Adam Yamey's Blog: YAMEY, page 25

A famous leader of France standing in a hallway in Pondicherry

DURING OUR RECENT (January 2025) stay in Pondicherry,  we passed an interesting looking doorway several times but it was always closed. Above the doorway are the words “Foyer du Soldat”, and these are superimposed on the French tricolour (red, white, and blue).

 

On the last day of January, we passed the doorway yet again and this time it was open. Through the doorway I saw what looked like a life-sized statue of General Charles de Gaulle.  We crossed the road and entered the building. In the hallway, the large statue,  which stands on a plinth with small white plastic wheels, is labelled “Charles de Gaulle”. High above his head, there is a framed photograph of French President Emmanuel Macron. His photograph was not the only one. There were others depicting several past Presidents of France, including: Mitterand, D’Estaing, Sarkozy, and Chirac.

 

Next to these portraits, there is one of Georges Montout, who has eight medals pinned to his chest and is described as “Fondateur du Foyer du Soldat de Pondichéry”.

 

Foyer du Soldat institutions were set up to provide French soldiers with a link between the battlefront and visions of the peace that would reunite a soldier with his family. “They help men to fight, to live, to hope.” (https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/31176). Another source (https://www.loc.gov/item/99613500#:~:text=Les%20Foyers%20du%20Soldat%20was,such%20as%20music%20or%20films)  revealed:

“Les Foyers du Soldat was one of the three official welfare organizations; the Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A. were the other two. They set up canteens for soldiers to go to while on leave, providing a place to sleep, relax, eat, bathe; they even provided entertainment such as music or films.”

 

Many men of Indian origin living in French colonies such as Pondicherry fought for France during wars including the two World Wars.  A French monument to those Indians who died can be seen near the seafront in Pondicherry.  The city’s Foyer du Soldat was restored in 2010. It is housed in a colonial building, but I do not yet know when it was first established in Pondicherry. 

 

When we stepped inside the hallway of the Foyer, there was a meeting in progress in its adjoining assembly hall. Although it was built to serve soldiers from Pondicherry as well as local veterans of wars fought for France, I imagine few of those who fought in these campaigns are still living.

A French photographer in a former French colony and Julia Margaret Cameron

JULIA MARGARET CAMERON (1815-1879) was a Victorian photographer, who pioneered artistic photography.  Rather than using her cameras to attempt to slavishly reproduce reality in her prints, she used cameras and processing techniques to produce an artistic interpretation of her subject matter. It has been said that some of the images she created influenced a few of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who were amongst her friends. 

 

In Julia’s honour, there is an annual prize for women photographers: The Julia’s Margaret Cameron Award. One of the winners of the award in 2024 is the French photographer Muriel Pénicaud. Born in 1955, she served in the French government as Labpur Minister from 2017 to 2020. A self taught photographer, she began taking photographs when she was 11 years old.

 

There are two exhibitions of Muriel’s work currently (January and February 2025) showing in the former French colony of Pondicherry in the south of India. One of them is at the Kalinka gallery in Kasturba Gandhi street, and the other is at the more centrally located ‘The Spot’: a bar-cum-restaurant (it serves good food).

 

The majority of Muriel’s photographs on display are in black and white. One of the few coloured ones show a red shoe lying beneath a pile of discarded shoes in drab colours. This image is the photographer’s reaction to the piles of murdered victims’ shoes that can be seen at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

 

What Muriel achieves in most of her images is the conversion of a mundane sight, say a tree trunk or a bird’s plumage, into a work of art. Without resorting to tricks of focusing and experiments with processing, as did Julia Margaret Cameron, Muriel, like Julia did, transforms the ordinary into the visually extraordinary in  subtly delicate ways. She creates a new way of looking at the world by making her subject matter look intriguing.  She deserves a prize that honours the pioneer of artistic photography: Julia Margaret Cameron.

 

You can read more about Julia Margaret Cameron in my book “Between Two Islands: Julia Margaret Cameron and her Circle.” This book (also Kindle) is available from Amazon,  e.g., https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0BZFCVLX9/  

LIBERTÉ ÉGALITÉ (MAYBE) FRATERNITÉ IN A FORMER FRENCH COLONY

PONDICHERRY IN SOUTHERN India was a French colony between about 1674 and 1954. This picturesque city is still divided into White Town, where the French lived, and Black Town, where the Tamils and other Indians resided.  The segregation of Europeans and non-Europeans persisted after the French Revolution  of 1789. It was during (or soon after) this historic uprising that  the motto ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’ came into existence. However, it was during a visit to the lovely church of Notre Dame des Anges in White Town that we discovered that the motto might not have applied to the Non-European inhabitants of the Pondicherry colony.

 

Within the neoclassical church, there is an informative panel outlining the church’s history.  The present edifice was constructed in 1855, but the parish is older. It was established by Capuchin monks in the seventeenth century. In 1699, the Capuchins established a Tamil Christian community. Soon, the Jesuits took over the Tamil community, and the Capuchins began a parish for Europeans and “Eurasians” (people with both Indian and European heritage). The Capuchin church of Notre Dame des Anges served Europeans and Eurasians, but not Tamils, who attended another church.

 

In 1887, almost 100 years after the French Revolution,  Archbishop Lauennen decreed that Notre Dame des Anges was for the exclusive use of Europeans and Eurasians. So much for the ‘égalité’ and ‘fraternité’, which was so dear the the French.

 

In 1984 Fr. Dusseigne, of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris (M.E.P) was the last M.E.P. Parish Priest, to serve the parish. He served until 2007, and was the last of a long line of Capuchin priests to lead the parish.

 

Dusseigne was succeeded by Fr. Michael John Antonsamy, who was the first Indian priest to lead the parish. Although he was the first Indian parish priest, I  have not yet discovered when non-Europeans began to be allowed to worship in this church in White Town.

 

Near the church, there is small walled cemetery where Capuchin monks have been buried. The earliest person to have his tomb there died in 1703. Sadly, the graveyard was closed, but we managed to see the well maintained funerary monuments through gaps in the locked gate.

  Colour bars were common in European colonies in Asia and elsewhere. Some of the clubs and schools founded by the British in India forbade entry of Indians even until several years after independence. So, one should not be surprised that colour bars existed in churches such as St Marie des Anges.  But what amazed me somewhat is that even after the French Revolution,  racial inequalities were not frowned upon in a French colony such as Pondicherry.

They never returned to the Netherlands and the slaves they sold never saw India again

PULICAT IS ABOUT FORTY miles north of the centre of Chennai.  It is one of the very few natural harbours on the Coromandel Coast (east coast of India). As early as the third century BC, it was a thriving port. The unknown author of the “Periplus of the Erythraean Sea” wrote that Pulicat was one of only three ports on the east coast of India. 

 

Today, it is a busy little village where freshly caught fish and other seafood are packed with ice before being transported elsewhere.  In earlier times, it was an important trading centre.

 

Between 1502 and 1609, the Portuguese had a trading station (‘factory’) in Pulicat. They built a fort there. In 1609, the Dutch defeated the Portuguese,  and took over Pulicat. They controlled it until 1825, when Dutch possessions on the Coromandel Coast were handed over to the British.

 

The Dutch built a fort, Fort Geldria, at Pulicat. This is in ruins today, and what is left is covered by seemingly impenetrable vegetation.  I did not feel intrepid enough to enter the tangled plants that cover the site of the fort. The Dutch also built a gunpowder factory in the town.

 

Pulicat was a port from which the Dutch exported a wide variety of goods from India, including for example, textiles, coins, and gunpowder. They also exported Indians as slaves to work in some of the other Dutch colonies in places as far apart as Ceylon and the West Indies. It is said that between 1625 and 1665 alone, over 38000 slaves, procured mostly by brokers in Pulicat,  were exported in Dutch boats. Many more were carried away from India after that.

 

Seeing Pulicat today, as we did in January 2025, it is difficult to imagine that this large village was once a thriving centre of international trade, and even more impossible to realise that it was an important market place for selling slaves. However, there is one very visible reminder of the erstwhile Dutch presence in the town: a small cemetery containing many well-preserved graves and mausoleums of Dutch people who died in the district.

 

Before describing the cemetery,  I will mention the small museum near it, and next door to a school named ‘Dutch Academy Nursery and Primary School’. The very basic museum is housed in what must have once been a small shop. Its  walls have some interesting informative panels attached to them. These outline the history of Pulicat. As for the exhibits, they are a rather shambolic assembly of unlabelled odds and ends. In one glass fronted cabinet, there were some fragments of ceramic vessels. I wondered whether these were bits of things left behind by the Dutch. On close examination, I noticed one of these broken pieces was labelled “made in Japan”.

 

The Dutch cemetery is a fantastic sight. It is well worth making the 2 hour road trip from Chennai to see it. The entrance to the walled graveyard is made of carved stone. On each side, it is flanked by stone carvings of skeletons. One is resting its skull on its right hand and holding another in his left, and the other is balancing a double-sided drum or tabla on its skull. Although there are several obelisks and elaborate mausoleums in the cemetery,  most of the graves are marked by horizontal stones upon which there are carved inscriptions. The inscriptions, which are all easy to read, are often framed with decorative floral carvings. Most of the inscriptions are in Dutch. A few are in Latin. The oldest of the deceased died in the mid to late 1650s. At the far end of the cemetery, we found two graves of British people. Although  the British took over Pulicat in 1825, they used it more as a place for picnics than as a trading station.

 

The Dutch cemetery is a reminder that not every Dutch person who came to India to make a fortune returned home. What it does not recall is the vast numbers of Indians who were exported by the Dutch as slaves, and had no hope of ever seeing their homes again.

A Swiss hut in the centre of Chennai

OPPOSITE THE APOLLO Hospital in the Thousand Lights district of Chennai, my eyes alighted on a sign I was least expecting to see in southern India.  The sign adorned the panel beneath the eaves of what resembles a Swiss chalet. It read “Swiss Hütte”. It is a restaurant. It was closed when I first spotted it, but we returned the same evening when it was open. We decided that it was such an unusual find that we had to eat something there.

 

The restaurant was founded about 19 years ago by a chef Joe Lobo. He lived in Switzerland for 25 years, working as a prize-winning chef. On returning to India, he established the Swiss Hütte restaurant. It is located in the verdant grounds of his family’s home.

 

The restaurant has an extensive menu with dishes inspired by various national cuisines, both European and Asian. We ate at the Hütte  several times, and everything we ate was delicious and perfectly prepared.

 

We asked Joe if he ever served Swiss food. Occasionally, if given sufficient notice, he will make fondue. However, in his opinion, Swiss food is bland and tasteless. These adjectives can not be used to describe what Joe cooks in the kitchen for his guests. Eating Joe’s food, it is easy to see why he has won prizes for his cooking.

A photographer and his works exposed at a garden in Chennai

SUNIL GUPTA IS a renowned photographer. He was born in 1953 in New Delhi, and migrated to Canada with his family in 1969. With a degree in accountancy and a diploma in photography, he moved to London (UK) in 1983. There, he married another photographer Charan Singh. Much of Sunil’s work relates to themes of sexual identity, migration, race, and family.

While we were in Chennai, the parents of another photographer, Varun Gupta, told us about the exhibition of Sunil Gupta’s works currently (January 2025) being held in the garden of the Government Museum in Chennai. The show is part of the Chennai Photographic Biennale, of which Varun is one of the founders.

The show is being held in the open air. We saw it when the air temperature was hovering around 29 degrees Celsius. In addition, crowds of schoolchildren were enjoying their packed lunches on the ground amongst the walls upon which the photographs were hanging. The show has been arranged to produce what could be termed an autobiography expressed by photographs.

There is no doubt that Sunil’s photographs are visually superb as well as being of great interest.

While I was looking at the images, many of which are artistic as well as informative, I began to wonder whether photography limits the expression of a photographer’s innermost feelings more than is the case for a creator who is painting or sculpting. The photographer, like other visual artists, can compose his/her pictures, regulate their appearance, and edit them. However, the light coming through the camera lens dictates the final product however many adjustments etc are made. In contrast, the light coming through the eyes of a sculptor or a painter (or a printmaker) impinges on the artist’s brain, and what eventually results reflects the effect that the image projected into the brain has on the creator’s innermost feelings about the subject matter.

Having said this, which I hope makes at least a little sense, I must admit that I do enjoy making photographic images and I hope that my photographic skills will be improved by viewing great works such as we saw at the exhibition of Sunil Gupta’s photographs in Chennai.

A peaceful garden close to the Adyar River in Chennai

THE MEANING AND PRACTICE of Theosophy remain a mystery to me. Suffice it to say that Theosophy was first established by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and others in 1875. One of its co-founders was the American Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. With some others  they founded the Theosophical Society. In 1895, there was a split in the society. Blavatsky and Olcott both converted from Christianity to Buddhism and established the home of their branch of the Society in India, the birthplace of Buddha. By the way, the Theosophists welcome people of all faiths.

 

Blavatsky and Olcott established the headquarters of their branch of Theosophy on a plot of land close to the Adyar River in Chennai (Madras). The various buildings used by what became known as the  Adyar branch of the Society are set within a 260 acre garden known as the Huddlestone Garden. This peaceful area is rich in trees, other plants, wild birds, and other wildlife. During our visit there in January 2025, we spotted two mongooses as well as numerous squirrels and dogs.

 

Although I  can tell you almost nothing about the nature of Theosophy,  I  have two personal connections with it. First, my wife’s paternal grandfather,  Kisanlal Daru, was an influential member of the Bombay branch of the Adyar Theosophical Society. 

 

Secondly, one of our friends in England is the grandson of Peter Freeman (1888-1956). The managing director of the family’s tobacco business  in Cardiff (Wales), he was a Labour politician, and served several terms as a Member of Parliament.  In addition, he was the General Secretary of the Welsh Adyar Theosophical Society between 1922 and 1944. He was the author of a few publications about Theosophy.  According to our friend, Peter’s grandson, when Peter died, he left all of his considerable fortune to the Adyar Theosophical Society.  I would like to believe that some of this legacy has helped to make the Theosophical Society grounds at Adyar so beautiful.

Beware of upsetting wealthy benefactors: a word of warning to Donald Trump

A JAIN BANIA (BUSINESS MAN) called Hiranand Shah travelled from Rajasthan to Patna in 1652. In 1707, he financed Prince Farrukhsiyar sufficiently for him to become the Mughal Emperor (he ruled from 1713 to 1719). Manik Chand, a later head of this Jain family was then rewarded with the title ‘Jagat Seth’, which means ‘banker or merchant of the world’. By the eighteenth century, the family or house of of Jagat Seth was the largest banking house in the Mughal Empire.

 

The Nawabs of Bengal used the banking services of the house of Jagat Seth to pay tribute to the Mughal emperors in Delhi. William Dalrymple wrote that the Jagat Seth family were able to:

“… make or break anyone in Bengal, including the ruler, and their political instincts were sharp as their financial ones.” (quote from Wikipedia)

 

When the young Siraj-ud-Daulah became Nawab of Bengal in 1756, he alienated many people including Jagat Seth Mehtab Chand. Siraj demanded 30 million rupees as a tribute from the banker. When the banker refused, Siraj-ud-Daulah  slapped him. As a result, Jagat Seth took part in the conspiracy to defeat Siraj-ud-Daulah.  He and others, including Mir Jafar, helped the British, led by Robert Clive,  to defeat Siraj-ud-Daulah at the Battle of Palashi (Plassey) in 1757.  Jagat Seth’s money funded the British to help them defeat Siraj-ud-Daulah.

 

The Jagat Seth family was at least as influential as tycoons such as the Rothschilds in Europe and figures such as Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump’s current ‘chum’ Elon Musk. Taking the story of Siraj-ud-Daulah as an example, one could say it is best not to upset your wealthy supporters.  So, Donald, it would be best not to upset Elon!

 

Soon after the Battle of Palashi,  the fortunes of the house of Jagat Seth began to decline. Today, this remarkable family is commemorated by an opulent mansion, which they built in Murshidabad, sometime after it became the capital of Bengal (for 70 years during the eighteenth century). In 1980, the house was opened up as a museum, which is privately owned and run. We visited this place before we knew about the family’s involvement with the downfall of Siraj-ud-Daulah and the following capture of Bengal by the British. Like many other places in Murshidabad,  it is a fascinating reminder of Murshidabad‘s history during the era when Europeans, especially the British,  were beginning to make their mark on Bengal.

It pays to be perceived as being senior citizens

Chennai Airport is very modern and user-friendly until you leave its terminal building. To get a taxi or a hired car, you need to join a queue to board an electric buggy that carries you to a distant car park where you then wait again for your vehicle. Oh, and while travelling on the crowded buggies, you need to hang on to your possibly heavy and/or bulky luggage.

Fortunately, in the eyes of the team handling the buggy loading, we were considered to be elderly people. Therefore, they took us and some other aged people out of the queue and summoned taxis to pick us up outside the terminal building instead of at the distant car park, reached in the buggy.

Making foil in the historic centre of Hyderabad

THE CHARMINAR IS a tall four-sided tower in the centre of Hyderabad (India). It was constructed in an Indo-Islamic style in 1591, soon after the capital of the Golconda Sultanate was moved to Hyderabad by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (c1565-1612). Today  this impressive, elegant building is surrounded by market stalls and many shops. Whenever we visit Hyderabad   we spend some time around the Charminar.

 

Since the first time we visited the city (2012), there has been what looks like a makeshift Hindu temple attached to one corner of the Charminar. During our most recent visit in January 2025, it was still present and looking as makeshift as when we first saw it. On one of our several visits to Charminar,  the square in which it is located was surrounded by armed police and many armoured vehicles. It was during Ramazan and the police had erected barriers around the makeshift temple. The atmosphere was tense.

 

This January (2025), the Charminar area was peaceful and felt as relaxed as can be in a busy Indian market place. As we strolled along, I heard loud rhythmic tapping coming from a small shop. We wandered over to see what was going on.

 

The small shop had four men squatting on its floor. Each one held a hefty mallet. They were rapidly banging the mallets on small square, thick leather pads, which they supported with fingers. How they managed to avoid crushing their fingers with the mallets amazed me. We asked them what they were doing. They told us that they were flattening silver and gold to produce sheets of silver and gold leaf/foil. These ultra-thin (0.2-0.8 microns) metal sheets, which are edible,  are sold to caterers, who use them to decorate Indian sweets and other food items.

 

Known as ‘vark’ (also varak  Waraq, or warq) , these thin foils are made by putting silver or gold particles between two sheets of thin paper, and then pounding them with mallets as we observed. Later, the papers support the incredibly fragile foils, and can be peeled off when they metal is applied to foods.

 

We had never seen vark being made before. Had we not visited Charminar once again, it might have been a long time before we saw that process elsewhere.