We crossed the Deccan Plateau, heading east and descending to the coast to get to Pondicherry, a six-hour journey that went through the Eastern Ghats. The Ghats, clumps of loose granite boulders in places, loomed over housing erected precariously in their shadow, making me wonder about earthquakes and avalanches. The myriad establishments in the vicinity involved in granite cutting, polishing, and selling explained this co-existence. We passed lakes, ponds, paddy fields, isolated villages, makeshift roadside vendor stalls, and many “trader” shops when we crossed over into Tamil Nadu. My “tree app” noted China Berry, Toddy Palm, Teak, Neem, Tropical Almond, Mango, and Bamboo among the indigenous trees, and imports like Peruvian Pepper, Mexican Sunflower, and Texas Ebony along the route.
Pondicherry is the largest of the French trading posts in India and was colonized from 1674 to 1963, before it became a Union Territory of India. There were two periods when the French lost control: to the Dutch between 1693-99, and to the British between 1793-1814 (circa French Revolution/Napoleonic Wars), and it was this latter period that I was interested in uncovering for my new book, because the new city that we see today did not exist then; the old city was destroyed by the British during the Carnatic Wars of the mid-18th century and not rebuilt until the early 19th century. Pondicherry must have been a ruin in 1799, the year in which my novel takes place, and unlike the city I was seeing now. I would have to engage the fiction writer’s imagination into high gear to recreate my setting for that year.
The smell of sulphur and fish wafts constantly, due to the many lagoons dotting this enclave with its distinctive red soil. Skeletons of the old city peek out in places – traces of the moat and wall of the destroyed Fort Louis, the old harbour with its crumbling pier, and the grid shaped layout of the town that is bisected into White Town (for the French) and Black Town (for the Indians) by a dried-out river with many bridges running across it. White Town has the salubrious seafront promenade at its back, while Black Town seeps into the humid and hot interior. The buildings in White Town are large, well-maintained, with gardens, while Black Town is a warren of streets and hovels piled one on top of the other. Government buildings, museums, restaurants, the craft market, Bharathi Park, and the famous Sri Aurobindo Ashram – aka the tourist stuff – are all in White Town. So is the profusion of well-fed stray dogs that kick up a fuss if you get too close.
I found an interesting museum off the beaten track called the Selfie Museum. Its founder, A.P. Srithar, gave me the tour along with his obliging docent, Devi. Srithar has branches of his museum in various other Asia countries, and he specializes in miniatures of men and women dressed in the national costumes of all the countries in the world, in single-line art, in the world’s smallest teddy bears, and in full-size waxworks of famous personalities: Charlie Chaplin, Michael Jackson, Jackie Chan, and Amitabh Bachan were among them.
“The remaining French Pondicherrians (there are about two thousand of them still with French passports) are not seen in public anymore,” Devi explained. “Many live in France and visit during the winter only. And local students pick French only as a third language behind English and Tamil/Hindi.” The Indianization of French Pondicherry was going on before our eyes, the only relics to the past being segregated and stored inside the Pondicherry Museum (where photographs were not allowed, leaving me to take copious written notes) and in those vacant and shuttered colonial mansions whose owners were in France. The collection of furniture and artifacts in the Museum from the French period provides a great snapshot of what this enclave must have looked like during colonial rule – well worth a visit (without your smartphone!).
The local cuisine was a fusion of Indian-French, aka Pondicherry Creole. Apart from the Tamil Dosai and Goan Vindaloo, French Bouillabaisse had morphed into Puyabaise, and Fish Assad Curry was a delicious curry made with coconut milk. The seafood was in abundance, especially prawns. In fact, the smell of fish in the town could be attributed to the strings of vendors who sell their daily catch spread out on roadsides, collecting liberal infusions of gasoline fumes from tuk-tuks and vehicles that narrowly skirt them to add to the flavour.
The beaches, and we stayed on the famed Eden Beach, are broad and long, stretching for miles. They were not elegant beaches, merely functional, but being open to the public, they serve the locals well. I could not swim in the ocean because the red flags were out during our entire stay. The saltwater pool at the hotel was my compensation. And as we were staying a couple of miles out of town, I had to venture forth daily with Google Maps and a friendly tuk-tuk driver to navigate the maze of streets which connected us to the downtown area.
One such excursion was to the Department of National Archives, located in a suburb, where I was hoping to get more information about what had gone on in Pondicherry at the turn of the 19th century. Despite Google Maps, we got lost several times as the streets had subdivided into other streets since Google had last taken pictures. When we finally arrived, the National Archives was a sprawling, new, three-storey building in a spacious private garden, sitting amidst a jumble of houses and shops. No one was around, although the doors were open, and operating hours were supposed to be “24/7.” After going through many empty rooms, I located a security guard on the third floor, who took me to the only person who seemed to be at work, the Assistant Director. I was told that I needed a letter from my embassy and another from an academic institution to access any records. I lost it at that point and said that I had come “a long way” for this information, and that no one had responded to my e-mail queries from Canada. The Assistant Director, a kind man, took pity on me and gave me access to their online database, and suddenly, I had access to everything I needed, and I could even carry out my research after returning home. That was when I understood what “Open 24/7” meant. India’s move to digital is to be lauded – the surest way to link its one and a half billion citizens, even though the implementation is patchy.
Then it was time to take the long ride home. We were flying back to Colombo, but Pondicherry has no international airport, so that meant a four-hour drive north to Chennai, during which our driver broke every rule in the traffic code to get us there in time for our flight. “Driving on your horn,” “Diving into the gap and waiting to spring forward at the slightest crack in traffic,” were new driving rules I learned on this drive, never to be repeated back in Canada. It was a ride that also brought home to me the vigour and rambunctiousness of this emerging nation that has now angled into “most populous country” and “fourth largest economy” in the world. These titles did not come easily for this country that had been stripped of its wealth and confidence during colonial times. These titles come from the type of confidence exuded by our Indian tour guides who are not afraid to “murder the queen” when they speak English—or Hindlish, as it is sometimes called—and it is a lesson to our more sheepish Sri Lankans engaged in tourism that you have to get out there and bat the ball if you want to hit it out of the grounds.
