Journey
French India — 1664 to 1962
Colbert chartered the Compagnie des Indes orientales in 1664 and Pondicherry was bought from a Bijapur governor in 1674. France lost the contest for India at Wandiwash in January 1760, kept five scattered enclaves by the Treaty of Paris, transferred them to India in 1954 after a vote, and ratified the cession in 1962.
Stops (10)
- Puducherry (Pondicherry) · capital 1674–1954
Bought in 1674 from Sher Khan Lodi, the Bijapur governor of the Carnatic, and the only French possession that grew into a city. Razed by the British in 1761 and rebuilt on a grid, it is a Tamil town with French street names, a canal dividing White Town from Black, and a civil law still partly French.
- Joseph François Dupleix · governor-general 1742–1754
Dupleix worked out the method that decided India: take sides in an Indian succession dispute, put your claimant on the throne with European-drilled infantry, and collect districts and revenue as the fee. He won the Carnatic for France on paper, was recalled in 1754 for the cost of it, and died in debt.
- Arcot · 1751
The Nawab of the Carnatic's capital, and the prize in the proxy war between Dupleix's candidate Chanda Sahib and the British candidate Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah. Clive walked into the empty fort in September 1751 with five hundred men and held it for fifty days, which broke the siege of Tiruchirappalli.
- Wandiwash (Vandavāsi) · 14 January 1760
Eyre Coote broke the Comte de Lally's army on open ground west of Pondicherry, with sepoys making up most of both sides. Pondicherry surrendered a year later and was demolished. France was left as a trading presence with no political future in India, and the Company had no European rival.
- Machilipatnam / Masulipatnam / Bandar · 1751–1759
Bussy held the Northern Circars for France from 1751 as the price of installing Salabat Jung at Hyderabad — four coastal districts, granted by a Nizam who owed his throne to French troops. Colonel Forde's march in 1758 and the storming of Masulipatnam in April 1759 took all of it for the Company.
- Yanam · 1723–1954
A few square kilometres in the Godavari delta, acquired in 1723 and surrounded on every side by what became Andhra Pradesh. Yanam was a loge with a customs house rather than a colony; its use to France was as a legal foothold on the Coromandel's northern textile coast, held for two hundred and thirty years.
- Karaikal · 1739–1954
Bought in 1739 from the Maratha raja of Thanjavur, which is why a French enclave sat in the Kaveri delta. Karaikal supplied rice and cloth and had the largest Tamil Catholic population in French India; the poet Subramania Bharati's circle moved freely between it and Pondicherry. It supplied rice and cloth and had the largest Tamil Catholic population in French India, and the 1954 referendum on the enclaves' transfer was held at Kizhur just outside it.
- Mahé · 1721–1954
Three square miles at the mouth of the Mahé river, taken in 1721 against the local ruler's wishes and held as the French window on Malabar pepper. Its real importance was military: Mahé was the port through which Haidar Ali of Mysore imported French arms, and the British knew it.
- Chandernagore · 1688–1954
Granted by Aurangzeb's governor on the Hooghly and, after Clive took it in 1757, permitted to exist unfortified. That made it useful in a way trade never had: a few hundred metres of French soil inside Bengal where a British warrant did not run, and where Aurobindo hid in 1910.
- Srirangapatna / Srirangapattana · 1799
French officers drilled Haidar Ali's and Tipu Sultan's infantry, a Jacobin club met in the town in 1797 and planted a liberty tree, and Tipu wrote to the Directory for troops. Wellesley's assault on 4 May 1799 killed Tipu and ended the last Indian state that treated France as a serious ally.