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Little Indias in Paris

A Tamil film in Paris Street vendors selling regional Indian DVDs

‘Little India’, in Paris, is located in the north of the city, in the vicinity of Gare du Nord (Northern Railway Station). It is just a small area, a network of a few streets, but all the Indian residents and the French peo ple who love India know it. The place comes on you suddenly: after having crossed a locality called Barbès, where most of the population is from Africa, you feel as though you are back in India. Restaurants, supermarkets, sweet shops, music and CD stores, dress material and saris: everything is there. It looks like India, it smells like India, people around you look Indian – but you’re in Paris.

Uma Sridhar, of Alliance Française, lived in Paris for five years “Actually, it is not Indian,” she explains. Most of the people there are Tamilians from Sri Lanka.” But, still, the supermarkets there look like Indian supermarkets. Not like the new modern Hyderabadi supermarkets, but the old ones – it would be a mix between a kirana store and neighbourhood supermarket. And when you go there, you can smell the Indian spices, coriander, green chillies… It’s really surprising: in winter, the weather outside is very cold, and you enter these supermarkets. At once, you’re back in an Indian atmosphere!

The streets are full of Tamilian shops, and there are also a lot of restaurants. “Our favourite one was the Madras Café,” Uma remembers. Last but not the least, ‘Little India’ is the best place in Paris to find Indian music and movies. Tamiland Bollywood movies, pirated versions, are available there just one week after being released in India, with (bad) French and (bad) English subtitles. And, in some small music stores there, one can apparently find CDs of Carnatic music which are difficult to find in Hyderabad.

Actually there are two different ‘Little Indias’ in Paris. One - the one we were talking about - is located in north of Gare du Nord. But if you want to buy paneer, for instance, you’ll have to cross the Gare du Nord, and walk a little bit further to the south. There, at Wembley Bazaar, you’ll find paneer imported from London by a Punjabi family. “Paneer used to arrive on Tuesdays. If you wanted some, you had to go there on Wednesday itself!” says Uma. You’ll also find very good Pakistani restaurants.

There is also a Ganesh Temple in ‘Little India’, founded by a Sri Lankan family in 1985. They regularly organise pujas and, once a year, a Ganesh festival, which takes place in Paris two or three weeks after Ganesh’s birthday in India. From early in the morning, thousands of people, Indian, Sri Lankan or French, join the procession, following two rathams: one for Ganesh, and one for his brother Subramanyam and his two wives. Women dressed in colourful silk sarees with jasmines in their hair, carry flowers and coconuts before the rathams. Prasad is provided to everyone. People break coconuts in the streets. That could be compared to the Indian festival. Yet, in France, it is not allowed to imme rse Ganesh’s statue into the Seine River. So the procession just winds its way back to the temple.

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