Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

20

The Fly in the Ointment

In a general way, the French turned out to be more humane in their dealings with the native populations. But they too had their moments of aberration.

Things had gone on for several decades, with more ups than downs, after the death of Francois Martin (1706).¹ Left to themselves, things might have developed harmoniously between the French government and the Tamil population, the vast majority of them Hindus. But there is always a fly in the ointment. In the event, the fly was the Christian missionaries. Jesuits to be more precise. It was impossible for a tribe of those proselytizers to tolerate Hindu temples. Mind you, if they could they would not have tolerated Muslim mosques either—but they were too afraid of the violence-prone Muslims. But Hindus were quite another cup of tea. So the Jesuits fixed their sights on Hindu temples. They got their heart's wish when Dupleix became the governor of Pondicherry.

Joseph Francois Dupleix, born in 1696 in France, had first arrived in Pondicherry in 1721 as the Councillor to the

¹ Francois Martin and his widow were buried in Pondicherry.

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Higher Council. There he met Jeanne Vincent who spoke several Indian languages. She was born Jeanne Albert, daughter of Dr. Jacques Albert, the Chief Medical Officer at the town's hospital. Her mother, Marie Main-former, was the offspring of a Hindu woman and a Portuguese man. So Jeanne was a 'Creole' to the locals. When Dupleix was posted to Bengal in 1731 as the Company's Director General, he called the Vincent family to Chandernagore. Vincent, Jeanne's first husband, died there in 1737, leaving her a widow with six children. In April 1741 Joseph and Jeanne got married. That same year, after his nomination as governor, Dupleix inherited the title of 'Nawab' from his predecessor Dumas. On 14January 1742 the Nawab and his Begum landed back at Pondicherry, and Dupleix assumed charge as the governor of French India. Jeanne had bewitched Dupleix, and could turn him round her little finger. She herself was under a strong influence of the Jesuit clergy. That was the opportunity those Christian priests were waiting for.

Now, it so happens that the Dubash,¹ Ananda Ranga Pillai, the commercial agent of Dupleix, was in the habit of writing a

Literally, Dubash means one who knows two languages, or an interpreter. In Pondicherry, the Dubash was the chief agent of the government to strike deals with Indian merchants.

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diary. He began writing it from September 1736.¹ He was unfailing in the task. So thanks to his voluminous diaries (twelve volumes), we get a pretty good idea of the day-to-day life during the time of Dupleix. And, naturally, the important events were written down in great detail. We give a few excerpts from his diary, describing how the great, ancient Vedapurishwar temple was razed to the ground.

"The first incident at the Veda Puri Temple took placeAnanda Ranga Pillai on March 17, 1746," begins

Sita Ram Goel, from whose book History of Hindu-Christian Encounters¹ we are quoting. " 'On Wednesday night at 11,' writes Pillai, 'two unknown persons entered the Ishwara temple carrying in a vessel of liquid filth, which they poured on the heads of the gods around the altar, and into the temple, through the drain of the shrine of Ishwara; and having broken the pot of dirt on the image of the god Nandi, they went away through a

¹ These diaries were translated into English in 1904 by the Madras Government's efforts.

⁸ (Published by Voice of India.) For the full report please read the book. A few other facts have also been taken from Sita Ram Goel's book, as well as Yvonne Gaebele's Histoire de Pondichery, and from Revue Historique de I'Etat de Pondichery (1955).

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part of building which had been demolished.' " Next morning the chief priest and the servants of the temple reported the matter to their superiors and "bringing them to the spot, showed them what had been done."

Like wildfire the sacrilegious news covered the town. Hindus, "from the Brahman to the pariah," held a public meeting. Governor Dupleix sent his chief peon, who tried to disperse the meeting by striking "a Chetti on the cheek" and ordering the people to go away. The people, however, defied the order and protested, 'You better kill us all."

The background to this act can be traced to the fact that the Jesuit missionaries had built in 1728 the Ghurch of St. Paul adjoining the Vedapuriswar temple. Those Jesuits were, so to say, all-powerful. During the reign of Louis XIV who had ascended the throne of France in 1643, they had had Governor Hebert recalled, because Hebert wanted to clip their wings by issuing a declaration proclaiming the citizens' freedom to live according to their ancestral customs. The Jesuits were furious. The King's confessor belonged to the Jesuit confraternity. He had the King's ear, hadn't he? So what was to happen, happened. But Hebert had learned his lesson. When he returned next as governor of Pondicherry he became as brutal as the Christian clergy. Already by 1703 the Jesuits were running there a sort of college. The 'born Christians' ("ceux qui etaient de la naissance" are the actual words used by Gaebele) were taught Latin, philosophy and theology. The Jesuits obtained from their king the ban on any repairs of Hindu temples, and the Hindu festivals were prohibited on Christian festival days. Three-fourth of the population fled from the city. It was still not enough for the missionaries.

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They urged that a temple should be pulled down. Not just any old temple would do, mind you. The temple should be the principal place of worship for the Hindus of Pondicherry. So it had to be the Veda Puri Ishwara temple. Louis XIV, the 'Sun-King' in whose name Francois Martin had given assurance to Tamil people, found nothing wrong in passing such a dark order. But the Pondicherry administration found itself unable to execute the royal order. The Hindus constituted the most important part of the native community and they put up a great resistance. The wily Jesuits bided their time.

When the hue and cry over their sordid deed of 17 March had died down, they repeated the same tactics on 31 December. Emboldened by the support of Governor Dupleix and his wife, they did their vile deed from within the grounds of the Church of St. Paul.

Months went by. The political situation was in a flux. In September 1748 the British laid siege to Pondicherry. Taking advantage of the situation, Dupleix allowed the departure of Hindus, so that not even ten heads of castes remained in town. At the same time, order was given to the soldiers guarding the city's gates not to let the Hindus return. All perfectly planned. The Jesuits, led by their superior, Father Coeurdoux of Karikal, rejoiced. And they struck.

Ananda Ranga Pillai wrote in his diary dated 7 September 1748. "This morning tents were pitched round St. Paul's Church, and two hundred soldiers and a hundred sepoys were quartered there ... and priests were told that the Iswaran temple would be demolished." Demolished it was the next day, on 8 September 1748. The engineer, the clerical staff with diggers,

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masons and others pulled down the southern wall of the temple and the outhouses. While the Dubash was being told all this, more news came in quick succession. "Just then," wrote Pillai, "news was brought that Father Coeurdoux, the Superior of St. Paul's Church, had kicked the inner shrine with his foot ... and ordered the Christians to break the Vahanams." The few heads of castes who had remained in Pondicherry braved the merciless beating by soldiers to rescue whatever of temple articles they could salvage. "Then Father Coeurdoux of Karikal came with a great hammer, kicked the lingam, broke it with his hammer, and ordered the Coffrees¹ and the Europeans to break the images of Vishnu and the other gods. Madame² went and told the priest that he might break the idols as he pleased. He answered that she had accomplished what had been impossible for fifty years...." The temple demolition order passed by Louis XIV was finally executed under the reign of his great-grandson, Louis XV.

Governor Dupleix had also ordered the demolition of the ancient mosque opposite the Eglise des Capucins. But unlike the Tamil Hindus, the Muslim Captain of the French Mahe sepoys went and told Dupleix, "If you pull down the mosque, not a single Muslim sepoy would be left," nor the demolition workers—all would perish. The Governor immediately revoked his order. Pillai lamented, "If the Tamils had only some among them as brave in word if not in deed as these Muslims, none would have thought of touching the temple."

' 'Coffree' in Pondicherry was a contemptuous term for 'black-skinned natives.' It is a derivative of Caffrc (or Kaffir), which originally meant Bantu inhabitant of South Africa, and more generally any Black South

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In his private diary, Pillai wrote his private thoughts. "The Governor has dishonoured himself. Firstly, he has listened to his wife's words and allowed her to manage all affairs and give all orders.... The priests of St. Paul's Church have been trying for the last fifty years to pull down the Veda Puri Iswaran temple; former Governors said that this was the country of the Tamils, that they would earn dishonour if they interfered with the temple, that the merchants would cease to come here, and that the town would decay, they even set aside the king's order to demolish the temple, and their glory shone like the sun. But the Governor listens to his wife and has ordered the temple to be destroyed, thereby adding shame to his dishonour."

In the temple, a native convert "also kicked the great lingam nine or ten times with his sandals in the presence of

Madame and priest, and spat on it, out of gladness____" It was

not for nothing that Tamil Hindus told Christian clergy that there was something seriously wrong with the doctrine which inculcated such beastly behaviour, particularly in the converts.

Ananda Ranga Pillai learned later that "the temple had been levelled with the ground and the whole people were troubled at heart." He himself was so sick at heart that he could scarcely move his pen. "I can neither write nor describe what abominations were done in the temple. I know not what fruit they will reap. All the Tamils think that the end of the world has come. The priests, the Tamil Christians, the Governor and his wife are more delighted than they have ever been before, but they have not yet considered what will befall them in future."

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Ma/l of Pondicherry by de Fer (1705). We have added a circleshowing
the location of the ancient ''pagoda'' or Vedapurisuiar temple.

Addendum

(Excerpts from a letter of 20 December 1952, from Frére L. Faucheux to Mrs. Yvonne Gaebele, translated from the French. Y. Gaebele had asked Rev. Fr. Faucheux, who had done some research on the sites of old graveyards, the exact location of the Vedapuriswar Temple.)

"Madam,

"The map of Pondicherry made by de Fer and published in 1705, placed the Vedapurisvara Pagoda at the east end of today's Nida-Rajappa-Ayyer Street. I presume that all the land east of the missionaries' cemetery, the land of the Mission's printing press, and the stretch of the Missions Etrangeres Street contiguous to them, belonged to it. The pond of the Pagoda took up almost all the land between the Missions Etrangeres Street, the continuation of Nida-Rajappa-Ayyer Street, and the compound of the sisters of Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague. Its southern part encroached on half the breadth of Saint-Ange Street.

"(...) According to the map by de Fer, at the beginning of the eighteenth century there was no edifice at the spot today occupied by the Cathedral.

"In 1728, the Jesuit Fathers began there the construction of the Immaculate Conception church, finished about 1736____

"Everybody knows that in 1761 the church was razed to a height of three feet by order of the English."¹

¹ The good Father mentions the destruction of the church by the English but passes over in silence the temple's destruction by his own order!

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