French impressions

As Yann Martel’s novel hits the big screen, Stephen McClarence tours the fabled Indian town which inspired the writer.

Men play boules in the town square, watched by shoppers with bulging bags of croissants and baguettes. Near a statue of Joan of Arc, not far from the Place de la Republique, gendarmes in kepis greet passers-by with a cheery “Bonjour.” Around the Rue Saint Louis, the Rue Dumas and the Rue du Bazar Saint-Laurent, restaurants advertise Escalopes de poulet saute among their plats principaux.

Paris? Marseilles? Mais, non. This is Pondicherry, a town on the steamy south eastern coast of India, fronting the Bay of Bengal. Its unmistakably French atmosphere – elegant, laid-back, charming – is the legacy of three centuries of colonial rule.

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Pondicherry, on the beguilingly named Coromandel Coast, plays a leading role in Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning fantasy novel about a boy and a tiger cast adrift for six months in the Pacific Ocean. A new film of the book, directed by Ang Lee, perhaps best known for Brokeback Mountain, has been released in the UK this week.

Martel visited Pondy in the 1990s and discovered, as he writes in his introduction to Life of Pi, a relic of “that most modest of colonial empires, French India.” The French were here from 1674 to 1954, and their influence lingers, making the town one of the most fascinatingly cross-cultural on the sub-continent and an almost “out-of-India” experience for travellers and tourists in need of a bit of peace and quiet.

Which is why my wife and I first headed there towards the end of a two-month trip that had sent us zig-zagging 2,000 miles down India. As we neared Pondy on a breakneck taxi ride from a railway station 20 miles away, we horn-honked our way through a lush tropical landscape, billowing orange dust as we went.

Round every bend was a glimpse of the crazy kaleidoscope of India. We passed whole families balanced on speeding motor scooters, bicycles piled high with bunches of bananas and sacks of grain, a village funeral procession led by a brass band blaring out solemn marches, with mourners scattering rose and marigold petals.

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Eventually, an avenue of palm trees took us into the town’s sprawling suburbs. Each tree had a number carefully painted on it; Tree No 4 was a particularly fine specimen.

So far, so Indian. What, though, of Pondy’s fabled sophistication? We discovered it as we crossed the canal that separates the two halves of the town, the Indian Tamil Quarter and the French Quarter.

Rundown courtyard houses gave way to tree-lined streets of old colonial mansions, with colonnades, verandahs, balconies and shutters closed to protect dark rooms from the bright tropical sun. Two hundred monsoons had taken their toll of some of the houses, crumbling their colour-washed walls and flaking their paintwork, but they had a ghostly grandeur. Many were being converted into hotels, boutiques and galleries. It was like Paris with palm trees.

The streets led to a promenade, where families strolled late into the night and ate Super Good ice cream and popcorn under the watchful gaze of a statue of Gandhi, striding out in his own little pavilion.

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A seafront fairground flared into gaudy life in the evening. Children put performing monkeys through their 
paces. As a sign for the “Sea Side Guest House” suggested, we’d come to a holiday place, somewhere to unwind for a few days.

So we did, and we’ve been back twice since then. Our visits aren’t strenuous. In the mid-afternoon lull, we wander round antique shops stacked with old gramophones and dusty statuettes of Hindu gods.

We have coffee and croissants at a cafe called Hot Breads, where customers flick through Le Monde and Paris Match. We visit the museum, with its battered 18th-century palanquin (a sort of sedan chair carried by servants) and its model of an Indian squat toilet.

We nose round the traditional bazaars in the Tamil Quarter, full of spice and bangle stalls and cafes serving curry from pans as big as barrels. And we often have dinner at the Rendezvous restaurant, a vibrant, friendly place where fairylights twinkle on the roof terrace and Fifties jazz plays.

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Pondy’s restaurants serve as many western dishes as curries, with menus offering coq au vin and crepes souzettes – options not seen all that often in India. And there are Creole dishes, rich and tangy, with plenty of coconut. They’re a speciality of the Hotel de l’Orient, a pink-painted courtyard mansion that’s among half-a-dozen smart, upmarket places to stay.

One of Pondy’s big draws is its Ashram and, linked to it, Auroville, a settlement a few miles outside town. It was conceived back in the Sixties as a sort of Utopian eco-spiritual city of the future, but these days it feels more like a post-hippy commune.

Slightly grizzled western seekers-after-truth with droopy moustaches and tied-back hair – some more old-age than New Age – surge past on motorbikes. It’s a place to wear your cheesecloth shirts, tied-and-dyed cotton trousers and, above all, your bandanna. And you might feel under-dressed without a tasselled shoulder bag.

Soothed by all this, we’re ready for Real India again.

Getting there

Cox & Kings (0845 154 8941; www.coxandkings.co.uk) can organise tailor-made private travel to Pondicherry. A sample 15-day Coromandel Coast to Malabar journey across southern India costs from £2,345. It features two nights in Pondicherry and also includes a cruise on the backwaters of Kerala and visits to Chennai, Cochin, Tanjore, Kanchipuram, Munnar and the temple city of Madurai.