L’imaginaire du sari et de la chevelure dans quelques romans d’Ananda Devi
The Imagination of the Sari and the Hair in Some of Ananda Devi’s Novels

Summary/Abstract: In her novels, Ananda Devi has always known how to immerse us in texts ennobled by local paintings where matrix India appears through the representation of a Cosmogonic universe dominated by magico-spiritual symbolism. Certain homogeneous interpretations, the fruit of historical constructions, obscure, even sometimes neglect, the deeply rooted heterogeneity of Indian traditions in Mauritius. This “bipolar contrast” (Sen, 2007), the sum of imaginary splices and cultural inter-fusion, nevertheless constitutes the humus of the Mauritian identity built over the course of colonial history. The author then illustrated herself through her writings as a major figure in this form of binary representation of the Mauritian universe. Our study aims at revealing the imaginary amalgams that circulate in Devis texts, starting from forms of discourse and knowledge surreptitiously disseminated in motifs such as the “sari” and “the hair”. By relying on an ethnocritical analysis grid, we will show how the Devi’s ethnotexts (Motsch, 2000), manage by a meiotic effect, to shape a “new humanism” at the antipodes of “orientalist representations” (Said, 1978) and ethnocentric of India as seen by the West.

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