Thesis advisor: Kevin Newmark / India featured in a large number of performances on the nineteenth-century French stage. The term “contact zones” coined by Mary Louise Pratt in her article “Arts of the Contact Zone” designates spaces where two cultures “meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (34). The nineteenth-century French stage functioned as an ideal contact zone, providing a dynamic forum for the construction of French and Indian identities. My corpus is selected to demonstrate the breadth and diversity of India as a trope in nineteenth-century theatrical performances. In the dissertation, I analyze the plays both as text and performance. In addition, I situate the plays within the context of their time. Theater reviews are an important tool in achieving this contextualization: they allow a play to be studied in situ, giving a glimpse of the social, political, and cultural circumstances surrounding the production. The effects of a turbulent political and social environment are studied by investigating shifts in audience reactions to the same play or to a similar one over a period of time. The study considers an author’s avowed intentions, as recorded in an accompanying preface, along with both the text of the play and the audience response chronicled in press reviews, to see if intention, expression, and reception coincide. The effort is to understand the play as a dynamic event that occurs simultaneously in two directions. On the one hand, the play is shaped by its environment; on the other, it works to inform and influence the audiences who witness it. The nuanced interaction between the Self and the Other is rendered more visible through this approach. With the support of colonial and post-colonial theories such as Orientalism, subalterneity, and hybridity, the issues that are disclosed in this analysis of nineteenth-century French theater are rendered current and relevant. The dissertation is composed of three main chapters. Each chapter is unified in theme, viz. Historical drama, Bayadères, and Sanskrit drama. Different plays with similar themes or different adaptations of the same play are compared to each other. Shifts in time and perspective are recorded, both in the creation as well as the reception of these plays. The treatment of stereotypes is studied in all three chapters. In addition, for each chapter, a specific issue that is particular to that section of the corpus is highlighted: problems of veracity in ostensibly factual historical accounts for Historical drama, the challenges of reconciling reality with imagination (contrasting the actual visit of Indian dancers in France to the theatrical representations of bayadères) for the chapter on bayadères, and challenges of translation for Sanskrit drama. This reveals the complex underpinnings of plays that could appear banal at first glance. The dissertation unfolds the manner in which the French contend with India in the role of the Other during the nineteenth century, when interest in India was at its peak in France. Even when reduced to a finite number of stereotypes, India is perceived as a space of excess; its complex and multifaceted nature is exacerbated by its size and distance from France. India is found to be overwhelming and beyond the reach of French possession, physical or ideological. India cannot be easily co-opted into French narratives of identity-formation: any construction of national, racial or cultural identity, whether of the French Self or the Indian Other, is shown to be unstable. Over the course of the nineteenth century, India reverts to being the place of myth and fantasy it has been since medieval times. Nevertheless, traces of India’s presence on the nineteenth-century stage linger in twenty-first century France in subtle but unmistakable ways. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Romance Languages and Literatures.

L’objet de ce travail est l’étude de la peinture au Karnataka depuis l’école de Vijayanāgar jusqu’à celle de Mysore, du XVIème au XIXème siècle. Nous avons tenté de réunir le corpus le plus large possible afin d’avoir une vision globale de l’art du Karnataka à travers ses peintures murales, ses manuscrits illustrés et ses images mobiles.Notre objectif était de mieux comprendre l’évolution de la peinture au Karnataka durant les trois cents ans qui séparent l’école de Vijayanāgar de celle de Mysore. Les seuls vestiges de l’école de peinture de Vijayanāgar se trouvent dans les peintures murales des temples Vīrabhadra de Lēpākṣī et celles du temple Virūpākṣa de Hampi. Nous présentons ces deux sanctuaires avant d’aborder l’école de peinture de Mysore et son iconographie, qui doit son rayonnement au roi Kṛṣṇarāja Woḍeyar III. A la même époque naissait aussi l’école de Surpur, inconnue jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Deux collections non publiées de miniatures provenant de Mysore et de Surpur nous ont permis de mieux comprendre l’évolution de ces écoles. La thèse prend aussi en compte d’autres développements spécifiques de l’art du Karnataka. Nous présentons en particulier les peintures murales du palais d’été de Tipu Sultan, qui se démarquent nettement des autres réalisations contemporaines, et des manuscrits d’un type original, nommés Uddharane, destinés à l’instruction des dévots adeptes du courant vīraśaiva. / The aim of this work is to study the paintings of Karnataka from the school of Vijayanagar to that of Mysore. It covers the period from the XVIth to the XIXth century. Our goal was to better understand the evolution of painting in Karnataka during the three hundred years that separate both schools. The only remains of the Vijayanāgar School of Painting can be found in the murals of the Vīrabhadra Temples of Lēpākṣī and those of the Virūpākṣa Temple in Hampi. We discuss these two temples before evoking the school of painting of Mysore through its murals, manuscripts and miniatures. This school is closely connected to King Kṛṣṇarāja Woḍeyar III. Contemporarily to the school of Mysore appeared the school of Surpur, unknown until now. Two unpublished collections of miniatures from Mysore and Surpur have allowed us to better understand the evolution of these schools. Other pictorial achievements present specific developments in the art of Karnataka. We present the mural paintings of Tipu Sultan's summer palace, which stands out clearly from the previous era, as well as the Uddharane manuscript intended for the teaching of the devotees.We have tried to bring together in this work the widest possible corpus of murals, manuscripts and miniatures in order to have a global vision of painting in Karnataka.

This dissertation explores the intellectual and cultural history of natural knowledge at the eighteenth-century court of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (r.1782-1799), and the ways in which this knowledge was both a product of Mysore’s local context and its wider global connections. It argues that more attention to Mysore’s sources and perspective is needed in the history of science given the power and productivity of the court before it was conquered by the British East India Company (BEIC) in 1799. After 1799, the BEIC dispersed the Mysore’s court’s library and artifacts, and obscured the court’s contributions to knowledge-making. This dissertation demonstrates that Mysore’s library and gardens were sites of natural science collection, experimentation, and production worthy of study. The extant collection of Tipu Sultan’s manuscripts remains understudied, especially those related to science. This dissertation outlines the surviving library texts related to natural knowledge and provides case studies of particular manuscripts that showcase Tipu Sultan’s interest in collecting, organizing, and producing encyclopedic knowledge of nature and natural processes. It further emphasizes that many (often unnamed) hands and labors enabled the natural sciences to be produced and disseminated in the eighteenth century, through close readings of Persian, French, and English texts and diplomatic records related to Tipu Sultan’s court. It thus seeks to recover both the elite contributions of Tipu Sultan and his courtiers engaged in natural knowledge production as well as the more obscure, but no less vital contributions of unnamed actors.