La Presence francaise dans le royaume Sikh du Penjab, 1822-1849.

• Author: Kierstead, Raymond
• Position: Review

By JEAN-MARIE LAFONT. Paris: ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT, 1992. Pp. 553.

In La Presence francaise dans le royaume Sikh du Penjab, Jean-Marie Lafont documents in rich detail the activities of a small, colorful, if only occasionally effective, group of military officers, agents, adventurers, and freebooters who maintained a degree of French influence on the Indian subcontinent during much of the first half of the nineteenth century. Although most of his study is devoted to the period 1822-49, Lafont offers a broad and general account of the French presence in the Punjab from the end of the Seven Year's War and demonstrates clearly that France never fully accepted the implications of the Treaty of Paris and continued, on a very small scale at least, to contest British power on the subcontinent for more than three-quarters of a century. In particular, Lafont refutes the idea that the defeat in 1803 of French-trained and -led brigades in Hindustan marked the definitive end of the French presence. Indeed, it is his general argument, perhaps overstated, that until 1849 the French played a significant role in the ultimately failed attempts at "national" integration in the Punjab, particularly under Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

La Presence francaise manifests both some of the typical strengths and weakness of its genre, the French these d'Etat. Its research is exhaustive and definitive; the scholarship impeccable. Thus the volume opens with a seventy-page discussion of archival sources in India, Pakistan, France, and England and it concludes with a twenty-three page bibliography of published primary and secondary sources. But one might ask whether Lafont deploys this voluminous documentation on a rather small subject - a twilight episode in the history of Anglo-French colonial rivalries in India. Ultimately, one's response to this question depends on the persuasiveness of Lafont's arguments concerning the French role in the military and administrative modernization of the Punjab, arguments based mainly on a richly detailed narrative of the relations between the French and Ranjit Singh.

The chronological focus of Lafont's complex story is the period roughly 1820 to 1840, a period marked by the dominating presence in the Punjab of the French soldier of fortune (and amateur archeologist), Jean-Francois Allard. During their service to Ranjit Singh, Allard and a small number of colleagues reorganized and disciplined the army, organized the defense of the...