Devdutt Trivedi examines Pankaj Rishi Kumar’s To Die a Frenchman through phenomenology, absurdism and existentialism, exploring Mounissamy’s fractured French-Indian identity and intersections between colonial history, memory, territory, belonging, consciousness, life and death.

Pankaj Rishi Kumar’s To Die a Frenchman transcends the question of citizenship to become an abstract exploration of identity as consciousness, memory, territory and corporeal existence. Through Mounissamy, a man of Indian blood seeking to recover a French identity severed by history, the film collapses distinctions between past and present, self and other, belonging and displacement. Devdutt Trivedi locates this existential struggle within phenomenology and absurdism, asking whether an identity denied by history and impossible to reclaim through the structures of life can ultimately be restored through death.

“Je est une autre” (The Self is Other) — Arthur Rimbaud

“French is only spoken by the French or by snobs” — Osho Rajneesh

Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger created the subject known as phenomenology: a movement from an arbitrary phenomenon A to arbitrary phenomenon B, to exercise the directionality towards willing toward an object that becomes conscioushood, known as intentionality. Intentionality is the awareness that creates a continuity of time and perspective in space, by which disorder becomes conscious order.

Identity Across Space And Time

Pankaj Rishi Kumar’s film To Die a Frenchman speaks of a Frenchman, Mounissamy, born with Indian blood, through a continuous voice-over that frees language of structure. Mounissamy wants to reclaim his French identity, leading to several transformations in space and time, shaving off his hair and eventually dying, as Rishi Kumar transforms the psychic-psychological into the physiological-corporeal. The psychological time of French colonisation, independence in 1954 and the present day become the body of Mounissamy, his shaven head and, eventually, his death.

Mounissamy’s struggle is for a lost history, for his French roots that were stolen from him in 1954, and the fact that no procedure can re-territorialise him as a Frenchman. Since he does not accept his Indian identity, he is essentially deterritorialised, or, put simply, a nomadic living being who is given the funeral of a French nationalist. With this episode, Kumar means to say that we achieve what we had hoped for in life, in death: life and death are not different; they are two parts of the same ‘whole’ that seamlessly blend into one another.

Searching For Memory And Territory

One questions why there is this search for a forgotten memory, history and temporality; also, spatiality, as he searches for a piece of land on which to territorialise himself as a French citizen. This reaches its limit image in the Bastille Day celebrations, but Mounissamy does not know the French national anthem, La Marseillaise.

The absurdists and existentialists challenged Heidegger and Husserl’s phenomenology, the archetype of which is Albert Camus’s novel L’Etranger. In this novel, the protagonist, Meursault, kills an unknown person for no particular reason, challenging intent, causality and purposefulness. It is within the same grid of absurdism that Kumar documents Mounissamy’s identity for a continuous past with a discontinuous present that cannot be resolved in life but only in death.

The Other Becomes The Self

In the frontal-perspective tracking shots of downtown Pondicherry, the actual differences between Indian and French culture are not a reality for Mounissamy, nor is it the case that he can acquire them after acquiring citizenship.

Therefore, it is only the symbolic marker of territorialisation that returns Mounissamy to himself: through the ‘other’, one becomes the ‘self’, coinciding with the famous statement by Arthur Rimbaud.