The ‘invisible’ thread that connects Pondicherry and Vietnam: An interview with Professor Ananya Jahanara Kabir

statue donated by the Pragassam family of Saigon to the Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Pondicherry (Ananya Jahanara Kabir)

There are other subtle traces of Vietnam in Pondicherry’s memory — for instance, in the way people arrange their homes. I had come across this comment by a Vietnamese student who was in India for an exchange programme, wherein he said that whenever he entered the homes of Franco-Pondicherrian people he was reminded of the interiors of Vietnamese homes. There is a guest house in Pondicherry, Le Jardin Suffren. The reception area there is decorated with photographs of family members from Vietnam and paraphernalia like dragon motifs on the wall which are Southeast Asian.

The French colonial world included several other places apart from Vietnam, such as parts of Africa. Why is it that it is only Vietnam that made its way to Pondicherrian memory and not other parts of the empire?

To be honest, other parts of the French empire are also there. And this could be another project. In my article I have mentioned about people from Pondicherry travelling to places like Senegal and North Africa for work. That’s a whole other project and it’s worth working on. I chose to focus on the Vietnamese connection, because it’s the one that first floated up for me.

But you may as well ask why out of all these layers of connections, the Vietnamese one is the one that floats up first. I think it’s perhaps because Pondicherry and Vietnam are two parts of the French empire that are within the Indian Ocean world.

Once the British took over India after the Anglo-French wars in the south, the French presence in India was gradually reduced to the enclaves of Pondicherry, Karikal, Yanam, Mahe, and Chandernagore. And they were not allowed to expand more. You have got to imagine that the French have lost real mobilising power in India, with a base but little else. So they were looking to see where they could go next and they found a fresh opening in Southeast Asia. They took over what they called “l’Indochine or ‘Indo-China’– basically it consisted of present-day Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

Photos from Le Jardin Suffren Guesthouse reception. (Ananya Jahanara Kabir)

It’s even further away from France than India is, but they (the French) already have a base in India. They already have a few centuries of training of local people. So they had a corpus of Indian people who could speak French and were working in local administration. These were people who had renounced their Indianness, taken on French sounding names, become Catholic, and adopted the French language and education.

When the French took over Indochina, they had to send people there to administer the new colony. Instead of sending a shipload of people all the way from France, they just simply started creating a little circuit in Asia itself, between Pondicherry and Saigon and other parts, other locations of Indochina. Consequently, they started encouraging people from Pondicherry to fill the administrative gap in Vietnam. Historian Natasha Pairaudeau in her book Mobile Citizens: French Indians in Indochina, 1858-1955 writes exactly about this: Why did so many Pondicherrians get linked to the French Empire in Southeast Asia?

A Franco-Pondicherrian agricultural scientist, the late Claude Maurius, whose memoir I have referred to, calls Indochina an “opening” because it represented, literally, a career opportunity for a whole bunch of people who had become French and were looking for new ways to express their Frenchness.

Was it just the bureaucrats who travelled from Pondicherry to Vietnam?

Once you had bureaucrats travelling along with their families, you would need a whole infrastructure to support them. So different kinds of people started travelling, sensing the opportunities. They included businessmen, jewellers, and bakers. In fact a whole caste of milkmen were taken along. Southeast Asians are known to be lactose intolerant and do not have a milk culture. So in order to meet with the requirements of the French and the Indians, people who deal with cows, and perhaps even the cows were sent across.

Therefore it was not just a small creamy layer of people who migrated, but four or five different groups of people. Natasha Pairaudeau in her work calls it a four-tiered diaspora that emerged. So there were merchants, bureaucrats, military men and finally the blue-collared workers, including those who were supplying milk.

There was also the non-Franco-Pondicherrian lot who migrated, following those from Pondicherry, for example merchants and small-scale service providers looking for economic opportunities. In fact, I begin my article by reminding readers that the notorious Charles Sobhraj too had a Vietnamese mother and a Sindhi father.

You mention celebrated figures like singer Julie Quang, stunt coordinator Peter Hein, and the notorious serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who are all partly Vietnamese and Indian. And yet their mixed genealogy is almost invisible in public discussions. Why do you think that has happened?

We in India have a consciousness of ourselves as an ex-colony of the British. So stories and communities that are remnant of the British presence in India are easier to remember and understand. Thus, for instance, everybody in India would have an idea of who an Anglo-Indian person is. But they wouldn’t know much about the kinds of demographics and communities created through the French presence in India, including those with Vietnamese connections. Our memories collectively accept that textbook fact that for two hundred years we were a British colony.

Already within this framework the French colonial presence is pretty marginalised. And whatever we know of it is mainly because of heritage tourism which has become a big thing lately. What really shattered the links of memory between Vietnam and French India and later Pondicherry of the Indian republic, was the fact that all these spaces were involved in complex decolonisation processes of their own. On the Indian side, for instance, there was no need for an Indo-Vietnamese story because it just didn’t fit into the story about how we emerged out of anti-colonial resistance to British Rule.

There is a big picture of British India, within that there are smaller pictures of Portuguese India and French India, and then within them there are mosaics of inner stories, such as the Franco-Tamlians in Vietnam or similarly the Goans who went to East Africa. The point is that nobody found it necessary to publicise the stories of these numerically smaller groups.

What is the memory of Pondicherry in Vietnam?

That would be the next step of this research project. We know that there are Tamil temples located there, for instance the Mariamman Temple at Saigon. We do know that in Vietnamese restaurants anywhere in the world, they always have a Vietnamese curry. The Vietnamese chicken curry, ‘ca ri ga’, is definitely a result of Indian influence in Vietnam. Even the curry powder that they have created is called ‘ca ri an do’ (Indian curry).

Of course, there is also an anti-Indian element in the local Vietnamese memory. It happened in so many other parts of the Indian Ocean world where Indians were present as important minorities because they were fitted into the colonial system, be it the Portuguese colonial system, the British, or the French. Pairaudeau examines in detail how cartoons and pamphlets presented Vietnamese ladies rejecting the Tamil milkman in favour of the new tinned condensed milk being supplied by companies like Nestlé. It is fascinating that the milkman who came all the way from Pondicherry became caught in the evolving relationship between European taste, industrialisation, and the Vietnamese people.

I would love to go to Vietnam and check for myself how these different memorial strands intertwine, but I would also love to follow the threads that connect Pondicherry to Senegal via Vietnam.