everything is dedicated to what constitutes the substance of this NMC: consumption. It is not only a question of eating or drinking, but above all of staging these actions because they are the ones that make it possible to count in Indian society, to be visible. Consumption is, in short, an act of recognition and this act is highly codified.

Document 6: The café des arts

Document 6: The café des arts

As is often the case in Suffren Street, many Indian tourists stroll around and especially take a photo in front of the facade of the "café des arts", where everything recalls the old continent. It is true that from now on Puducherry supplies in abundance everything that could appear to be attached to France, to its culture (street names written in French, bakery, Breton crêperie, tricolor, institutions). This storefront is one of the most photographed in Pondicherry and reveals multiple verbal transactions and contortions as to the ideal location for the perfect selfie, which will then be posted on social media.

  • 25 Some of these images are featured in this campaign YouTube channel video of the campaign Incredible (...)

34In 2017, to reach this NMC clientele, the Indian government launched a new tourism promotion campaign aimed in particular at enhancing the Northeast States. This campaign objective and exoticizes the so-called "tribal" populations. The slogan is evocative: “North East, paradise unexplored”, and the advertising campaigns persist in broadcasting images of “traditional” communities, deeply anchored in their environment, as if the colonial construction of the savage was found by a postcolonial detour in India25. This representation relies heavily on a very nostalgic version of the era of colonial exploration. Indeed, these spaces located at the margin, are supposed wild, covered with inhospitable and strange vegetation sheltering rare and often dangerous animals. This new frontier of tourism is reminiscent of the tourist experiences described by Lucie Dejouhanet who has clearly shown in what ways the Adivasis populations who live further south, in the Ghats mountains and on their foothills, "have been attached two essentialist visions which still influence the way people look at them: that of preserved tribes living in harmony with nature in an approach of ecological romanticism, and that of backward peoples, who have remained outside of civilization” (Dejouhanet, 2017). All this illustrating the performative effects of the “magic triangle” (Abélès and Cullerai, 2001) based on the idea spread within tourism of a common singularity of groups, places and lifestyles, otherwise known as a deterministic association between a culture, a territory and an identity.

  • 26 It is also a question of developing tourism in these territorial confines to ensure control of thes (...)

Document 7: The Northeast, the new frontier26 for tourism? (Copyright: Incredible! India)

Document 7: The Northeast, the new frontier26 for tourism? (Copyright: Incredible! India)

Conclusion: towards new asymmetries: Tribals and Dalits, the new "damned" of tourism?

35Through this study we wanted to show how multiple actors mobilize tourist imaginations to support or redefine collective identities. We have shown how these imaginaries are shaped by the mark of contested stories (those of imperialism, colonialism, decolonization and, more recently, neoliberal restructuring) and in return how they reshape these stories. In this, postcolonial theories open up the perspective of third space, making it possible to escape from binary visions to propose a third way: that of hybridization.

36Who controls the tourist area? Who is excluded? To what extent do the struggles for the tourist space contribute to the reproduction, or on the contrary, to the redefining of social hierarchies?” (Marie dit Chirot, 2018, p. 12). In the Indian case, this questioning is particularly relevant for a country marked by a strong linguistic, social and religious heterogeneity corresponding to as many contradictory accounts of the nation, its heritage and its identity. The Hindu identity advocated by the Indian state is not that put forward by the Pondicherry Tourism Department or what the consumption practices of NMC members tell us. By aligning with the western reference of "world class city", the members of the latter do not only mimic Western modernity, they compose with, by arranging local conditions and in particular another dimension inherent in the Indian case: caste.

37There are many forgotten about the development, at the forefront of which are the "Adivasis", which in a way allow the NMC to replicate a colonial subjectivity in a postcolonial context, but also the ex-Untouchables , the Dalits. The latter appear, to use Fanon’s terminology, as "the damned" of India and of tourism in India, largely justifying the words of Boukhris and Chapuis: "tourism practices appear as products of social relationships and their analysis allows to rethink politics as the expression of a conflicting social world, based on antagonistic relationships between social groups” (2016). However, many analysts of Indian society claim that the rise of the NMC, which reflects the major changes in India (the economic shift to the tertiary sector, urbanization but also fragmentation), would necessarily imply the weakening and decline of old identities by which we used to have a hold on Indian society: castes and communities. However, the antagonistic caste reports continue in tourism and I would like to conclude by giving the floor to Appu, a guide originally from Tiruvannāmalai who settled in Pondicherry when he was eighteen years old. Appu only works with western tourists because:

“In India, as soon as you face other Indians, the question that keeps coming up is always who? Not who I am in a metaphysical sense, but who are you? Who is this guide there in front of me? Which means where does it come from? What is his religion? But above all what is his caste? I come from a slum in Tiruvannāmalai, I am a Dalit, an untouchable. Even if it is not visible it looks like I carry it within me. People only call me once. They quickly discover that I am a Dalit and no longer want to call on my services. This is why I work with Westerners and only Westerners, because they are looking for what is metaphysical. This "caste-line" they do not perceive it. To this "caste-line" in India must be added the "color-line" and the supposed qualities which one attributes to certain categories of people. You have noticed that in large hotel groups and restaurants the workforce is not Tamil but Nepalese. All this to avoid social conflict. They are above ground here and can be bribed at will. I don’t envy them. […] It is often that Indians call me to ask me how I manage to be friends with Westerners and especially women. One day, one of them, he was from Pune, wanted to approach one of my clients, originally from the United States, I told her about it and she said yes. The guy immediately put down his business card, said that he already went to the United States for the holidays and gave the amount of his expenses during his vacation. He concluded that in Pondicherry he was spending $ 1,000 a day. The conversation ended there. You see, this social class that everyone calls middle-class looks like it can only be accomplished with money, that money also means status. I also earn a lot of money, but I do not feel that I belong to this social class because it does not erase the other lines of power. In addition you must consume, consume. It is this consumption that has brought about a culture that did not exist before: that of cafes. They’re all looking for that, to mime the West, to sit, drink coffee and take selfies. But in Europe it’s different, tell me if I’m wrong but there’s what you call the welfare state. Here there is a middle-class and no welfare state. And a middle class which defends its interests by associations and NGOs. So we are still losers. To believe in the market, in consumption is bullshit. This generates even more exclusion and poverty. This is why my money I invest it in my community, with the members of my slum” (extract from an interview conducted on 12/21/18 in Pondicherry).
The interest of postcolonial studies is thus twofold: it allows us to think about hegemonies but also to question the political dimension of tourism.

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Notes

1 Following the work of Peyvel, rather than internal tourism, I prefer to speak of domestic tourism because this expression reflects a process of appropriation of new skills in order to build, for the societies in question, their own recreational mobility: it is a way of taming new practices. Tourism is indeed "a medium through which people can acquire knowledge, build a renewed vision of themselves and societies" (Peyvel, 2019, p. 20).

2 "One of the current challenges of tourism research could then consist in renewing the framework of a materialist interpretation of the facts of tourism, while avoiding the pitfalls of critical approaches which have long dominated this field of research, in particular in geography" (Marie Dit Chirot, 2017).

3 Even though the discourse of the orientalists underlined a deep rooting of India in the tradition and the religion, this profusion terms undoubtedly testifies to the perplexity, even the growing anxiety among the Western countries, to note that India (a developing country, "third-world") will soon claim the status of industrialized country (or "first-world"), or even exceed the economies and hegemonies of the West.

4 In 2006, the name officially returned to the pre-colonial denomination, Puducherry. Both internationally and in India, it remains known as Pondicherry, which explains why this colonial name continues to be used in tourism promotion materials, where it has the potential to attract attention to something more immediately familiar to the public.

5 All these specialists were and are specifically attached to the study of Sanskrit and Vedic texts even though contemporary India appears as one of the leaders of new communications, those related to information technology and the outsourcing of services or BPO (Business Process Outsourcing).

6 “Located its own subjectivity in the spiritual domain of culture, where it considered itself superior to the West and hence undominated and sovereign” (Chatterjee, 1989: 632).

7 This plan recommended a fluid and comprehensive vision of the heritage policy while calling for a participatory approach. It has been considered a model of its kind that can be replicated at other sites (Kammeier, 2007).

8 https://www.deccanherald.com/content/187423/probe-sought-eviction-families-hampi.html

9 http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/karnataka/2011/nov/28/asi-nod-for-rehabilitation-of-hampi-encroachers-314706.html

10 https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/others/virupapura-gadde/articleshow/47114272.cms

11 As such, in 2015, Mahesh Sharma, then Minister of Tourism and member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), declared that "for their own safety, women foreign tourists should not wear short dresses and skirts. . . Indian culture is different from the western » (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/india-female-tourists-skirts-safety-advice).

12 One could say that the vision of Western tourists and the vision of Hindu nationalists are similar and complementary: "It is that the images of India are also, in part, produced in India" (Louiset, 2008, p. 9).

13 This postcolonial nationalism is also accompanied by a desire to rename a certain number of cities and public places to erase the Muslim heritage of the country: in 2017, the State of Uttar Pradesh removed the name of the Taj Mahal from its tourist brochure.

14 The document is available online at: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/history-as-politics/219991

15 Note that India's tourism advertising does not explicitly target a European or Western audience. The same ads, with the same images and the same titles, have been used worldwide.

16 The Indian government distinguishes between international tourist arrivals (ITA) and foreign tourist arrivals (FTA). The first term includes both NRI and the FTA

17 .While the old middle classes were curbed in their consumption by the socialism of Nehru or the ideals of austerity of Gandhi, this NMC owes its explosion to the laws of economic liberalization and to the media revolution of the decade 1990 diffusing models of freedom and self-fulfillment. Of course, I do not omit the debates on what this NMC means and its limits, but what is relevant is that the expansion of this NMC is not only numerical, NMC is also a subjective category of self-Identification

18 Marketing slogan popularized by the then ruling Bharatiya Janata (BJP) party for the 2004 Indian general elections, which referred to the general feeling of economic optimism of the time.

19 One Crore equals 10 million rupies

20 Among them is the creation of a handicraft interpretation center and an interpretation center for Arikamedu, an old port dedicated to trade with Ancient Rome

21 Our contact is one of the trustees of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage Pondicherry. This organization is an ambiguous player in heritage planning policies in Pondicherry because it is both a prescriber, a prime contractor, and also provides contracting authority for beautification operations. Like all the major players in heritage planning policies in Pondicherry, they are not local Tamils but North Indians (and/or foreigners and they all belong to an English-speaking bourgeois elite), and all have the same vision of what Pondicherry should be: a clean, hygienic, peaceful city, free of its poor, in other words, those who cannot consume.

22 This is what I saw during the heritage visits organized by INTACH or even by Storytrail, during its discovery trail entitled "French connections trail" (https://www.storytrails.in/trails/french- connections-trail /).

23 « A dynamic in which multiple pasts jostle against each other in a heterogenous present ».

24 Tourism stakeholders: INTACH, the Ministry of Tourism and Smart city mission (to name only the most important) do not share the same vision of heritage and what deserves to be the subject of a heritage policy. For example, the distillery and the old prison (the last 18th century building in Pondicherry) were razed, the first to become a museum space, the second a parking lot, because for some actors it was not a question of heritage.

25 Some of these images are featured in this campaign YouTube channel video of the campaign Incredible !ndia : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW_EJ1UCseQ

26 It is also a question of developing tourism in these territorial confines to ensure control of these border territories of China and Bangladesh. Note that this objective does not exist in the case described by Lucie Dejouhanet, which proves that ethnic tourism can develop without a geopolitical objective.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Document 1: Hampi, from the cultural landscape to the classified site
Légende Whilst entire villages are included within the boundaries of the UNESCO World Heritage site, Hampi has never been recognized as constituting a cultural landscape (a constructed landscape associating the monuments left with legacies of granite chaos, rice fields and sugar cane fields) but only as a simple "site", which greatly affected the ability to put in place a conservation policy involving experts and residents. Only Hindu and Jain temples, tombs, mosques and other monuments under the responsibility of the Archeological Survey of India and the State Archeology Department are taken into consideration by this heritage policy.
URL http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/viatourism/docannexe/image/4251/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 932k
Titre Document 2: Motherland: India (Copyright Incredible !Ndia)
URL http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/viatourism/docannexe/image/4251/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 52k
Titre Document 3: Incredible !ndia "Not all Indians are polite, hospitable and vegetarians"
URL http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/viatourism/docannexe/image/4251/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 76k
Titre Document 4: Flow de tourists to Puducherry (2004-2018)
URL http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/viatourism/docannexe/image/4251/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 80k
Titre Document 4: A cosmopolitan middle class
Légende Like every weekend, the restaurants in the "white town" are experiencing their peak attendance. NMC members flock there to testify in photos of their way of consumption. If alcohol has been a serious health problem since the 19th century (for a long time alcohol was much cheaper in Puducherry because of the border with Tamil Nadu, then rigorist and prohibitionist), the novelty lies in a consumption that is done in another register, that of worldliness. Of course alcohol continues to be a typical strainer for the social weight of the caste system, a sort of fatalistic despair, but it gives rise to new ways of dealing with space. If its consumption remains mostly hidden (a male audience locking themselves up in a hotel room to drink and play), for the NMC, it is a question of staging it, “for many members of the new urban and educated middle classes the consumption of alcohol in public has been socially stigmatized as a westernized and morally weak practice. Hence, to them, the introduction of drinks as a means of socializing is a challenge to some groups” (Brosius, 2010, p. 16).
URL http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/viatourism/docannexe/image/4251/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 3,4M
Titre Document 5: A server observing the "beach road", when the term "white town" becomes a selling point
Légende This slogan “Come, eat, drink, relax we are in white town” displayed on the back of all the shirts of the waiters at this waterfront restaurant perfectly illustrates the fact that hybridization is inseparably political, since it modifies the common space between them. According to Bhabha, "third space, although unrepresentable in itself, constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation which attest that cultural meaning and symbols have no primordial unity or fixity, and that the same signs can be appropriate, translated, rehistoricized and reinterpreted” (Bhabha, 2007, p. 82).
URL http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/viatourism/docannexe/image/4251/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,1M
Titre Document 6: The café des arts
Légende As is often the case in Suffren Street, many Indian tourists stroll around and especially take a photo in front of the facade of the "café des arts", where everything recalls the old continent. It is true that from now on Puducherry supplies in abundance everything that could appear to be attached to France, to its culture (street names written in French, bakery, Breton crêperie, tricolor, institutions). This storefront is one of the most photographed in Pondicherry and reveals multiple verbal transactions and contortions as to the ideal location for the perfect selfie, which will then be posted on social media.
URL http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/viatourism/docannexe/image/4251/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 5,4M
Titre Document 7: The Northeast, the new frontier26 for tourism? (Copyright: Incredible! India)
URL http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/viatourism/docannexe/image/4251/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 223k
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Référence électronique

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud, « Coloniality and tourism: the fabric of identities and alterities in India », Via [En ligne], 16 | 2019, mis en ligne le 30 mars 2020, consulté le 18 février 2025. URL : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/viatourism/4251 ; DOI : https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/viatourism.4251

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Auteur

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud

French Institute of Pondicherry, UMIFRE 21 CNRS-MEAE
University of Bordeaux, IUT de Bordeaux, UMR 5115 LAM

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Traducteur

Nelson Graburn

University of California, Berkeley

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