Laporte Street

Ponnoutamby Laporte, known also as Ponnu Thambi Pillai, was a nineteenth-century Tamil lawyer and political figure who operated within the framework of French law rather than against it. Where the Indian nationalist movement elsewhere was building toward independence from European rule, Laporte's project was different: he wanted the full rights of French citizenship for Indians within the French system, an end to the legal distinctions that placed Indian subjects of France in a subordinate category to their European fellow-citizens.

The legal category at stake was that of the renonçant: a Tamil or Indian resident of French Pondicherry who formally renounced Hindu or Muslim personal law and submitted to the French civil code. Renonçants gained access to French courts, could enter the French administrative and professional class, and had a different legal standing than the sujet ordinaire governed by customary Indian law. Laporte fought to extend and clarify these rights, enabling Indians to escape caste-based discrimination through formal legal renunciation and achieve full French citizenship equality.

His political vehicle was what his contemporaries called the Parti Français, a faction of the Franco-Pondicherrian community that was committed to the continuation of French sovereignty but demanded that sovereignty deliver on its promises of legal equality. This was a different argument from the pro-merger movement that would eventually transfer Pondicherry to India in 1962, and a different argument from the pro-French resistance that blocked that transfer for a decade. It was a claim internal to French law: if France governed here, France should govern equally.