PONDICHERRY- Comment Francais Est Cela

Pondicherry is part of the holy trinity of Indian tourism with Goa and Rajasthan. A former French colony, its relatively recent French past is trumpeted through glossy brochures that promise you a glimpse of the capital of food, film, fashion and ultimate European snobbery for an overall price less that the airport tax at Paris.
As you negotiate with the merciless Chennai traffic, street names you cannot pronounce or remember, and taxi drivers who are religiously rude, you clutch on to that Pondhicherry Guide for dear life and dream of the exotic French names that fill its pages. Names as difficult to pronounce as those in Chennai but infinitely more inviting to minds steeped in the charms of Godard, Voltaire, Flaubert and Proust (in fact one of the most prominent streets on the map is named after noted dramatist, author and Nobel winner Romain Rolland).
But after over three hours on the road when you finally read the sign ‘Welcome To Pondicherry’, the landscape doesn’t magically transform into a Parisian suburb or French countryside. Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi are still struggling to outsmile each other from lifesize hoardings and the street is clogged with ramshackle stores selling every conceivable coconut product. We had entered the city through its Tamil quarter, the wasteland of locals that once surrounded the island of French revelry within.
Fighting a surge of disappointment and doom, we made our way to the French quarter and were relieved to see a dramatic shift of cityscape. The filth gone, the streets neatly cobbled and rows of candy-coloured homes with white fences and romantic verandahs greeted our dreamy eyes and we began to ask our way to Hotel De L’Orient on Rue Romain Rolland in our best faux French accents.
Over the next couple of days we were to discover that not a single person you will encounter anywhere (except the odd French tourist wondering if all this is French what is he) can comprehend let alone pronounce the fancy French names unless they are broken into a catchword and heavily Tamil-ised.
Anyway, now settled in the breathtakingly restored and uniquely designed French property all that was left to do was seek the ghost of the foreign culture. Since the most foreign film running in the halls packed with gaudy Tamil capers was Jodhaa Akbar and the most fashionable item on sale a second-hand Marks and Spencer dress discarded by a broke Brit, our best way in was going to be food. Everywhere we were assured that the finest French cuisine is available around the corner at Rendezvous, the tourist Mecca in town. With visions of Champs-Elysees cafes and Van Gogh’s café at night floating in the mind we climbed the stairs to what turned out to be a Goa-beach-shack in Pondicherry. Plastic chairs, a blackboard scribbled with ‘specials’, tubelights and innumerable un-bathed foreigners- this was a repast to hippie-land, not French elegance. The most French dishes on the vegetarian menu were stuffed pancakes and a cucumber and tomoato salad with ‘french’ dressing (it is also amusingly their highest selling dish), so we settled for mash, fries and vegetarian gratin (of dubious ‘continental food genre’). The place is owned by the very affable Vincent Mathias from Mumbai who has managed to retain a chef or two from the French times to stir up the couple of French dishes, like baked oysters and fresh duck liver pate, that dot the meat/seafood menu. But even their flavour is greatly compromised by the paucity of authentic ingredients. The affordable pricing of the menu makes it impossible for him to source expensive ingredients from abroad. Satsanga and Le Club, the other two most populous haunts of the quarter are similarly done up shacks. While the former has a mammoth menu with a number of dishes sounding promisingly French, they are almost never available. Instead you’re served pasta, steak and garlic bread, edible only for their grease. Le Club used to be run by the Allaince Francais but the current management serves a multi-cuisine fare with Chinese, Indian and continental prepared apparently with interchangeable spices.
We figured we might have to turn to the posh hotels for a true experience and made our way to Le Dupleix. Chef Kumar at their restaurant admitted that authentic French food was hardly to be found anywhere in the city now. Influences from Europe, Vietnam and India had seeped into their dishes too and bearing testimony to his admission was the alarming curry leaf and lentil tarka on our custard fish. Next in line was the Promenade, a modern airy sea-front property, where we skipped the regular coffee-shop buffet and looked for the fare advertised as chef Lionel Wincent’s specialty. The menu again was multi-cuisine and the French dishes had been adapted to local tastes. The advertised chef was nowhere to be seen and had apparently left two years ago. The local chefs who claimed to have designed the menu were not sure how to define what they were serving.
Expectedly tired we gave up our pursuit and settled for a meal at our own hotel on the final evening. The co-chairman Francis Wacziarg, of the Neemrana group that owns the place being French we mildly hoped to be less disappointed. But that was settled as soon as our cheese platter arrived with a bottle of Indian wine from a very sparse wine menu (so much for French!). Even the cheeses were not from France and dominating the palette was a disgusting bland cheddar generously studded with roasted cumin seeds. The main course had a large section of ‘Creole’ food. Creole is a term generally associated with a kind of cuisine that is popular in Louisiana but the Puducherry-ites have appropriated it to describe anything they make with south Indian spices, which is not too rich and hot. Their claim to the term is derived from a group of people (of mixed Asian and European blood) called Creoles who were settlers in the French colony.
Sitting on the concrete seafront later that evening at the tourism department run La Café (snacking on croissants that tasted like egg-stuffed gujiyas) and watching children climbing a gigantic Gandhi statue, we talked of how much one could enjoy this very unique town if they were not burdened with expectations of French exotica. There was another thought that brought a smile- the idea of India might be elusive but one thing is for sure, wherever we go and whatever comes to us, we will steep in our colours till it is undistinguishable. We know no subtler love.