Overview and General Concepts

Pondicherry 1889, Alacoupan district, French India: a few bare-headed and bare-chested male villagers pass by a simple thatch shelter next to a grove of trees. Under the shelter, a small group of turbaned men sit around a table with a box at its centre. There seems to be no interaction between the villagers and the sitting men, who appear to be of higher status. At first glance, the scene evokes a picture of everyday rural life in nineteenth-century south India, with its traditional and long-standing caste divisions. On closer inspection, however, it tells a significant modern story: the box is a ballot box, and the period is that of the Third French Republic, when, for the second time, all males in the French colony of Pondicherry received the right to cast their votes in local elections.

In 1848, the Second Republic had granted male Indians the right to elect a French representative to the Chamber of Deputies in the metropole. This situation did not last, partly due to the French administration in India opposing such a law and disorders that arose in one of the suburbs (aldées) of Pondicherry. The upper caste protested against the Pariahs who were emboldened to wear footwear, an emblem of the upper castes, by the establishment of a republic in France.

From the 1870s to World War I, scenes of local polling places were no longer be so uneventful. There were fiercely contested battles among French and Indian candidates roughly representing republican values and the colonizers’ interests versus communal and caste-based motives. Eventually, many locals in Pondicherry were organized into voting blocks, voting fraud became endemic, and voting booths became sites of violence.