How Colonial Power Still Shapes Mauritius: Ananda Devi's New Novel Exposes Economic Legaci

The sugar estate of the Dumontais family stands at the center of Ananda Devi's new novel, but it is not really a place. It is a structure of power, rendered in prose, that has never been dismantled. The novel, "Chronicle of a Lost Kingdom," published by Grasset in 2026 across 464 pages, begins where most historical accounts end: with the question of who holds power, by what mechanisms it perpetuates itself, and what collective memory has been made to forget in service of that perpetuation. Devi has spent decades circling this question. Her doctoral thesis in anthropology, completed in 1980, examined minority identities in Mauritius. That academic starting point became the political foundation for everything that followed. She is an author of roughly thirty works, decorated with the Prix des Cinq Continents, the Prix Louis Guilloux, the Femina des lycéens, and in 2024, the American Neustadt Prize for her body of work. Yet the novel she has now completed represents a different kind of reckoning. It is not simply a work of fiction. It is an interrogation of structures, written in the form of a family saga that spans four generations and a century of transformation. The central claim is direct. Mauritian society, Devi argues, comprises people from different cultures and nationalities of origin who have failed to construct a shared culture or forge a sense of belonging that transcends their differences. The descendants of colonizers have retained the majority of economic power and live in isolation, refusing to mingle with other communities. This structural imbalance has fueled riots, though the society has not descended into civil war. What remains is a kind of permanent fracture, visible in the distribution of wealth and invisible in the official record. The novel's narrative unfolds within the sugar property at the end of the nineteenth century. It follows the descendants of a union between the estate owner's wife and a freed slave known as the Old Goat, who had chosen to remain in service to the family. When the father discovers he is not their biological parent, three children (Sydney, Mylène, and Raymond) are banished from the family domain. They find refuge in a place called Le Bouchon. For four generations, their descendants defend this territory, a microcosm in which, according to Devi, the universal history of violence, dispossession, and resistance is replayed. The question of institutional responsibility runs through the novel from beginning to end. There are no slave graves in Mauritius, Devi notes. This absence was not accidental. It was the first erasure, a deliberate act of forgetting. When slavery was abolished, names were assigned arbitrarily to formerly enslaved people, sometimes degrading names tied to the plantations where they worked or to physical traits. Their original names were lost. Today, some people, including descendants of enslaved people themselves, prefer not to revisit this history. The pain remains too acute. "The question of memory and forgetting remains burning," Devi insists. She draws a parallel to the anonymous dead of the contemporary Mediterranean, who are also denied burial and official recognition. The pattern repeats across centuries and geographies. The refusal of recognition is both historical and present. By contrast, the novel does not dwell in abstraction. This refusal is precisely what it attempts to contest. Devi notes in an introductory passage that the work, "born from an alternate-history delirium," does not claim to be historical but aims to "better disturb thought." Fiction becomes a tool for challenging power. The project had resisted her for decades. The complexity of weaving together four generations, a multitude of characters, and a century of transformations seemed beyond reach. It was only after completing a text for the "My Night at the Museum" collection that she reopened her old notebooks and found the momentum necessary. Several figures in the novel embody the mechanisms of injunction and erasure inherent to systems of domination. Willie carries the weight of expiation for faults he did not commit, invested with a quasi-sacrificial mission that isolates him from those he loves. Mylène, a silent and invisible creature, ultimately performs an act of resistance when Le Bouchon is attacked, acquiring a mystical dimension. The narrator, male and keeper of memory, is described by Devi as her literary double, the one who speaks "by duty, by obsession," born to testify to what the silences of previous generations have covered. When pressed on comparisons to García Márquez and "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Devi marks a precise distance. She does not practice magical realism but rather an interweaving of realism and mythology, nourished since childhood by tales from Indian mythology and readings of "One Thousand and One Nights." As for the designation of masterpiece that the novel has received, she greets it with a certain unease, fearing it might parasitize the reading experience and weigh on public expectations. The records show what the novel attempts to articulate: that economic power in Mauritius has never been redistributed since the era of slavery. The descendants of colonizers retained their holdings. The institutions that might have intervened did not. The names of the enslaved were erased. The graves were never marked. What remains is a society structured by an inheritance that no one has been permitted to refuse or to fully examine. The novel does not solve this problem. It does not offer reconciliation or closure. Instead, it insists that the problem be named, that the mechanisms of its perpetuation be traced, and that the silences surrounding it be broken. Devi speaks of the future with a kind of determined uncertainty. "I hope even more that the story will not end there," she says, "and that I will still have other things to say and to write." The question that remains, for readers and for Mauritian institutions alike, is whether literary recognition of historical dispossession can substitute for what structures of power have refused to accomplish.