29854: Jenson (reply) Re: 29848 (query) "Mazulitapan" (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Deborah Jenson <djenson@wisc.edu>

Paul Bick asked for a summary of the "Mazulitapan" query to which Guy
Horelle had responded. The question derived from the French woman
writer Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's 1821 colonial novella Sarah,
indirectly inspired by her (calamitous) 1802 travels in Guadeloupe,
Saint-Barthelemy, and Saint-Domingue (Haiti).  In the novella, a
group of slaves inform a maroon slave who had returned to the
plantation of the evil overseer's cruelties, referring to him as
"mazulitapan" ("[They spoke] of the evil deeds of  the overseer
Sylvain, whom they all considered to be mazulitapan, which was a kind
of term of invective the poor slaves used against their torturers").
  I knew that Mazulitapan (or Masulipatnam or Machilipatnam) was a
port city on the Coromandel coast of India, a former center of the
textile trade and of French colonial involvement, but I couldn't
trace how this place name could have come to serve as a metonymy for
a cruel master in the Caribbean.
Guy Horelle suggested that the term derived from the garb and
behavior of the former guards of the French colonist Dupleix in
India. When Dupleix, apparently known for tyranny, was expelled from
India in 1754, he brought many of his guards with him to France, and
apparently some of them went to the Caribbean with the French navy
and settled there. They had "ferocious" morés associated with the
Legion in Africa, and wore scarves from Mazulitapan called by that
name (parallel to "Madras" scarves), making them a particularly
recognizable "type."
I will be doing further research to see what can be documented from
this. I am delighted to have a plausible basis for this mystery of
Indian influence in early 19th-century French Caribbean slave culture.