“Mistreatment by Words and Blows”: Domestic Violence between Lived Realities and Colonial Meanings

The evidence of domestic violence in eighteenth-century Pondichéry – France’s former colony in South Asia – resides in what might seem like the minutiae of everyday lives. In addition to the criminal cases adjudicated in the city, many tales of domestic violence can be found in the archives, nestled between trade reports and records of daily interactions between the city’s colonists. Given the ubiquitous violence in the early modern world, it is not all that surprising that traces of domestic violence go generally unremarked upon in these records, especially since the legal category of domestic violence was a moving target. In Pondichéry, there are no archival records focused on domestic violence. There are no contemporary police reports that recount and articulate incidents of these disturbances. Instead, there are only records with domestic violence.

While murder was undeniably illegal, other kinds of domestic violence offered the chance for the community writ large to negotiate the definitions around licit and illicit interpersonal violence. The social understanding of conjugal rights over a spouse’s body in early modern Europe complicated the definitions of and limits to violence within domestic situations. Men and women relied on formal and informal relationships with the community and local governance to define the acceptable limits of violence one might experience in their intimate spaces.^[1] By adopting a definition of domestic violence that includes myriad forms of physical, verbal, and emotional distress between complex interpersonal relationships within the home, we can see how officials and colonists manipulated and entrenched the politics of domestic violence in Pondichéry’s colonial setting.

In archival fragments, we can see that the potential of domestic violence (and the specter of murder) offered a justification for city officials to push difficult decisions back onto their superiors’ plates. Writing back to the directors of the French East India Company in 1704, for example, the Superior Council of Pondichéry was at a loss for how to manage a brewing scandal in the city. Pondichéry’s French-born chief engineer had been conducting an affair with a married South Asian woman from nearby British Madras while her husband was on a voyage to Manilla. Now she was pregnant.^[2] Many options were explored to break up the mésalliance, but none had worked. The continued dalliance between the two lovers not only disrupted the social order in Pondichéry but also fomented the potential for physical danger to the pregnant woman from her husband. The city’s councilors felt that the simplest solution to ending the social disorder over the affair would be to expel her from the city and back to whence she came.

In this case, though, the city councilors were reluctant to issue such an order for two reasons. First, the chief engineer threatened that he would follow his pregnant lover to Madras if councilors expelled her from Pondichéry – and leave the new fortifications unfinished. This threat would render the French colony susceptible to both British and Dutch incursion. Second, the counselors would not send the woman away because of the potential danger she faced back in her home. They feared “that her husband – upon his return – would have followed the custom of his nation which forgives not even the slightest suspicion; we have many examples of wives murdered by their husbands for less.”^[3] Ultimately, the city councilors chose to do nothing immediately. Instead, they foisted the choice back onto the Company’s directors. Their justifications allowed them potentially to absolve themselves of guilt no matter what happened.

Though conjugal domestic violence likely happened far more than appears in the historical record, when such violence did spill out into the view of the public, officials made a concerted effort to contextualize the narratives and mitigate fallout. When Mangau, a South Asian woman, committed suicide in 1731, the officials who examined her corpse were taxed with discovering the circumstance that precipitated such a drastic action. In questioning Mangau’s personal relations, her brothers claimed that domestic violence had been a motivation. Mangau’s husband, Virapia, had suspected she’d taken some money from him. For the next three months, according to witnesses, Virapia had subjected Mangau to “very sharp criticisms, [and] mistreatment by words and blows.”^[4] Mangau fled from her husband to a nearby city. The pair eventually reconciled and returned to Pondichéry after some time, but soon afterward Virapia continued his regular “mistreatment” of Mangau. Only then did she poison herself, ending her life as a means to escape her dire domestic situation.

Though the politics of colonial suicide were themselves negotiated between residents and city officials, it appears that Mangau’s circumstance of domestic violence diminished any punishments or sanctions one might expect to see in the case of a suicide.^[5] Unlike other residents in the city who chose to take their own lives and were subsequently stripped of the right to religious burials, Mangau’s cadaver report does not carry any order from French officials that her burial be denied. In fact, the document neither uses the term suicide nor states what happened to her body after the investigation. We may never know anything more about her life beyond the violence she faced in her own home. What we do know is that the domestic violence Mangau faced provided some maneuverability for city officials to not only better understand the circumstances that led to her choice, but to reconcile it within the social norms of the time.

Colonialists were always concerned about death because of domestic violence because it brought instances of social instability more acutely into the public eye of this tight-knit colonial community. Whether the potential for murder (as in the case of the engineer’s paramour) or the reality of suicide (as in the case of Mangau), examinations of cadavers held a special place in determining the legal and social outcomes in cases of domestic violence. Such a display was particularly relevant when the city’s doctor examined the mutilated body of one resident.^[6] On July 31, 1712, the city’s surgeon-major examined a grim sight: the corpse of Beaugranidy, an enslaved South Asian domestic worker, covered in scars and burns with multiple head contusions, pooling of blood in the lungs, and a ruptured kidney. The examination concluded that all the injuries had been made by blunt objects (instruments contondants). Did Beaugranidy’s enslaver, Henrick Conseiller, beat him so severely that he fled, only to die in a house nearby?

The fatal, physical violence that Beaugranidy faced had been the last in a string of violent domestic acts. The household of Henrik Conseiller had only enslaved Beaugranidy as a punishment for his inability to pay a debt when he was an employed servant there. The Superior Council, when convicting Beaugranidy of this crime, reinforced the relationships between domestic violence and the colonial setting when they stripped him of his personal liberty. Rarely, if ever, were convicted debtors sentenced to such penalties back in the metropole. Only in the colony could the French force the colonized into such circumstances. They bound him to the home and reforged his identity from a free man to one of the enslaved of the city, “as a thing belonging to [Conseiller].”^[7] The act of enslavement, as well as the life a person must lead as enslaved, was undoubtedly one of violence. The violence of becoming a “thing” belonging to another then subsequently allowed the enslaver to enact untold personal harm over the enslaved – especially in their household. The cadaver reports emphasized the cause of death and identity of the deceased, rather than the pursuit of the perpetrator as one might expect. Domestic spaces in particular became sites where violence was not only enacted but also protected by the city’s governing structures in attempts to further patriarchal control within them.

Enslaved populations were also constantly faced with institutionally supported emotional violence. For example, Marie Caron sold the young, illegitimate daughter of her long-time enslaved servant Lucrèce to another enslaver living in the French Mascarene Islands in the Southwest Indian Ocean.^[8] Everything in this situation indicates the presence of physical and emotional variants of domestic violence in the colonies. Lucrece was not a stranger in the household (she had been there at least 15 years by this point); she would likely have grown close to the Caron family.^[9] Nevertheless, Lucrèce had no husband, nor did the child (also named Marie) have a father listed on her baptismal records. This was common when an enslaved worker faced another form of intimate violence in the house. Could the child’s father have been the patriarch of the family, Caron’s ex-husband? Had this younger child been a product of violence? We cannot say definitively, but it’s likely: the enslaved and all domestic servants were especially susceptible to sexual violence within the household.^[10] We do know that Marie Caron inflicted more violence on Lucrèce when she sold the latter’s daughter. No matter what intimacy existed between Marie Caron and Lucrèce, the former chose to disregard it in favor of ripping the enslaved family apart for financial gain.

We gain insight into this episode of domestic violence and the questions it raises not from a cadaver report or a criminal case. Instead, the violent fragment of these three women’s lives can be glimpsed in the remaining bill of sale for the young girl to ensure that the buyer’s and seller’s financial interests were protected. Neither the city officials nor the enslaver would have likely considered their actions as ones of domestic violence. Whether it was a concern over the loss of their engineer or explanations of suicide, the meanings of domestic violence took shape around the events of everyday lives and the desire for social and colonial order. In this final example, we see how colonial officials institutionalized violent actions as acceptable within the contexts of domestic slavery in Pondichéry and across the Indian Ocean. In all of the instances described, documenting domestic violence–whether licit or not–remained secondary to concerns that colonial administrators considered to be of greater significance.

Featured image caption: A country scene near Pondichéry. (Courtesy Wikimedia)

Jakob Burnham

Dr. Jakob Burnham is a Lecturer of Early Modern Europe and the World in the History Department at the University of North Texas. He received his Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from Georgetown University in May 2024. His research centers on early French colonialism in the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dr. Burnham is particularly interested in the complicated intersections of social practice and colonial development, which he explores through a variety of themes including, medicine, domesticity, and slavery—among others. While Writer-in-residence, he will continue to examine how the archives of eighteenth-century French Indian Ocean history can reveal dynamic questions about the histories of medicine, health, race, and gender.

• Jakob Burnham

  https://nursingclio.org/author/jakob-burnham/

  Fetal Remains, Knowledge, and the Making of Early Modern Monsters
• Jakob Burnham

  https://nursingclio.org/author/jakob-burnham/

  A Tale of Two Deaths: Chronic Illness, Race, and the Medicalization of Suicide
• Jakob Burnham

  https://nursingclio.org/author/jakob-burnham/

  Healing on Credit: Medical Bills and the Politics of Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Pondichéry