29842: Jenson: (query) "mazulitapan" (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Deborah Jenson djenson@wisc.edu

A colleague and I are stumped by a colonial linguistic reference in
an early 19th century French text by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore.
Desbordes-Valmore had travelled in Guadeloupe, Saint-Barthelemy and
Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in 1803, and had learned some rudiments of
kreyòl. The term in question is "mazulitapan." It is used to describe
a vicious white slave overseer. In the passage in which it is used, a
group of slaves tell a maroon slave about the misdeeds of the slave
overseer:
"They told him of the misfortunes of Mr. Primrose, and of the evil
deeds of Silvain, whom they all considered to be mazulitapan, a kind
of term of invective the poor slaves used against their torturers."
I know that "Mazulitapan" is a port city on the coast of Coromandel
in India near the former French colony of Pondicherry. In the novel
Georges  by Dumas, Coromandel is mentioned as the source of a
decorative fabric used on walls in the île de France, so it may have
been a center of textile trade. It is also likely that slave commerce
was conducted through Mazulitapan.
But how had that place name become associated with cruel slave owners
or overseers?
Has anyone on the list ever heard the term used?
Thanks very much.