The Price of Hospitality: An Indian Traveler in Revolutionary France

In April 1793, two Indian travelers from Gujarat landed in Marseilles. The son of the nawab of Broach and his attendant, they were heading for England but were stranded in France for a couple of months, just as the Revolution was spiralling into Terror. What happened to them? How did they manage to establish their credentials with the French authorities and get along in this strange new environment? This talk will be about social credit and the price of hospitality.

Rahul Markovits is assistant professor at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. His work focuses on the circulation of people, products and texts on a transnational scale in the eighteenth-century.