AS COLONIES go, Pondicherry was not exactly a success story. Almost immediately after the French set up this lovely nugget on the Bay of Bengal in 1674 it was captured by the Dutch, retaken by its founders, then sacked and destroyed by the British.
And though the French kept rebuilding it, Pondicherry never became more than a stopover on the way to Indochina. Even after Pondy, as it is nicknamed, rejoined India – in 1956 – it languished, out of step with the rest of the nation. For most of its history, Pondicherry was a backwater, in decline.
Not any more. Today, Puducherry, as it is officially known but rarely called, is capitalising on a glammed-up version of that history, and emerging as an arty, design-savvy destination with a quasi-Gallic approach to eating, drinking, shopping and relaxing. It's like India seen through a French lens, or maybe vice versa.
On the south-eastern coast, about 150 miles south of Chennai, Pondicherry is, for an Indian city, tiny. Only about a million people live here, mostly in the types of charmless concrete buildings erected all over the poorer parts of Asia. But near the Bay of Bengal, the cityscape changes . Soon you see tile roofs and wooden shutters, balconies and colonnades, wide streets and pastel churches – the neighbourhood once known as the Ville Blanche, or White Town, where the colonists lived.
Here, under a very un-Indian blanket of tranquillity, Pondy is exploding. In less than a decade, the local branch of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage has contributed to the restoration of dozens of historic structures, from private homes to former governors' residences (a description apparently applied to half the buildings in town).
The crumbling walls of the 18th-century Education Department, for example, were once covered in a sheen of grey mould; when I arrive in the rue Romain Rolland, the building is smart and tidy, with pink-peach plaster trimmed in white. It reopened as the 16-room Hotel de l'Orient in 2000, and my room has a four-poster bed, an antique wardrobe and framed prints of blue-skinned gods on the walls. When I turn off the air-conditioning, I hear something I've never heard before in India: nothing. No traffic or peeping horns, no street-sellers' cries, no heavy machinery clanging.
Peace pervades the neighbourhood. In a neatly subdivided park, office workers on their lunch break nap in the shade, and along the waterfront boulevard, couples and families – mostly Indians, the women in stunning yellow, orange and teal saris, along with a smattering of French tourists – amble past the rocky beach, the stately Hotel de Ville and a statue of Gandhi.
In the garden of the 33-room Promenade, Pondicherry's second-newest boutique hotel, well-heeled patrons – mostly western, with a smattering of Indians – drink cocktails and dangle their feet in the pool. It is a Tuesday in March but it feels like a summer Friday.
North of the park sits the equally tranquil Pondicherry Museum, an old mansion full of relics from the past. I wander among the carriages and cannonballs, ornate dining-room sets and bronze statues of goddesses.
Further north lies the Aurodhan Gallery, perhaps the city's finest collection of contemporary Indian art. After browsing three floors of brilliant Ganesh portraits and sombre neo-expressionist scenes of old men drinking and playing chess, I ask the gallery owner's wife, Shernaz Verma, what to do next. She suggests I visit the French Institute and Auroville – a utopian community founded by the Sri Aurobindo Society, whose followers were, for many years, Pondy's main tourists – but warns I shouldn't expect a holiday crammed with activities. In Pondicherry, she says, "there's not much to see, but a lot to feel".
So, for the next five days, I try to soak up as much feeling as possible. I play flaneur, strolling among the striking architecture and observing my fellow visitors. The French, it seems, have a penchant for local dress, donning saris and kurtas as if they've worn them all their lives. They are also, contrary to what I've read, the only people to be heard speaking French – Tamil and English dominate les rues.
Likewise, Pondicherry's restaurants represent an odd mixture of cuisines. There are so-called 'creole' places such as Madame Shanthe's which offer French and Indian dishes side by side, and it's up to you to, say, dunk a crust of baguette in your coconut prawn curry. But all demonstrate attention to colour and design. Even humble Surguru, where the superlative vegetarian thalis cost slightly more than 50p, has a wood-beamed vaulted ceiling, tabletops covered with shellacked newspapers and a contingent of chic French expatriate wives at lunchtime.
After lunch I hit the shops. I sift through hundreds of brightly patterned shirts and scarves, skirts and sandals, then browse the shelves of Hidesign. Relatively unknown outside India, this Pondicherry-based maker of leather goods is starting to expand overseas and its slick, soft briefcases and handbags can be found as far away as Dubai, Hong Kong and Norway.
Instead of buying a bag, I sample the slick, soft brown-leather banquettes at Risque, in the Promenade hotel – which, by no small coincidence, is one of two developed by Hidesign. Risque is a classic boutique hotel destination bar: DJ playing dance music for a mix of stylish international types. It is, perhaps, a little pretentious (especially given the bartenders' mixological failings – my martini, criminally, is served warm), so everyone moves on to Le Space, a rooftop bar with mismatched chairs and fairy lights, where it doesn't seem to matter that the owners never have enough tonic water or that mosquitoes are nipping. Here, the Kingfisher beers are cold and disparate populations mix: backpackers, spiritual seekers, wealthy French and, a relative rarity, Indians.
More than anywhere I've ever visited, the invisible wall between locals and tourists in Pondicherry is a challenge to breach. In part, this is a legacy of colonialism – or at least that's what I understand from my research at the French Institute. Escaping the midday heat, I read about how the French, unlike the British, rarely tried to change Indian society or the caste system, and explicitly cut the city up – block by block, house by house – according to ethnicity. That few Pondicherry natives now speak French in public seems natural. You could interpret the city's current superficial Frenchifying as subtle revenge upon the colonisers. What better way to redress the wrongdoings of centuries past than by adopting a French façade in order to extract money from nostalgic Gauls?
I could continue my research, except Pondicherry is just too beautiful and relaxing. So I walk down its pristine lanes and come upon a night market where vendors sell roast ears of corn or spicy baskets of chickpeas. Then I wander the Tamil quarter and spot a Vespa under the tiled awning of an old wooden house, and all those old distinctions – Indian/French, native/foreign, authentic/simulated – lose their meaning. Pondicherry is simply Pondicherry, and becoming more so every day.
FACT FILE: PONDICHERRYFLY to Chennai from Glasgow or Edinburgh (via Heathrow and Bangalore) with British Airways from around £760 in July (
www.expedia.co.uk). A double room at the Hotel de L'Orient costs around £50 per night, while a honeymoon room is just £15 more (
www.neemrana hotels.com). Bed and breakfast in a sea-facing double room at the Promenade Hotel costs £70 per night (
www.asiarooms.com).
The full article contains 1280 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
