Monday, February 18, 2013

Pondicherry, Je T’Aime: An Unexpected Slice Of France In India

Pondicherry French Colony
French President Francois Hollande’s aboriginal official state appointment to India will not cover a trip to Pondicherry.
Hollande has other important things on his mind like affairs billions of dollars of high-tech fighter warplanes and nuclear ability plants to New Delhi.

However, a visit to the eastern littoral arena of Pondicherry would accept been highly allegorical and appropriate, back it was already a French Colony which still maintains a French ambiance centuries later. 

In 1673, as European nations ventured out to sea to beat adopted lands, the French took over Pondicherry at the allurement of a bounded sultan. By the afterward year a man called Francois Matin became its aboriginal French governor. Over the next 270 years, as the British acquired greater and greater slices of India for themselves, Pondicherry remained a quiet French paradise.
The French, at one time or another, as well ruled over a few other locations of India, including Yanaon (near Pondicherry), Mahe on the Kerala Coast, and Chandranagar in West Bengal.

France, however, was engaged in connected battle with the Dutch and the British in India, attached any efforts to aggrandize their Indian authority significantly. Paris put more accents on its backing other east, like Indochina, while accepting colonial assets in other locations of the world as well.
The French did not clearly abandon the anchorage city of Pondicherry back to India until 1954; seven years afterwards India acquired its ability from Great Britain. However, French is still announced in Pondicherry, while Bastille Day is acclaimed and bakeries and restaurants action Parisian fare. There is even a bronze of Joan of Arc, France’s national heroine, in the town.

Ratnakar Sadasyula wrote on the Boloji website: The absolute towns [of Pondicherry] are disconnected into two sections, the French division and the Indian quarter. The absolute town is blooming on the French filigree pattern. To a company the French access is unmistakable. The French names of the streets, the French appearance villas, and the afternoon siesta if annihilation stirs, the bicycles on the streets. One could be forgiven for cerebration that they are in some old Mediterranean towns affected by Hollywood. In the French quarter, the building are about colonial view with continued compounds and stately walls, the like of which we see alone in Hollywood romances.

He added wistfully: “Truly walking through the streets of Pondicherry is like traveling in a time machine, we see the blazon of houses we accept alone apprehend about. This is one abode that still has not been ravaged by tourism. Churches co-exist with temples, the cops abrasion French hats, one can airing beyond the bank alley leisurely. French and Tamil are appropriately spoken, while this have to be one of the few places area one can see the French banderole aerial in India. [Pondicherry] absolutely represents the assemblage of the East and West”. 

An estimated 10,000 French humans currently reside in Pondicherry -- interestingly, most of them conveyance the Hindu acceptance rather than Catholicism. Pondicherry afresh accustomed a huge addition to its contour through the Hollywood blockbuster blur ‘Life of Pi’, locations of which were filmed in the town.


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A travel and tourism enthusiast, travel writer, interested to explore unexplored locations around world. Love to share the tourism updates, news and developments happening in my native place - Kerala.

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