In 1908, twenty years after the French press in Pondicherry had celebrated the enthusiasm displayed by Indians at its first Bastille Day celebration, 'countless coolies' were seen 'unloading a consignment of Liverpool salt' from a foreign vessel whose cargo contained 'the bleeding head of a cow and the gory feet of an ox'. The coolies in question were clay models in what was branded a 'seditious' exhibition in the French territory of Chandernagore. Twenty-six years later, when activists in Pondicherry were agitating for the reform of its obsolete and inherently racist electoral list, M. K. Gandhi toured Pondicherry and publicly exhorted Indians to embrace France's fine legacy of liberty, equality and fraternity. Taking these counter-narratives as a point of departure, this essay examines the tensions between French imaginings of Pondicherry as revealed in the colonial archive and the perceptions of those Indian inhabitants who, in the words of one petitioner, were tired of Pondicherry being treated as a 'bibelot' or museum piece, and wanted change. Drawing on archival materials spanning 1885 to 1935, I contrast the public mirage of Pondicherry as a place of sanctuary from British rule with the French government's dual policy of, on the one hand, building strategic alliances with exiles such as the Burmese Prince Myingun and the Indian nationalist Sri Aurobindo Ghose, and, on the other, collaborating with the British government where security interests coincided. Far from a simple place of refuge, this essay concludes, Pondicherry was a complex site of power and imaginings that were sustained in strategic symbiosis with British rule.
