Place · French coastal enclave · India
Mahé
A three-square-mile enclave on the Malabar coast at the mouth of the Mahé river, French from 1721, taken and returned by the British repeatedly, and transferred to India in 1954 — now a Malayalam-speaking district of Puducherry surrounded by Kerala.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 11.701, 75.536
Worth knowing
The mismatch is administrative and linguistic at once: Mahé votes in Puducherry, whose capital is seven hundred kilometres away across the peninsula, and whose other districts speak Tamil and Telugu. Its schools teach in Malayalam and its liquor is cheaper than Kerala's, which is most of what it is now known for.
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyThalassery
Mahé and Thalassery are twenty kilometres apart on the Malabar coast and were French and English respectively, competing for the same pepper and the same access to the Kottayam and Kadathanad chiefs behind them. The English took Mahé four times and gave it back three; Thalassery's factory grew as Mysore pressed down from the interior. Two European powers holding adjacent fishing towns on one coast is what the Carnatic wars looked like locally.
- CampaignSrirangapatna / Srirangapattana
Mahé was Haidar Ali's arms port, and he had guaranteed its safety. The British capture of the enclave in 1779 was the specific act he cited in declaring war, opening the Second Anglo-Mysore War. A three-square-mile French loge on the Malabar coast is therefore the trigger for the longest and most expensive of the Company's wars in the south.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mahé, India”. Jean Deloche, Le vieux Pondichéry; the Institut Français de Pondichéry publications; French India treaty texts.
Open Mahé in the repository →