Puducherry

Pondicherry — officially Puducherry, locally still Pondy — is the clearest evidence on the Indian coast of what four centuries of French colonial administration looks like: wide boulevards, mustard-coloured colonial buildings, a cuisine that combines Tamil spicing with French technique.

The French Quarter along the seafront has been in careful restoration for two decades and is now arguably the most architecturally coherent colonial streetscape remaining in India. The buildings are Tamil in scale and internal arrangement but French in their facades and fenestration: shuttered windows, wrought-iron balconies, bougainvillea cascading from compounds still owned by Franco-Tamil families who have been here since the 18th century.

Sri Aurobindo Ashram, founded in 1926, draws a particular kind of visitor: not the pilgrim seeking a specific religious tradition but the person searching for a framework that combines Western philosophical rigour with Indian spiritual ambition. Auroville, the international township founded nearby in 1968 as 'an experiment in human unity,' now has 3,000 residents from 60 countries living around the Matrimandir — a golden sphere for individual concentration that is one of the most architecturally distinctive buildings in South Asia.

The cuisine of Pondicherry, particularly the Franco-Tamil synthesis found in the old families' kitchens — fish prepared with French cream sauce and Tamil spicing, baguettes served with coconut chutney, the rose-flavoured desserts that the French patisserie tradition overlaid on Tamil sweets — is available only in the handful of restaurants that have managed to document and preserve it.