Les Rencontres Francophones

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Francophonie in India, the Festival des Francophonies de Pondichéry was created in 2019 with the ambition to build in Pondichéry, in partnership with the Francophonies en Limousin.

The 2022 edition called ‘French Rendez-Vous’, is bringing together arts & culture enthusiasts and professionals in South India. This festival aims to showcase creations, exchanges between professionals, workshops and cultural development activities and is accessible to all audiences. It not only aims to promote the friendship & cooperation between India & France but also aims to promote different artistic expressions in the fields of live performance.
The programming of this festival has been entrusted upon Les Francophonies – Des Écritures à la scène, represented by Mr Hassane Kouyaté, who is in charge of the artistic direction and coordination of the festival. Mr Valavane Koumarane from Indianostrum Theatre in Pondicherry was in charge of the expertise mission for the festival.

Francophonie & India

Francophonie is people sharing one language: around 300 million people speak French on the 5 continents. Every year on 20th March, they celebrate Francophonie all around the world.

The ecosystem we live in today is a global space. The genealogical tree that determines us is no longer just vertical, the same country, the same region, the same village, it is horizontal and is defined by a set of cultural practices, appetites, references, languages ​​that imprint to other cultures. Francophonie is this mental space in which the individual can invent a collective space which is the expression and the reality of this need for otherness, translation, bilingualism, language creation, creolization, accents, intonation. ​​It becomes a tool for understanding and sharing our differences.

It is from this set of expressions, of singularities, that we invent systems of collaboration and solidarity. The border is not only what guarantees our territorial identity; it is also what allows us to move from one flavour to another, as Édouard Glissant said.

Jawaharlal Nehru, evoking the Territory of Pondicherry, spoke of an open window to France. The ambition of this Festival is to open it up to the French-speaking world, and through it, to India as a whole. The organization of the festival, thanks to a quality cultural diffusion, makes it possible to affirm the place that Pondicherry occupies for the Francophonie in India.

Events