Place · French colonial port town · India

Puducherry (Pondicherry)

Also known as Pondicherry, Puducherry, Pondichéry, French quarter, White Town, Ville Blanche

Function

Trade & production

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

11.934, 79.830

Worth knowing

The town is laid out in two halves divided by a canal: Ville Blanche, the White Town on the sea side, with wide streets, compound walls and ochre houses under bougainvillea, and Ville Noire, the Tamil town inland, denser and built around its temples — the segregation written into the plan and still legible in it. Aurobindo came in 1910 because French territory lay beyond the reach of a British warrant, and the ashram grew in the White Town's streets. France also kept a scatter of loges elsewhere — single walled compounds with a flagstaff and a few staff at Masulipatnam, Kozhikode, Surat and Dhaka — held by treaty long after any trade had gone, and handed over in 1947 with mostly nothing left standing.

Connections (11)

• Life routeSri Aurobindo

  Aurobindo came to French Pondicherry in 1910 to escape British prosecution and stayed forty years, leaving his room almost never after 1926. The territory's legal separateness is the whole reason the ashram is where it is — a colonial accident produced a place of retreat. He had been tried for the Alipore bomb conspiracy and acquitted, and wrote afterwards that his politics ended and his yoga began in the year he spent in that jail awaiting trial.

• Teaching lineageSantiniketan

  Śāntiniketan and the Pondicherry ashram are two institutional answers to the same question about what a free Indian should be educated into. Tagore built a school in a grove and taught in Bengali; Aurobindo withdrew from politics entirely and built a discipline around inner change. Both were founded by Bengalis who had tried the political route first.

• CampaignWandiwash (Vandavāsi)

  Eyre Coote broke Lally's army at Wandiwash in January 1760 and besieged Pondicherry, which surrendered a year later and was systematically demolished — walls, houses, church. The French got the site back at the Peace of Paris and rebuilt the town to the grid that still stands, but without the right to fortify it or keep troops. Everything French in India after 1761 exists on those terms.

• Succession in timeSri Aurobindo Ashram, Puducherry

  Aurobindo Ghose left British India in 1910 while facing sedition proceedings and settled at Pondicherry because French territory was beyond the reach of a British warrant. He never left, turning from revolutionary politics to yoga and writing, and the ashram grew around him; Auroville followed in 1968. The town's political usefulness and its later spiritual reputation are the same fact about it.

• Imperial administration ofKaraikal

  Karaikal, Yanam and Mahé were administered from Pondicherry although they lie in three different linguistic regions hundreds of kilometres apart — Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam — which is why the union territory of Puducherry still has four non-contiguous districts and a legislature that meets in a city most of its citizens cannot reach in a day. The arrangement is a colonial accident that independence preserved intact.

• Imperial administration ofJoseph François Dupleix

  Dupleix governed French India from Pondicherry for twelve years, rebuilt the town, and turned a trading station into the capital of a client system reaching from the Carnatic to Hyderabad. His recall in 1754 was a decision by directors in Paris that the political method cost more than the trade earned — a judgement the Company in London declined to make about Bengal.

• CampaignArcot

  Arcot and Pondicherry are the two ends of the Second Carnatic War: the French candidate Chanda Sahib was installed as Nawab with Dupleix's troops, and Clive's seizure of his capital in 1751 forced him to abandon the siege of Tiruchirappalli. Chanda Sahib was killed in 1752 and Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, the Company's man, held the Carnatic for the rest of the century.

• Power passed toMachilipatnam / Masulipatnam / Bandar

  The Northern Circars were France's largest Indian acquisition, granted to Bussy in 1751 by Nizam Salabat Jung in return for the French troops that had put him in Hyderabad. Forde's victory at Chandurti and the storming of Masulipatnam in 1759 transferred the whole grant to the Company, which held the districts until 1947 — the French client system inherited entire.

• Power passed toNew Delhi, Lutyens' plan

  France and India agreed a referendum of the enclaves' elected representatives, held at Kizhur near Karaikal on 18 October 1954; the de facto transfer followed on 1 November. The Treaty of Cession was signed in 1956 and ratified in 1962. Unlike Goa, French India changed hands by vote and treaty rather than by an army, and kept its French civil law for those who claim it.

• Patronage networkSrirangapatna / Srirangapattana

  Pondicherry was the source of the French officers who drilled Mysore's infantry and cast its guns, and Tipu Sultan's embassies to Paris and to the Isle de France went out through it. A Jacobin club met at Srirangapatna in 1797 and addressed him as Citizen Tipu. After 1799 France had no Indian ally left, and its enclaves survived only because Britain saw no reason to take them.

• Life routeSubramania Bharati

  Subramania Bharati's 1908-1918 exile at Puducherry (then French territory beyond British reach) was the formative period for his nationalist Tamil poetry. He lived at the Easwaran Dharma Raja Koil Street alongside Sri Aurobindo and V.V.S. Aiyar in the French Quarter and wrote his masterworks 'Panchali Sabatham', 'Kannan Pattu' and 'Pappa Pattu' during these ten years in Puducherry.

On these journeys

• Reform, education & the national movement
• French India — 1664 to 1962
• Decolonisation, partition and integration

Sources

Wikipedia, “Pondicherry”. Jean Deloche, Le vieux Pondichéry (1673–1824): la ville et ses fortifications (Institut Français de Pondichéry); INTACH Pondicherry heritage listings.

• Wikipedia — Pondicherry