The Croissant Delusion. A Letter From Pondicherry

I sat in a cafe on Rue Suffren, paying ₹450 for a cappuccino that tasted like disappointment with foam. The menu was in French, and around me, Indian tourists were busy photographing yellow buildings like they had discovered Versailles.

This was during a recent forced transit through Pondicherry or as the marketing materials breathlessly call it: "The French Riviera of the East." But to me it was like visiting a monument to the subjugation of my own people, and paying for that privilege.

Every cafe in the French Quarter serves the same fantasy; interchangeable menus, interchangeable vibes with identical performance of Frenchness.

The architecture is admittedly beautiful—those colonial villas with their elegant shutters, the tree-lined boulevards, the promenade.

Except, those buildings weren't gifts. They were erected to house administrators who extracted wealth from Indian lands and people. The boulevards were designed for them. The promenade was where sahib walked, and our ancestors did not.

But in Pondicherry they've bleached the history out. Scrubbed the blood off and slapped on a fresh coat of paint and called it heritage.

The Indian tourism industry has turned colonial infrastructure into nostalgic infrastructure. We're not only preserving French colonial buildings, we're celebrating them.

We serve French food we've never eaten, speak French words we don't understand, and market a lifestyle that was built on our exclusion. In Pondicherry, we've become the custodians of our oppressors' memory.

From one Café owner, I heard a dangerous lie, that French colonialism was different. It was more civilized and the Indians in Pondicherry were "considered as French nationals, culturally and legally." They argue that this was a partnership, not a conquest.

However a cursory look at history tells us that the relationship between French colonizers and Indians was explicitly master-subordinate. Always.

The colonial project in India—whether British or French—was defined by aggressive force, and violence, in the political, economic and religious fields. Yet the myth persists because it's more comfortable.

It lets us admire the buildings without confronting what happened inside them. It lets us fetishize French culture without acknowledging that French culture in India meant French power in India.

This myth of partnership is dangerous because it suggests we chose this and that colonialism was a cultural exchange program we opted into, not a system of exploitation we endured.

Between 1947 and 1954—when the rest of India was free—French authorities in Pondicherry conducted a campaign of political terrorism against Indians who wanted merger with independent India.

Police chiefs stood by while organized gangs burned houses belonging to pro-merger activists. The colonial administration banned meetings and processions of anyone advocating for independence.

Arrests. Arson. Intimidation. They called it "political gangsterism," and it was state-sponsored.

Before that the Indian natives of Pondicherry faced Centuries of military violence. The Siege of Pondicherry. The Battle of Wandiwash. Forced labor. Resource extraction. The entire economic apparatus designed to drain wealth from India to France.

None of this appears on the cafe menus. There are no historical markers explaining that the beautiful building housing your brunch spot was constructed by people who had no choice. No plaques commemorating the Indians who resisted. No Whitney Plantation moment where the narrative centers the oppressed instead of the oppressor's architecture.

Just croissants and colonial amnesia.

This reminds me of American plantation tourism. Right now, across 19 U.S. states, there are over 375 plantation sites. Places where enslaved people suffered unspeakable brutality have been converted into wedding venues and wine-tasting destinations. Literal sites of human bondage repackaged as "Disneyland for adults."

And Black Americans have been speaking against this for years. They've demanded that if these places exist at all, they must center enslaved people's narratives, not romanticize antebellum elegance.

Now apply that lens to Pondicherry. Imagine if Black Americans ran slavery-themed luxury experiences for white tourists. Imagine if they served mint juleps in the master's house and called it "heritage tourism."

Can you imagine the outrage if some black people insisted that slavery was actually a "partnership" because some enslaved people learned to read? So why aren't Indians outraged when some of us do the same thing?

I know the counterargument: "But tourism creates jobs. Those cafes employ locals. The buildings are beautiful. This is our heritage too." All true and all beside the point.

The question is not whether we preserve the architecture but how we contextualize it. Right now, we're choosing mythology over memory, choosing French nostalgia over Indian resistance. It's pathetic but we're choosing cafe aesthetics over historical accountability.

And yes, there's money in it. Heritage tourism is lucrative precisely because it sells sanitized history. The uncomfortable truth is that honest history doesn't photograph as well. Blood beneath the bougainvillea doesn't trend on Instagram but the economics of forgetting does have a cost.

Every generation that grows up thinking French colonialism was charming is a generation that hasn't psychologically decolonized. In Pondicherry, We're not just selling a version of Frenchness. We're selling a version of ourselves that accepts subjugation as sophistication.

Pondicherry isn't an aberration but a symptom. We do this across India. We admire British colonial architecture in Mumbai and Kolkata. We romanticize hill stations built for British escape from the heat. We preserve Portuguese churches in Goa without acknowledging the horrors of the Portuguese Christian Inquisition.

This is what incomplete decolonization looks like. We got political independence in 1947, but we never decolonized our minds. We're still performing for the colonizers—even when they're not in the room.

Pondicherry could tell a different story. The museum could center the Indian experience of colonialism, not French nostalgia. Walking tours could trace the sites of resistance. We could demand historical accuracy over aesthetic pleasure.

But that would require admitting that we've been complicit in our own historical erasure and that every croissant we sell and every romanticized photo we post is a small act of forgetting.

Perhaps you're still thinking about those cafes, and wondering if I'm being too harsh. If maybe the French really were better than the British.

Let me ask you this: Would you vacation at a site where your grandparents were terrorized? Would you pay premium prices to experience the lifestyle of people who systematically oppressed your ancestors?

Would you really be comfortable performing their culture, speak their language, serve their food—all while erasing the memories of their violence?

Because that's what we do when we sip that ₹450 cappuccino in Pondicherry.

We've built a theme park out of our own subjugation. We're the staff, the performers, and the customers. Until we're willing to tell the truth about what those beautiful yellow buildings represent, we'll keep serving overpriced coffee with a side of historical amnesia.

The croissants aren't even that good.