The Shimoga man-eaters

The events described in this post are nothing historical. No lines on maps were redrawn because of it, no wars fought, no great men created and only a few notable ones [who?] destroyed. If I had never thought of it, if it had never been written, Andalusada would look no different. In no way does this significantly change the overall flow of history.

This post is parerga. And yet it is legendary parerga. This post is a symptom of imperial France in its decline, a post of a story that's become etched in the French consciousness as surely as Jaws is in ours.

Background to the Shimoga man-eaters

Since it hasn't been mentioned in awhile, southern India is a French colony. L'affaire de Chimogue was entirely a colonial affair, taking place in French Malenadu - specifically in the vicinity of Shimoga, home to a fairly large and young coffee latifonde.

• The War of the French Succession left the Empire perilously close to fiscal collapse; the next generation had been spent trying to rebuild it. Fortunately for them, the Iberian coffee monopoly had cracked with the collapse of Umayyad Seville thirty years earlier; since the price of New World coffee stayed high (between limited Mexican production and Cabralia's war-shaken economy), the French colonies were able to make it a lucrative cash crop, leading to the Oriental Company's latifundism.
• From the 1880s, the spread of coffee rust blight from Africa started seriously impacting the global coffee market. French India, which had thus far managed to avoid the coffee blight, was thus even more profitable than it had ever been before.
• About a generation later [when?], tiger-hunting become the sport of choice for a certain type of cosmopolitan noble twit. Guns in hand (many totally inadequate for the task; many Frenchmen gave their lives before the black-powder cat-gun was sorted out), they managed to devastate the Malabar tiger population, which led to some interesting side effects, such as...
• ...the collapse of tiger-hunting, and with it preparation for dealing with tigers.
• ...the collapse of a lot of former tiger habitats, as growing populations along the Malabar Coast began expanding outward, pushing back the tree coverage that the tigers needed to move and progressively driving them north.
• ...a period of about a decade in which so few tiger hunts were successful that the tables began to turn: every year during this period [when?], Malabar tigers killed more humans than humans could find tigers to kill. (This was chalked up to the tigers being more aggressive rather than any environmental changes.)

French colonial policy had thoughtlessly prepared a perfect storm. Early in the 20th century [when?], that storm hit.

The Nestorian Epistles

There are many things that bother me in alternate histories. Three of them come to mind right off the bat, like so:

• The humanities tend to be plot-significant-only. Presumably there's an enormous amount of art and writing and architecture that's going on in any timeline, but nobody ever takes a break to discuss what the hell it is unless it's directly related to the overarching story.
• Directly related to the above, the mental landscape of the world is assumed to never significantly deviate from the IRL norm unless it's plot-significant. (Even then, there's relatively little exploration of how it deviates, or the consequences of doing so.)
• Eurocentrism.

So, for variety, today I'm gonna blog about a fictional work of writing, loosely inspired by the Persian Letters of our world.

International perceptions of India

IRL, our perception of "India" is actually of north India. India is Aryan; "Indian" restaurants (at least in America; not sure how it works in the UK) are much closer to Punjabi than, say, Gujarati cuisine. This isn't "natural"; it evolved this way for historical reasons.

After a thousand years of divergence, Andalusada's Indian subcontinent has diverged in two ways, hinted at before but spelled out explicitly here:

• The colonial hegemon is French. England, Scotland, Portugal and a few other players all have their own presence on the subcontinent, but most of that looks disproportionately large on maps because otherwise it wouldn't be visible at all.
• Colonialism has been much less successful. Because of various trends that are still too far in the future for me to explain yet, the French Empire has not been able to build a united French Raj. While Paris controls much more of India than you might expect (especially given that unlike the United Kingdom IRL they have not had a solid century of domestic tranquility), Gujarat and points north have repeatedly fought the Firangis to a standstill, and Bengal has successfully played its French and Scottish (later Anglo-Scottish) neighbors off each other so long and so well that it's become an established buffer state.

So what are the consequences of this?