Pondicherry
India
FRANCAIS | ENGLISH


Responsable: Dominic Goodall

École française d'Extrême-Orient
16-19 rue Dumas
605 001 Pondicherry, India

Tel: +91 413 233 45 39
Fax: +91 413 233 08 86 goodalldominic@gmail.com
administration@efeo-pondicherry.org


PRESENTATION
LIBRARY
Mme. Suard, who took up her post of Consul that very day, cuts the ribbon, observed by Mme Prerana Patel and Mr. Bertrand de Hartingh
Mme. Suard, who took up her post of Consul that very day, cuts the ribbon, observed by Mme Prerana Patel and Mr. Bertrand de Hartingh
Inauguration of the annex at 19, Dumas Street
31 JULY 17
The inauguration of the new annex, to house our archives, in the courtyard of 19, Dumas Street, in the Pondicherry Centre of the EFEO, took place on 31st July 2017.

Many scholars, notably eminent specialists of epigraphy and of the history of Buddhism, were present at the ceremony, and speeches were given by two guests of honour, Mme Catherine Suard, Consul General of France in Pondicherry, who took up her post the very same day, and M. Bertrand de Hartingh, the Counsellor for Cooperation and Cultural Action of the French Embassy in Delhi.

The handsome principal building of the EFEO was probably constructed in the 1820s, shortly after Pondicherry had been ceded back to the French after the British besieged and razed the city to the ground in the 1770s and 1790s. The place where the new construction now stands was occupied by an undistinguished and poorly built annex that had been enlarged and modified to contain a photo-lab in the 1970s. After the erection of a five-storey hotel next door in 2006, the old annex began to display cracks of increasingly alarming magnitude and engineers judged that the construction could not be lastingly secured.

The falling of a couple of chunks of masonry in February 2016, fortunately at a moment when no one was passing by, called for urgent action, and the destruction of the old annex began in June 2016. The new one, most generously designed for us by the architect Jean-Louis Cardin in a style that attempts to echo but not compete with the old courtyard, was completed in July.

With the construction of this new archive-space in Pondicherry, France expresses its continued commitment to the preservation and study, in close collaboration with Indian scholars, of the primary sources of Indian history and civilisation.


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