Filmmaker Pankaj Rishi Kumar’s To Die A Frenchman was screened in Bengaluru on September 15 at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC), followed by a conversation between the director and author Ramjee Chandran.
Shot over five years, the 80-minute documentary follows Mounissamy, a seventy-year-old man in Pondicherry who spent most of his adult life fighting for French citizenship and the land he believed both nations owed him– a fight that outlasted the empire that first made him that promise and outlasted him as well in the end.
Pankaj has been making films on Pondicherry’s French Tamil community since 2012, with a body of work that includes Two Flags (2019) and Janani’s Juliet (2019), India’s official entry for the 92nd Academy Awards. To Die A Frenchman, which had its world premiere at Rotterdam earlier this year, grew out of five years of conversation with Mounissamy and his family, a conversation that, according to Pankaj, ended in a way neither he nor they had expected when it began.
Mounissamy lives in Ville Noire, Pondicherry’s old Tamil quarter, where the street signs are still in French, and the memory of the colonial empire has not entirely disappeared, even though the French left more than sixty years ago. Every July 14, which is France’s National Day, Mounissamy raises a flag modelled on the tricolour and sings in what he calls “butler” French, an anthem to a “Mother France”, the country he still half-believes might reclaim him.
The story behind this fight is particularly interesting. It goes back to 1954, when French Pondicherry was handed over to India in practice, if not in law, without the referendum that had, at various times, been promised to its residents.
The formal transfer took until 1962, when the French government offered citizenship to anyone in Pondicherry who wanted it. Of the roughly three lakh inhabitants, only approximately seven thousand took the offer. As Pankaj emphasised, this was not because the rest had declined it, but because most never knew it existed.
“There was just a notice outside the consulate. That was it,” he said. “That’s how colonial powers work. In a way, they give you something, and in a way, they don’t give it to you”.
For those who “missed the bus”, an Indo-French treaty had promised land in compensation, and Mounissamy spent nearly eight years chasing a claim that both governments seemed content to let lapse quietly. He was never a French citizen in any legal sense, but by his own understanding of what had been promised to Pondicherry’s French Tamil community, his claim was simply what he perceived as a legitimate debt owed to him.
While peeling back the film's sundry layers, one seemingly inconspicuous quote from Mounissamy stands out: “They are trying to erase our history, and rewrite our textbooks."
He was talking about the specific erasure of Pondicherry’s French Tamil identity, one that was disappearing even as he spoke, and that he had watched vanish over the course of his own life while refusing to loosen his grip on it.
Though he said this to a camera in 2019, this line remains relevant today, when the rewriting of textbooks and the erasure of inconvenient histories are no longer just the business of one small former French territory on the Coromandel Coast. India has a past that simply resists tidy narratives; however, the impulse of late has been to simplify it until little remains, rather than reckon with its complications.
People like Mounissamy, holding onto identities and claims that the official record would rather forget, are often the ones lost in that simplification.
To Die A Frenchman will be screened at Suchitra Film Society on Karanth Road, Banashankari, on September 17 at 6:30 pm, followed by a Q&A with director Pankaj.
This article was written by a student interning with TNM.