“View of Pondichéry”: Looking at India from Paris in 1750 and 1931

In 1750, the well-established Parisian engraver Jacques Gabriel Huquier published a painted engraving titled “Vue de Pondichéry dans les Indes Orientales.” The image presents a view from the water of the colonial French city of Pondichéry on the Coromandel Coast in India, highlighting a bustling port full of ships waving various flags and an imposing French fort commanding the coast. Using this engraving to examine French metropolitan understandings of Pondichéry, this presentation will begin with an inquiry into the meaning of French empire in India in the eighteenth century, when French influence in the subcontinent was at its height. Jumping nearly 200 years forward, these eighteenth-century understandings will then be juxtaposed with much later French imaginings of India, revealed by an examination of the catalogue of the French India pavilion in the Paris colonial exhibition of 1931, and its images of Pondichéry. By bringing together these two views of Pondichéry, I aim to reveal the import of eighteenth century history for modern French colonial efforts. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a group of French colonial administrators and amateur historians played a central role in putting together a French India pavilion in the colonial exhibition, a wide-ranging display of French empire and imperial history. I will investigate the relationship between French colonial governance and such projects of historical preservation, and their focus on the eighteenth century. In other words, borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss, I will ask why was eighteenth-century Pondichéry “good to think with” for modern colonial administrators? The presentation will thus offer initial reflections on the challenges and benefits of simultaneous inquiry into the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and the changing significance of Pondichéry in the metropolitan imagination.