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The past meets the present here

The site where the Le Cafe´ building stands has a fascinating history

PHOTO: T. SINGARAVELOU

OF HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE The Le Café building

For the French, the small structure on the sea front on Goubert Salai may remain an anecdote, but surely not for many fishermen living in Kuruchikuppam. Their ancestors, the "Macouas" (a French deformation of Makuvan), had waited at this site the whole day for some work in one of the hundred "chelingues" of the port of Pondicherry. During the French period, the present Le Café building was Pondicherry's harbour office. It was the first site the Europeans saw and landed on. In fact, the harbour captain and his staff worked here. It was also the oldest post office of the city. One of the oldest buildings of Pondicherry, it is now about 200 years old, even though it has been disfigured by a number of recent extensions.

It is often quoted as being built in the "beginning" of the 19th Century, because most people think that it was founded around 1827, when Governor Desbassyns de Richemont opened the "Cours Chabrol", known today as "Goubert Salai". But it is clear now that the harbour office is older than that because the French archives in Aix en Provence (CAOM) have another story to tell. When the Cours Chabrol was opened, the same "bureau du port" existed already, "needing a few reparations". And, in 1817, when the French came back to power after the British occupation of Pondicherry, they found a building, which they had to repaint and whose proportions were quite similar to those of today. So the "bureau du port" was never destroyed or rebuilt by the French during the 19th Century.

We know quite well how the site existed in the 18th Century since we find its description in M. Jean Deloche's "Old Pondicherry revisited": There were two buildings known as custom house and harbour office, separated by the "Porte Marine" in 1765. But they were quite different from our "café". In 1793, the British conquered the city once more after a violent bombing. We may assume that the two buildings near the "Porte Marine" were destroyed at that moment, because they were very close to the fortification's walls. As the British needed a harbour office, they had to build a new one. So the "café" is most probably the only witness of the British period of Pondicherry and dates either from the last decade of the 18th Century or the first one of the 19th Century.

We don't know much about the early years of the café; but from its plans, we can make out that the two rooms inside were built first. Later, in 1817, the French added two rows of arcades outside: one in the North and one in the East.

At that time, the harbour office was in quite a good condition, but was threatened by the sea. In 1824, the harbour captain Cordier noted that the entire eastern part of the building collapsed, and that the other part would follow suit. But it was not completely destroyed by the sea, and was roughly repaired with some palm tree trunks.

When Governor Desbassyn de Richmont visited the site in 1827, he found it in such a bad shape that he decided to rebuild the eastern row of arcades and to create a new one in the South, so as to harmonise the building with the newly opened "Cours Chabrol." It remained unchanged from 1827 to the late 1940s. At that time, the government decided to give the harbour office a modern look: some doors and windows were shuttered, the huge word "Pondichéry" was painted on the eastern wall, "Port" on the western wall. The building began to change only when the port was shifted from "Cours Chabrol" in the late 1960s.

For Pondicherry, this building is a bridge between the past and the present: The port was built in this particular place because of the neighbourhood of the "Porte Marine". The latter was built in the place of the old French fortress destroyed in 1761. During the 19th Century the port influenced the sites around: In 1827, a flag mast was shifted from Suffren Street to the port. In 1836, a lighthouse was erected. In 1866, the old pier was the last construction of this organisation.

RAPHAEL MALANGIN

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